I know for a fact that this is not true. You just need to find a faculty member (or sometimes a department) to fund you, not the school.
There is no chance of you getting a company to do this. It’s not like a branch of the military where they will help with tuition in exchange for joining said military branch. Think of it from a company’s perspective, why would they pay to fund a future employee’s education when they could just hire someone with that education right away and save on tuition?
Also, I don’t know where you did your undergrad but almost all of my classes, engineering included, had a graduate student TA at the very least. You will be much better off asking your prestigious department for a TA position than you would be asking a company.
No, 110k in debt isn’t worth it.
Agree with @Bodangles:
How much money will a humanities grad make “overall” (if he/she CAN find a job) vs. an engineering grad with an MS?
This is precisely a good reason for not funding a “future” employee: “battitude”.
Echoing what @boneh3ad said, I know for a fact this isn’t true.
That’s exactly what a cash cow is. “Cash cow” isn’t a negative thing, nor does a program being one suggest that it isn’t reputable. It simply means that it brings in a lot of money for the school.
Let’s me ask you this: if you owned a company, would you allow your company pay $110K COA for a person who came to you and simply said “I was accepted to university _ which is top 5 in the country”?
A company exists to make profit, not to give out merit scholarships (that is, assuming you have merit). If a company invests in something, it wants decent ROI. What does the company get back in this case?
If you want someone to pay for your grad study, apply to a PhD program.
It might just be semantics that are throwing you for a loop. The money within the colleges are for teaching assistants and research assistants. The research assistants will be funded usually by a company or government orgization usually thru a professor. A student can then turn that research into a thesis. But just getting funding to do a thesis, no.
Some companies will give a signing bonus for graduates of degrees that are in high demand. But they won’t, because they get enough applicants without having to, for most jobs. At this point I would imagine that a degree in chemical engineering is not is high demand.
I was accepted to multiple top 20 engineering graduate schools in chemical engineering, BUT I have absolutely no funding from any of them and I am only doing a non-thesis (MENG) degree.
Is there any chance I could convince a company/future employer to pay for my graduate school even without having ever worked for them simply because I could tell them “I was accepted to university _ which is top 5 in the country”?
I know companies do pay for masters degrees for employees, but I’m not sure if they do it for students who haven’t even been hired yet or anything. Basically I only think this is a viable option because it is such a great program for chem. engineering.
Please let me know because I feel like time is winding down and I need to make a decision! Thank you!!!
@boneh3ad : @AuraObscura @HPuck35
But these universities have all stated there are no research assistantships or teaching assistantships for M.S. (even thesis) or M.Eng. degrees.
I’ve even called to verify this. Are you telling me they put this on paper but actually will give money if I am persistent?
I don’t know what they told you or why. All I know is that, generally, it’s up to individual professors to decide whether they want to use their grant money to pay me students, not whole departments or universities.
@boneh3ad I didn’t read it on the university’s general homepage, but rather on the specific department’s homepage. Do you think it still applies? That’s really great news if what you’re saying could be a possibility still 
What part of my statement did you misread? Departments generally hand out TAships. RAships come from individual faculty members. So maybe the department reserves most or all TA positions for PhD students. Whether or not an individual gets an RA is the choice of the faculty member with the money.
University research groups are basically like small businesses. Faculty members have pools of grant money and are largely free to hire whoever they want with that money, and each professor runs their own group in their own way. Some flat out will not hire MS students with grant money. Some will. Either way, the department doesn’t have all those answers on their webpage unless they have some department-wide policy about it, and not many do. They’d have a hard time attracting and keeping faculty if they hamstrung them too much like that.
I’m not sure where you’re getting this information or who you talked to. I personally graduated from a top 20 university with a thesis MS in mechanical engineering relatively recently, and thesis MS students at my university were just as eligible for teaching assistantships as the PhD students. Thesis MS students also received research assistantships, provided their advisor had funding (like @boneh3ad said, RAs are up to the faculty member).
