<p>hi all
I have been looking into the salaries ,I noticed that most engineers get around 55 k as a start.
Stanford engineers got 56 k and Ohio State universtiy got 49 k ,so approximately it is the same.
then what are the advantages of going to top programs like Stanford,Mit...??
I know you will have better education and better opportunities but ,why all engineers have the same starting salary??</p>
<p>I worked for a large aerospace company and they did give larger starting salaries to those from the top engineering schools. Your observation that the difference wasn’t that great was is correct. Pay increases were based on perfromance, so any difference in starting salaries was washed out quite quickly.</p>
<p>I believe that the biggest advantage of going to a top tier school was that companies like mine did tend to hire from top schools rather than lesser schools. You could still get a job with my company but they did spend more time and money recruiting from the top engineering schools. As a result, we had a lot of engineers from MIT, CalTech, Purdue, Michigan, UCLA, CalBerkley (we were a CA company after all), etc.</p>
<p>Be careful looking at average salary. It can be skewed heavily by the geographic location of a school’s graduates.</p>
<p>For CS, at least, going to Stanford probably gives you a better shot at getting jobs with Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/hotNewStartupInSiliconValley. Most of these companies will pay six figures.</p>
<p>There are a ton of other schools that place just as many graduates as Stanford, however. Stanford is not the be-all end-all of schools, although it is a very attractive option (and can also give a lot of financial aid).</p>
<p>I don’t know how it is in Silicon Valley, or Chicago or Texas, but I can tell you how it is in the Washington DC area in software engineering:</p>
<p>New Grad #1: From top school and gets starting salary of $65K
New Grad #2: From State-U and gets salary of $55K</p>
<p>After 3 years, New Grad #1 has a salary of $71K, New Grad #2 has salary of $61K.</p>
<p>New Grad #2 learned the latest “hot thing” in the industry and changes employers and now has a new salary of $75K. New Grad #1 stays at current employer.</p>
<p>Happens all the time.</p>
<p>It’s not as much about the college as what you do, so your question is pretty pointless.</p>
<p>But anyway, the average salary for CS degrees from Cornell or Stanford are around $93,000 well above the national average. The reason is because of the people there, not because of the school. What school you go to can only help your chances at getting an interview, but it won’t help you pass the interview or not. </p>
<p>This answer is more specific to engineering/CS though.</p>
<p>If you’re concerned about money, I wouldn’t recommend trying to go to a top-rated school (although you still don’t want to go to one that is bad). Even if you get in, tuition and other costs will be through the roof compared to other schools, especially if it’s out of state! The small extra compensation right out of school won’t make up for that, especially if you have interest accumulating on student loans.</p>
<p>Empirical research suggests the most important determinant of post-college success is your own efforts and ambitions, not the college you attended. Your choice of college matters some, but your actions and behavior matter much more.</p>
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<p>That is true for the most part. However, the very elite private companies out there do tend to bias very heavily towards hiring only elite school graduates. Some of them won’t even look at your resume if the name of the school you graduated from isn’t in the top 10 list of USNWR.</p>
<p>Personally, I prefer companies/organizations with more diversity than that. I think you end up getting better ideas, fresher ideas, and a better overall culture when you have more diversity. More minds solving problems, looking at things from different perspectives and backgrounds. It’s one of the reasons I prefer working for government organizations or labs as they [actually have an obligation to] hire graduates from a wide variety of schools.</p>
<p>my main plane is to get my bachelor degree in EE from the US and then do my MS in Germany,then I wanna work in Germany for few years(considering I love Germany) and then get back to the US hoping to work in a big company like Google.
during college I intend to learn programming as much as possible because I noticed that most EE doesn’t know much about it.
the reason I want to learn programming is because I want to be eligible to fill a CS job in the future “that might be possible”.</p>
<p>If your goal is to work at Google, why are you getting a degree in EE?</p>
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<p>Google is an example I made,my goal is to work for a big company.
can’t an EE work for Google??</p>
<p>Google is both a hardware and software company, so they certainly hire EE’s.</p>
<p>They hire a lot more CS guys than EE’s. Their hardware side is comparatively small.</p>