Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Date: Nov 13 2005
Major: Aerospace Engineering (This Major's Salary over time)
This university is highly dependent on the types of professors you get for your classes. If you "know" which professors to get, classes could be great - well-taught and informative. However, there are a lot of "bad apple" professors who don't know or don't care about what they're teaching. This is not good for an extremely challenging major like AE.

If you are a freshman walking in uninformed you're the first to get shafted if you happen to unluckily be put in the uncaring profs' classes. The first year is definitely designed as a "filter" - classes are made tough to screen the low ones. This is ok, but some profs go overboard and on top of that don't know how to teach. This is a bad combination.

The problem gets worse as you progress through the "gauntlet" soph. year when hit with statics, dynamics, et al - if you don't have a good prof, or good friends, you're screwed. The problem is it shouldn't be that way - it shouldn't be a luck of the draw scramble where everyone rushes and fills in the known good profs' classes within the first 5min of registration.

There is a disturbing level of preferential treatment with profs here - and it seems correlated with their ability to teach. The good profs (mostly in the EE dept) know how to make even complex things easy to understand, while the bad ones will do the equivalent of reciting textbook problems on the blackboard.

A lot of political stuff happens at this school, which causes tuition to go up for little reason. Tuition is already high for an AE, admittedly not as bad as for AS, but bad enough. It just seems that major actions are politically motivated (I have heard stories, but am unsure of their validity). A minor example is when the food was good while parents were there, but then rapidly declined. Social life is not so good (even if you're greek) - being in a middle-of-nowhere town doesn't help things much.

The bottom line is that if you're great at teaching yourself things, you won't see much of a problem with this school. But then…why are you paying 20K+ in the first place? With that amount of money flung around I would hope there wouldn't be too much fighting for the "good" professors…we don't get a discount for being pushed into classes at awkward hours with unfavored professors.

There is a lot more to complain about but I would NOT recommend this school for anybody who doesn't like crapshooting and wants a satisfying experience. Sure, the technology is up-to-date, the computer network top-notch and some of the course work unequalled, but this price is almost too much to pay for being a darling candidate for aerospace companies. There are other universities that are improving their AE programs immensely and this one is going to fall behind if it doesn't watch out.

The student body seems overall arrogant, cliquish and self-minded. Very few friendly people, but an overwhelmingly negative opinion among all I talked to (about 40 or 50). The only ones positive are clearly in denial (there are actually quite a few of them) or are taking EE. I'm willing to give the student body some leeway here, though - the environment and faculty/school gimmickry doesn't exactly lend itself to happiness.

Not recommended for AE. I know it's prestigous, but they're pricing their way out of the market and don't mean that in a monetary sense.

Not recommended for AS either - unless you want to pay massive amounts of money for elitist, unrealistic pilot instruction. Recommend DIYing your licenses and getting a degree from another school instead.