I’m currently finishing a PhD at a top-5 EE program. When I was a TA, there were more masters candidates as TA’s than doctoral candidates. Top programs often have enough RA’s to offer that PhD candidates spend minimal time as TA’s, so masters students get the gigs.
This is true, but that doesn’t mean that the department is wrong when they say MEng students are not considered for funding. I have absolutely seen departmental websites where the website says that MS students are simply not funded, or that MS or MEng students are only rarely funded. (Michigan and Cornell are two engineering MEng programs I’ve seen this language).
University research groups are sort of like small businesses, but they still do have to adhere to university policies. Faculty members can’t hire RAs who aren’t students, for example, if they have GRA funding that restricts them to that. There’s also such a thing as pressure - even though technically the grant may allow them to hire a master’s student into a GRA role, the custom in a specific department may be to only grant funds to doctoral students. The other thing is that faculty are motivated to hire students who are going to stick around for a while and get research done. It’s a better return on their investment to hire a PhD student who will be around 4-6 years than an MEng student who may be around for 1-2 (and has less of a motivation to do research in the first place).
I doubt faculty would leave en masse because they couldn’t offer funding to MEng students or if they were required to give preference to doctoral students. most of them would do that on their own.
OP, maybe it would be helpful if you would point to the language on the websites you’ve seen for clarification.
Hey everyone @juillet @boneh3ad @AuraObscura @cosmicfish
I could not find the exact place where I saw it on UMich’s website because I talked to my adviser who told me this, but I found the smoking gun on CMU’s website (about same rank as UMich) and it says this about M.S. students:
“The MechE department at Carnegie Mellon does not offer financial assistance of any kind to M.S. students.
All M.S. students are self-funded or externally funded. Some M.S. students work as Course Assistants (CA).
The Department will notify M.S. students when CA positions are available – this typically occurs
immediately before each semester. In rare instances, M.S. students secure Research Assistantships (RA).
RA’s are offered by a student’s research advisor, not the Departmen”
What do you think?
I think that says exactly what I already told you.
What is the least expensive option that you have been accepted to?
Going $100,000 in debt is IMHO a huge mistake. Half of this would still be a mistake. You would be much better off to work for a year and apply to universities that are less expensive, or to go work for an employer who will pay for your Masters after you work for them for some time.
By the way, I have heard many times that the US needs more STEM graduates. You have just discovered that we as a nation are not willing to put our $ where our mouth is. However, you have to deal with the way the world is, not the way that we might think that it should be.
@DadTwoGirls: So many people must do it though it seems! Yes it is a shame that we need more STEM majors and yet no one will fund them. I’ve heard our president Donald Trump is defunding the humanities so hopefully he will allocate some of these resources to where we need them since he is a businessman and not another lawyer (since everyone says we need more STEM).
@boneh3ad Okay thanks but you were implying M.S. TAships were pretty easy to obtain. It appears they are available, but in small amounts and certainly not guaranteed. I hope that isn’t the case!
Neh/nea is national funding. It’s for large cultural or historical projects spearheaded by researchers, recognized artists, or research groups - not related to master’s students. Federal funding is entirely separate from TAships; it may be related to RAship if you bring skills useful to a lab but those tend to go to PHD candidates.
Also, that funding will be shifted to defense contractors. (Washington Post or WSJ both have good analyses of the budget. You can try and read that.)
Your best bet is to work for an employer that offers to sponsor graduate studies for its best employees. Hopefully if you got into UMich once, you can get in again. Email them to explain your decision, highlighting the fact it’s financial, and that you hope to apply again once you’ve found sufficient funding through your employer.
Finally, read the whole thread again. Your understanding of the information provided seems partial at best, which in turn made you sound tone-deaf at best; this would be problematic both in graduate settings and in industry, so re reading may make things clearer. You will really need to analyze/synthesize and communicate better once you are in the workforce.