I don’t know about the schools you mention. I mean about high ranked private schools that people are usually comparing against the flagship very reputed publics.
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I have 2 kids that are engineers. One went to the big public not as highly ranked school and the other went to a T-15 private elite University. Both kids loved their respective schools/experiences and both got great jobs with top aerospace companies… same starting pay. Opportunities are up to the individual… working hard and networking.
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Many of the schools where engineers end up parlaying their degree into something not traditionally considered engineering, quantitative financial analysis as an example, aren’t well respected for producing practicing engineers. Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth would all fall into that category. Do they produce decent engineers? Sure, but probably not as strong as most state flagships.
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People are making decisions on how to spend their time and energy learning what they want to learn, and developing expertise in areas that they think maximizes their human capital. And they may or may not choose to maximize their engineering expertise as opposed to other parts of their skill set. Maximizing engineering expertise is not necessarily holistically optimal for everyone. The US is somewhat of a post industrial society.
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It’s not as binary as you suggest-- “well respected” vs. “not respected”.
There are perfectly competent engineers coming out of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth doing just fine in their engineering roles. And guess what- there are terrible engineers graduating from the programs you love at “most state flagships”.
I’ve hired engineers in my career- lots of them. SOME roles (especially in rotational programs leading to fast track management positions) require solid engineering skills but exceptional other things (communication, soft skills, foreign language fluency). Engineering is the ticket in- and then everything else becomes important. You are god’s gift to engineering but don’t have everything else? You’d be considered for a plain vanilla role, but not one of the plum spots. “Decent” engineer but exceptional at the other stuff? Great! You are what we are looking for!
You sure have a limited perspective on what engineers do for a living! And to conflate the requirements of Civil vs. Electrical (for example) when those fields are looking for completely different things???
Not binary- good/bad, exceptional/decent, private/state flagship. So many factors to consider.
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You will find more people at those 3 schools with ambitions of starting their own companies than you will at State U. You will foster personal relationships at those 3 schools with more wealthy & connected people that can benefit someone in many ways. You will build person networks with more top achievers.
If someone just wants a job as a Design Engineer at ABC company, the cost for a ‘prestigious’ university is not justified. There are many reasons why the cost would be justified. The desires of the student and their potential factor into all of this.
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I don’t disagree with any of that. I was responding to a previous post claiming private schools offered students broader opportunities than state flagships.
This, along with curiosity and work ethic, with some luck sprinkled in, are the things that determine success. They are all independent of the school.
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This is recklessly inaccurate.
Honestly, do you think there is no value to the people you will be around and the relationships you will build with them?
Do you really think if a student works as hard as they can at Sam Houston State or Florida Gulf Coast University that they will have the exact same personal & professional networks (and career opportunities) as someone working just as hard at Stanford or Princeton?
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If different schools were not different, CC would not exist. We would just be calling them school1, school2 etc, and kids would just be choosing schools based in weather, the density of other kids of the appropriate gender (hat tip @tsbna44 ) etc.
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Source please? A number of the state schools mentioned in this thread have all kinds of resources for start ups and incubators, and plenty of students with ambitions to be more than “just” an engineer.
My D has been hired for a rotational eng leadership development program, the kind that Blossom referenced in her post. Her cohort has students from GT, Purdue, and Pittsburgh. Motivated, driven, smart students aren’t confined to one type of school.
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No one said they were.
At this point, if I haven’t made my point clear by now, I am obviously incapable of doing so.
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My son has worked on two extremely competitive, desirable teams. He holds a patent. The people on his teams were educated in the most random places. Engineering is fairly egalitarian right out of school, and almost completely meritocratic from there. There is no correlation to where the best engineers are educated. There are plenty of brilliant engineers that went to school at Podunk U and plenty of pedestrian engineers from “elite” institutions.
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Honestly, to make a blanket statement either way is inaccurate. I guess in some rarified fields it matters but I’d put those fields in the tiny minority.
In my field, we often found the Columbia grad students to be woefully unprepared and flat-out entitled when it came to the internships they breezed into, compared with Joe from East Directional U, who was a go-getter working his a** off every day. (My work routinely hired the Columbia grads for internships as a matter of course; the others fought like tigers to win a slot)
So clearly the prestige of the Columbia name was getting a certain percentage in the door.
At that point, the assessment of them was completely school-blind, if you will. And it was not unusual for them to come up short.
I don’t know how else to say it - schools might get you that first look, but it will not, over the course of a career in my field, be the thing that gets you to the top.
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I agree.
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Ultimately it’s the kid - and I remember meeting my son’s roommates from Ga Tech - he from Bama. They weren’t invited back for next summer and he was.
I get what @zrt42 is saying and there is no doubt the average kid at certain schools are academically superior on average than kids at other schools.
But it takes a lot more than that to have success.
And most kids are looking to integrate into the established, not the new creations although when those happen, the schools magnify their successes as if it’s everyone.
There are wonderful schools out there for all - and certainly Notre Dame (I think where this started) could be one as could be hundreds of others.
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Southwest Texas State doesn’t offer Mechanical or Civil engineering. 
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I am a big fan of Notre Dame. I think it is worth every penny - if you have it. The original poster was trying to justify the cost and that’s a different question. My kids couldn’t apply (and probably wouldn’t get in) because we just didn’t have the money. Classmates (cousins) whose grandfather was willing and able to pay for any school chose ND and loved it. If their parents had had to pay, I think both would have gone to in state schools, and CU or Colorado School of Mines aren’t too shabby for engineering.
All the things listed above - knowing professors personally, no online classes, building friendships - my daughter found at her school (Florida Tech). She didn’t have big time football, but did have astronauts walking around campus and teaching (either classes or lectures) all the time, some alums, some just in the area (Buzz is/was an adjunct and there every day), lots of local opportunities to get into the space industry, plenty of one-time opportunities. Is Florida Tech in the ‘same league’ as ND or Purdue or GTech? No, but it has its own benefits. Several of her classmates work for SpaceX or NASA or Northrup because they were in the right place at the right time.
And she has very little debt.
Would I have liked her to go to ND? Absolutely. Would I have borrowed large amounts to make that happen? No.
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Great points, and really glad to hear about your daughter’s great experience. I think what is often forgotten is that for many kids, being in what is essentially a “town” made up almost entirely of 18-22 year olds, is going to extremely formative (and fun). The opportunities are there, but will have different flavors depending on the school’s culture and where graduates tend to go, which is often determined by geography as much as anything. You cite the access to space program. And car companies tend to recruit in the Midwest. So regional economies are a factor.
And I agree entirely with point made that engineering is fairly egalitarian … pedigree matters less than in many other fields. (Though ABET certification can be a factor.)
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