Conclusion
Primary Differences
There are two main factors I feel have accounted for the drift in educational requirements and offering at West Point and Brooklyn Poly. Perhaps the biggest difference is the difference in mission. While engineering education began in the military due to applications like ordinance, defense engineering etc. in the modern day military the majority of these tasks are automated by computers with accuracy and speed that no human could ever match. The mission of West Point has always been to develop the best officers it could ergo the shifting demands of the armed services profession have changed the requirements at West Point as well. It is not uncommon to see non STEM majors at West Point with courses like law and psychology being some of the most popular departments. Brooklyn Poly on the other hand always has been an engineering centric institute, and after the merger with NYU, offers almost solely engineering specific courses and majors. These differences extend beyond the academic programs into the extracurricular offerings as well. West Point offers minors in topics relevant to its mission like terrorism studies or international relations, and has extracurricular clubs that match these such as the Irregular Warfare Group or the Sandhurst Military competition teams. At Brooklyn Poly on the other hand the clubs are more what you would expect for the mission of educating future engineers, professional organizations and topic groups for things like risk analysis. As the goal at West Point is to produce military officers there is also more rigidity in the required courses and the electives you are allowed to take. Perhaps a more correct way of phrasing that is the electives you are required to take as you can take any electives you want as long as you have the time and energy to complete them concurrently with the other courses you are required to take. This has always been an important part of West Point as regardless of branch everyone has more or less the same function on a daily basis, commanding a tank squadron being not particularly different to commanding an infantry platoon. When the educational program was revamped post World War II the breadth of courses required expanded significantly to things like foreign languages, ethics, economics, psychology, and others. This is not really comparable to Brooklyn Poly where apart from the core courses and core electives there is and has been a more lax attitude to the courses you can take. Following the merger with NYU this has expanded even more significantly as provided you receive permission you can cross register in courses across the university as a whole and have the credits count towards your degree. West Point fits the extra credits in by in general having students take more courses than at Brooklyn Poly, on top of military and physical commitments this I feel further exacerbates the difference in research output between the two institutions as discussed later on. The second major difference is in the degrees that the two institutions offer. While in the modern day you can begin the process of becoming licensed as an engineer by passing the Fundamental Engineering Exam immediately after or during an undergraduate degree, historically engineers have held Master's degrees of some variety, be it an MS or MEng. West Point is a strictly undegraduate university which presents a unique situation as far as engineering schools are concerned. There is a much higher degree of involvement from the faculty in guiding students at West Point through research or independent studies because they have no one else they can work with apart from their colleagues on the faculty. There is certainly original research being done at West Point but it tends to be on more applications of engineering rather than theoretical work, for example a virtual reality/ augmented reality recreation of Civil War battlefields to help provide a more immersive or definitive guide to the war. Whereas at a major research university like Brooklyn Poly it can be more difficult as the professor might rather work with someone pursuing a Doctoral degree in the specific field they're researching. While there is certainly research on applied sciences and engineering at Brooklyn Poly, with major contributions coming from its laboratories, there is also a strong focus on theoretical work at least in the computer science and mathematics departments. This strong research also works to draw in more graduate students and at the moment Brooklyn Poly has a higher graduate than undergraduate enrollment. This is by no means a modern phenomena, as Brooklyn Poly has always had a robust graduate program even as soon as the early 20th century, partially for the reasons outlined above and perhaps more cynically as graduate degrees have always been a major financial opportunity for universities. A graduate degree has a relatively short duration and can run for exorbitant amounts of money due to the perceived return on investment on a professional degree. The difference in degrees offered also leads to a difference in the faculty teaching at the 2 institutions. Historically West Point employed almost entirely military officers to teach, oftentimes themselves graduates of West Point, especially in the early days when most officers commissioned from West Point. And obviously the Army is reluctant to let qualified officers do something apart from the job they were commissioned to do for any longer than absolutely necessary, which leads to the majority of faculty being a rotating set of officers. Tied into this is that the majority of these officers will have Master’s degrees rather than doctorates as is common at most universities, as 4 years to complete a PhD is longer than the Army deems necessary in most cases. That is not to say the instructors are unqualified to be teaching the courses that they do, it is merely meant to highlight a difference between the two institutions. Of course at Brooklyn Poly there are many tenure track professors and other faculty who have been with the institution for years, which can be helpful in them developing the best practices for the courses they teach. With the notable exception of the computer science department where it is uncommon for people to seek PhD’s the vast majority of the faculty at Brooklyn Poly are also doctorate holders. Again this may lead to a difference in the amount and types of research being conducted, as a PhD generally requires a long term period of novel research whereas some Master’s degrees are coursework only and others which require a thesis might not have requirements on the length or novelty of the research being conducted.
Conclusion
Taken as a whole these observations have led me to a rather strange conclusion, that the oldest engineering institution in the United States is not and hasn’t been for quite some time an engineering school. Yes there is still a robust engineering program and all the students are required to take at least a few basics courses in engineering regardless of their major, but is that enough to be an engineering school? I would argue that given the large prevalence of courses outside of engineering that are required and the amount of people studying other things at West Point it is more of a liberal arts school with an engineering twist. Contrast this to Brooklyn Poly which has maintained since its inception a very direct focus on engineering. At various times STEM was the only degree path offered at Brooklyn Poly with one or two others options. To this day Brooklyn Poly has less than a handful of majors that aren’t directly in STEM but even then they are still related. Even on a meta level this course, one of the only writing intensive courses I’ve had to take at Poly focuses on engineering in its own way as we examine the institution from a historical lens. But perhaps this realization should not be surprising. West Point was always driven by the needs of the Army, even as Brooklyn Poly was the needs of the engineering professions. And while there has been a veritable boom in the demand for engineers in the last 50 years, the role of engineering in the Army has become highly specialized with few people genuinely needing a background in engineering to perform their duties optimally. And West Point is a public institution where the money is monitored and a reckoning is due if it is wasted. As such the focus has shifted from its roots in engineering to its more current form as an institution for teaching leadership in a modern environment with all the complexity that entails. The changes began after the first world war, were affirmed after the second world war and have led to the strong divergence between two of the most historic engineering institutions in the country. While the differences were obvious in the 1970s now they are unmissable.