<p>There’s no guarantee that the quality of education will be significantly better, but it could be. ABET has very rigorous standards, intensifying engineering education at virtually any accredited school. Although, the professors and such could still be better at prestigious schools. On the other hand, sitting in a class of 200 students, might make it harder to learn the material.</p>
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<p>this is the greatest reply I have ever read.</p>
<p>Since this is a concern I have for my kids (who both chose more challenging schools) I asked this same question to a HP recruiter at a recent dinner. She told me that each company sets a minimum GPA unique to each school that they interview at. While it’s not the most precise answer, it seems to show that companies acknowledge the difficulty level of schools.</p>
<p>my conclusion about this:
an accredited engineering program is the best way to go for the undergraduate.
I am going to study EE at Cleveland state university ,I am going to work as hard as I can to maintain a high GPA like 3.7 so that I can land a decent job.
plus I will save the money for the Grad school.</p>
<p>“Prestige has the potential to ‘open doors’ by giving you access to high-profile networking, but it is not necessary for career success and/or happiness.” - this.</p>
<p>my opinion is that it prestige helps you get a foot into the next door, but you still have to earn your way. I went to Dartmouth, and yes I think the name has helped me, but it would not help me much if I slouched my whole way through school and medical school and work beyond that. My colleague went to UT (Tennessee) and she is at least as good as I am, probably better in many respects - and paid a fraction of the tuition I did. However, I think she may have had to make sure she stood out a little more at UT. People tend to give you the benefit of the doubt if you come from a strong school because they realize it was selective just to get in. If you are going to grad school, then most people will care a lot more about your performance in grad school.</p>
<p>I’ll repeat what my experience has been on prestige vs non prestige, personal and professional.</p>
<p>From directional state, the good students are good, and the bad students are bad. In a prestige school (read, flagship state or decent private or good private with big name recognition) the good students are good as well, but the bad students are pretty good too. I.e. at the top of the crop (darned idiom) the students are pretty good, not 100% to 100% of course but close, but at the middle to bottom, it gets uglier. This is for reasonably comparable programs.</p>
<p>I feel to a great extent people love the prestige schools because of the perceived ‘known quantity’. I did one degree at a directional in the South and one at Purdue. I don’t recall anyone real bad at Purdue, even those who had to work their tail off to pass the class were much better than the same ‘grade’ or ‘caliber’ student at the directional. At the top it’s down to individual talent and ability.</p>
<p>There’s also a bit of prestige vs prestige. I work a lot with both Purdue and Rose Hulman grads. The difference in approach in the schools (Purdue taking the uber-school approach, vs RH taking the more personalized, small class size, etc) does end up reflecting on the graduates, even tho they’re equally good engineers.</p>
<p>I had the opportunity to speak to an engineering recruiter today. She was my patient, so I had her undivided attention. She has recruited engineers for several firms over the past decade. I asked the common questions I see here. “Does prestige matter?” She gave me an emphatic “NO” for an answer. “What is the most important factor in your recruiting process?” Experience is the most important. She placed full time work experience at the highest, followed by co-op, then followed by internship. She stated that she would never hire a new grad because it was not worth the risk hurting her reputation with her engineering firm clients. More importantly, they are not ready to contribute to the firm on day one. She wants hard-core engineers with years of experience who have specific skills requested by the employers.</p>
<p>“Where should a student attend engineering school?” In her experience, she found many of the state universities produce great engineers. The two that she stated were University of Michigan and Alabama. Trust me, Alabama was a big surprise. But these were 2 of many schools.</p>
<p>I have spoken to several other engineering recruiters, engineering firm owners, or engineering HR directors. Prestige of the school has never been listed as a factor in recruitment. For those of you who are on the fence between going into debt for prestige or comfortably affording a state university, why don’t you contact an engineering recruiter and ask them? At least you will get an answer from the person who may be hiring you in the future.</p>
<p>“Prestige” only really matters in those areas that are known for their Old Boy Networkism, or where people need some way to differentiate otherwise undifferentiable people. Academia, Big Law, Big Accounting, and High Finance come to mind as areas that only want people from top schools.</p>
<p>Since companies that hire engineers are interested in what you can do, what your skills are, <em>what results you can produce,</em> prestige of alma mater is a second-order differentiation, after what things you’ve accomplished. This is why I keep suggesting undergraduate research, because it is where you are most likely to work on complete or semi-complete projects rather than tedious grunt work.</p>
<p>Using CS as an example, most CS internships will involve tedious coding on the boring parts of programs, or testing, or something similar. Whereas in research you may actually get to contribute to a project or have your own little project you can show to employers. I did a program for displaying STM image data, among a few other little apps, for a physics research group. Instead of saying “I spent a Summer doing test scripts on an accounting program” I can say “I spent a Summer creating a suite of applications for turning numbers in data files into images for scientific analysis. I turned specifications for a program into a finished program and tested it myself. I taught myself a new language and had to invent some new algorithms which turned memory-intensive, system-crashing algorithms running in O(n^3) into leaner algorithms that used a fraction of the memory and ran in O(n^2) and O(n) which allowed us to load files that were an order of magnitude larger. And I did it all by myself, baby!”</p>
<p>Of course, you can alternate. Internship one Summer, research the next, etc. The great thing about research is you can do it year-round, drop in and out as your schedule demands, and you can start while you’re still in high school, and sometimes get paid!</p>
<p>I’ll add another nope.
