<p>I personally chose a large public school because they were still highly ranked and competitive degrees, but for a lesser cost to myself and my parents (a lot of bang for the buck). Only the public schools bothered to give me financial aid. A good large public school also has a large alumni network, and we have pretty big career fairs. They had fantastic student resources and laboratories, and a really cool research lab. Not everybody goes for research experience, so as long as I can out-compete the majority of my classmates, I can probably get one semester of undergrad research. </p>
<p>Your peers are who you choose to work with really. And SAT scores aren’t good predictors of success. Nobody cares about high school after first semester freshman year. Or at least they really shouldn’t. </p>
<p>I like my big top 10 engineering public school.</p>
<p>How did someone ranked dead last get into UIUC’s engineering school?!?!</p>
<p>The middle 50% of freshman at UIUC’s enginnering school:
ACT: 31-34
SAT: 1370-1490 (M+CR)
Class Rank: 92%-99%</p>
<p>In Engineering, the top public schools are perfectly fine. Arguing that MIT or Caltech is better than school X, is like arguing that the world is round. Please…</p>
<p>^Ok then, I suppose you’re right about stats. But how about the large student populations? Doesn’t that hinder the progress one can get in research and such? I mean, if class sizes are a few hundred kids, doesn’t that mean less chances to get help from professors?</p>
<p>Sure, you can get less one-on-one attention at a large public school than at smaller private/LAC. However, these large engineering schools have huge research budgets and resources, that aren’t available to smaller private schools. For this reason, most smaller private schools have limited (if any) engineering programs.</p>
<p>MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Cornell etc, are an exception. However, access to these very selective schools is limited. Most (top 10% students) will end up at one of the large state public universities. And they will do fine.</p>
<p>By the way, few if any engineering classes have class sizes in the hundreds, with the exception of core classes in Calc, Physics, etc. These course that do have break out sessions and TA to assist students. Once you’re taking classes in your major, the classes are much smaller.</p>
<p>Not all of us care about going the research path. Many of us rather just enter the workforce and gain expertise in a specific area and parlay that into other avenues to increase income like independent consulting/contracting, opening startups or maybe entering the national security/defense sector. If one choose to specialize in an in-demand or hot technology area, then there are usually many more jobs than qualified engineers which means those qualified engineers can command high incomes.</p>
<p>Public schools will give you more “return on investment” and if one chooses to always stay on the cutting edge of technology, one can also have less stress with finding new jobs because there is less competition.</p>
<p>There’s a reason most companies prefer to recruit from big public schools. They get to view and pick from a large talent pool while minimizing recruiting expenses.
If you want to go into research/academia, large and smaller private engineering schools will do just fine. If you want to go into industry, publics (and elite privates like MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU) are much better in terms of ROI and placement.</p>
<p>It’s unusual for me to find a new grad from Northeastern or WPI who is really a good fit for our department. It’s happened though. I had a Northeastern guy who had a great relevant coop at another company and we snatched him up.</p>