Now to another resource, how much a school influences “success.”
I frequently read families justifying why giving away their hard earned money, or even going into debt for brand X is a great idea because their student will earn so much more if they do it will be worth it. I often talk about opportunity cost, but it’s lost on most posters.
Below is a list of the same schools in the previous order and the median salaries for mechanical engineers two years out (that’s my son’s major) listed numerically. I threw in two ringers, the increasingly prestigious NYU and Michigan Tech, a school on no CC family’s radar.
The data comes from College Scorecard, because it is not self-reported. It too, like all data, has flaws. It only represents students who received federal grants. That said, if a school was worth the investment, raising the most financially needy would seem like a good benchmark. It is linked below. Again, we’ll summon @Data10 to vet the data.
See if you can pair the school with the median 2 year ME salary.
I’ll reveal the true order after we have a little dialogue. Red or Blue? Do you really want to know?
Cal - Berkeley
University of Illinois - Urbana - Champaign
Georgia Tech
Purdue
MIT
Stanford
Cal Poly
Hose-Hulman
Harvey-Mudd
Olin
NYU is probably at the bottom, since (a) their engineering school is light years behind the rest of the university in quality and (b) so many of the students are international, don’t stay in the US, and make lower salaries.
On a complete search of ME results, there are 55 schools with 2 year ME salaries of less than $60K. But this data is not perfect…it only includes students who received federal grants and/or loans.
Yes, NYU is the lagging school. I put it on there as an illustration that institutional reputation and college/department reputation might be different.
One of the reasons I posted this is because every year families debate the massive cost difference between big name, prestigious schools like MIT, their state flagship, and even schools known for high merit where the student could go for little to no money at all. It is really based on fear of missing out.
I’m in no way saying don’t go to MIT, Stanford, or whatever other Brand X is in the mix. Depending on the major, financial quantitative analysis for example, MIT is probably the golden ticket. For everyday majors where employment is very egalitarian, it might not be.
Stanford, Cornell, Northwestern, Berkeley, Michigan, Olin, CMU and Cal Poly all fall in the $73-79K band. There are 8 state schools, Wayne State, Mississippi State, and Cal State Maritime as examples, that fall into the same band for ME. They are cheap in state, and all have acceptance rates north of 50%, some by a long margin.
NYU bought the old New York Polytechnic, which was originally called Brooklyn Poly back in the day. I actually thought Brooklyn Poly had good programs, maybe it was for their graduate school. You’re probably right about the international students though.
The NYU report at Career Outcomes | NYU Tandon School of Engineering mentions a much higher average of $73k for mechanical engineering, which separates persons working outside of USA. However, international students generally wouldn’t be in the sample of federal FA recipients that CollegeScorecard uses. There may be a bad sample issue or other contributing factors that are specific to NYU.
I agree. I expect prestige / brand name has little effect. As I noted in the other thread, quality measures of incoming students seem to have less influence for non-CS engineering than most other fields, so while there is a correlation with quality of students, you often don’t see huge differences between extremely selective colleges where near everyone is a top academic student vs less selective colleges that admit the vast majority of applicants. Location does play a role – both due to cost of living and proximity of nearby businesses. There are also relationships with particular employers and colleges, as well as influence from student backgrounds and small sample size. Some examples are below that try to control for location by choosing colleges in similar region.
Michigan Area Colleges
UMichigan (Dearborn) – $80k
Oakland – $77k
UMichigan (Ann Arbor) – $76k
Michigan State – $76k
Wayne State – $76k
Central Michigan – $74k
Michigan Tech – $72k
Western Michigan – $71k
MA Area Colleges
MIT – $80k
Northeastern – $73k
WPI – $69k
Boston U – $69k
Tufts – $67k
UMass – $66k
Puerto Rico Area Colleges
Ana Mendez – $39k
Inter American – $35k
Universidad Politecnic – $34k
Polytechnic University – $34k
