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<p>The presumption is that the person actually got into MIT. I can think of quite a few students who were admitted to Harvard but not MIT. Furthermore, the totality of engineering resources available to Harvard students, especially when considering the availability of cross-registration resources at MIT, probably exceeds the engineering resources at Princeton. Princeton engineering students are not allowed to cross-register at MIT or any other top-ranked engineering school. </p>
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<p>The real question is whether prestige and rankings in engineering actually translate into tangible benefits for the typical undergraduate, and the sad truth seems to be that it does not, at least, not in terms of starting salary. With the notable exception of EECS, MIT engineering students do not make significantly higher starting salaries than does the average graduate from the same engineering discipline, especially when you factor in the highest cost of living in the locations where MIT graduates tend to work. Lest you think that I am picking on MIT, I would point out that the same is true of other top-ranked engineering programs such as Stanford and Berkeley - again, with the exception of EECS, their engineering graduates are also not paid significantly higher than engineers from the average school. Heck, in certain disciplines such as chemical engineering, MIT graduates in certain years were actually paid less than the national average. That’s right - less. </p>
<p>If employers truly valued the prestige and education of the top-ranked engineering schools, then you would think that they would pay a premium for those graduates. Sadly, they do not. Granted, it may be true that graduates from top engineering programs will progress faster in their engineering careers through their better training. But that nevertheless concedes the point that employers do not seem to place much value upon the engineering ranking itself if graduates from top-ranked programs are initially consigned to the same salary run as the average starting engineer. </p>
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<p>Whether you agree with iCalculus’s philosophy, the fact of the matter is that engineering students who don’t actually intend to work as engineers is a burgeoning theme within the top engineering schools - probably for the reasons stated above that engineering employers don’t really seem to value them. They probably are better off, at least financially, by choosing another career path rather than taking an average engineering salary for average pay. </p>
<p>Consider the sadly biting comments of Nicholas Pearce:</p>
<p>Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: “It’s marketed as–I don’t want to say dead end but sort of ‘O.K., here’s your role, here’s your lab, here’s what you’re going to be working on.’ Even if it’s a really cool product, you’re locked into it.” Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. “If you’re an M.I.T. grad and you’re going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day–as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that–it seems like a no-brainer.”</p>
<p>[Are</a> We Losing Our Edge? – Printout – TIME](<a href=“http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1156575,00.html]Are”>http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1156575,00.html)</p>
<p>My take is, as long as engineering employers refuse to pay the graduates of the top programs better, then a growing number of those graduates will not really want to work as engineers. </p>
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<p>Well, the truth of the matter is that many, probably most, entry-level jobs available to graduates from any discipline are menial, even if the school is top-ranked. Let’s face it: most liberal arts graduates are consigned to relatively menial jobs. The reality is that our higher educational system produces boatloads of graduates who don’t really have capabilities that the economy actually demands, especially in these sundered economic times. Granted, the counterargument is that while colleges may not provide directly applicable vocational skills, it does develop the capacity to quickly develop such skills - but whether this actually happens is far from certain. I can think of many college graduates who ended up stocking shelves and manning cash registers at the mall. Exactly what sort of skills are they developing that they couldn’t have developed by just taking those jobs right out of high school?</p>