Plus the fact that some subfields of a specific type of engineering… Are so rare / unpopular, but basically, there are less graduates than the demand. At one of the least prestigious schools (that people think you can certainly go to a better one), might be the best and one of the few that actually offer this type. Just saying, and even though this might not sound appealing / people often criticize me for doing this, I know it’s darn going to work and I’m darn going to love the major.</p>
<p>Does prestige matter at all in CompSci? You’d think with all these companies desperate for programmers, they could care less what school you came from as long as you can code?</p>
<p>I see the same question being asked by many people on different platform. I came across a post that might help you get an answer to your question. </p>
<p>[Does</a> College Prestige Matter? | Noodle Education](<a href=“http://www.noodle.org/noodlings/college/does-college-prestige-matter]Does”>Does College Prestige Matter? - Noodle.com)</p>
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<p>Lest anyone be discouraged after reading this, third-party headhunters, which is what this woman sounds like, as a matter of course don’t deal with new college grads. Those just getting out of college need to send their resumes directly to the companies they’re interested in working for.</p>
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<p>I graduated with a BS Computer Science, but whether prestige matters is a function of what industry you work in more so than what degree you have. I graduated mid-pack in my class from a state university.</p>
<p>I believe the general trend is that the more technical your degree is, the less prestige matters.</p>
<p>I work as a software engineer in the defense sector and, for the most part, the name of your school does not matter. What does matter are the following:</p>
<ol>
<li> BS Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering</li>
<li><p>Current and valid security clearance (and level of security clearance)</p></li>
<li><p>Previously or currently a service member (which probably impacts #2)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>All three drastically trump what school you graduated from by a long shot.</p>
<p>As for benefits, when you factor in income, tuition reimbursement, reserve career compatibility (and opportunities to double dip) and military differential pay, 4+ weeks of vacation time, cost of living, 35 hour work week, etc., I would have needed to be guaranteed at least $180,000 per year as a new grad in the NYC area to match my current employer offer. Needless to say, even if I went to a prestigious school, no employer would guarantee that level of compensation.</p>
<p>Prestige will never be as important as appearance, presentation, friendliness, how personable a person, how they come across in an interview, who is recommending them for the job, etc. You need to keep in mind that many of the people on this site are into “prestige”. It helps build their ego if they or their kids go to a “prestigious” school. But that “prestige” brand name will do very little in assisting you in being successful on the job. At the best, it may (or may not) help you get an interview you otherwise would not have gotten. But in the end, its what you know, how hard you work, how good you are at your job. That is what will make the difference. And given LSU is a huge school, with a large alumni network, if you intend on staying in Louisiana, that school will open more doors for you than any other, including the Ivies.</p>
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<p>It can matter for your first job out of school in terms of whether your school is targeted for on-campus recruiting by non-local smaller companies which do not have the resources to recruit everywhere. If you are at a non-targeted school, you have to be more aggressive in finding and applying to companies (not just GAFAM which recruit widely and everyone applies to anyway).</p>
<p>ucbalumnus: “It is not a given that you will get a lower GPA at a more selective or prestigious school, since more selective or prestigious schools tend to have more grade inflation.”</p>
<p>A question. Do more selective schools have more grade inflation or would the fact they are selecting the smarter and more prepared students mean that as a whole the students would have higher grades? It seems to me the premise behind the bell curve becomes a poorer predictor of success as the overall ability of the students increases.</p>
<p>That makes no sense, why would more prestigious schools have higher grade inflation compared to less known schools? Why not the other way around since those schools are in need of a better reputation. Of course going to a lower ranked school is easier, everyone else is dumber and the class curve is actually beneficial.</p>
<p>They have more grade inflation because nobody feels there should be C students at Harvard.</p>
<p>[National</a> Trends in Grade Inflation, American Colleges and Universities](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com%5DNational”>http://www.gradeinflation.com)</p>
<p>(Look at the list of schools on the bottom to compare schools.)</p>