Grinnell's Engineering 3+2 Program Spotlighted

Then there is the 3+2 dual degree path. If you're tentative about attending a full-fledged engineering program, and you have decided to attend a liberal arts school that doesn't have an engineering department, this just might be the program for you. The list of small liberal art schools offering this alternative is in the hundreds. The Dartmouth listing will give you a sense of the array of schools associated with its Thayer School of Engineering. Fu School of Engineering at Columbia University alone has more than 100 participating colleges including: Claremont-McKenna, Colgate, Davidson, Grinnell, Occidental, Reed and Whitman. Ending up with a BA from any of these colleges, along with a BSE from Columbia in five years, is not a bad way to enter into graduate school or head out into the job market, even these days.

To get admitted into most of the affiliated engineering schools with 3+2 programs requires at least a 3.0 GPA and solid recommendations from your math and science professors.

What the standard 3+2 program does is bridge small liberal arts schools, with no engineering programs, to an affiliated engineering program, in some of the more eminent engineering schools in the country. Students, in a 3+2 program will begin their studies with no engineering classes for the first three years. Many of these students, however, will probably choose a fairly rigorous problem solving major, such as physics, along with high level mathematics, chemistry and other science classes in preparation for an accelerated, intense dosage of engineering coursework that comes the following two years.