<p>My surgeon went to a non-descript, regional state university, graduated from a Big 10 med school, and is practicing medicine in a small city. He seems to doing okay.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider is honors and other special programs. There are often special educational and social opportunies available at “lesser” schools that may not be accessible at prestigious schools.</p>
<p>I graduated from an Ivy. 25 years later, i am not doing great things and frankly my career has hit a rough patch, but I have a wonderful family and i am generally happy. Everyone has memories from college and there are lots of great professors out there at many schools. That being said, I had a work study job in a department mailroom on Saturday mornings. There was a Nobel Laureate who used to come in and sit and talk to me just to pass some time. I wouldn’t have gotten that experience at many other colleges. There were professors that I had who testified before congress regularly and who had worked at the highest levels of goverment and industry. They were fascinating people and it was a wonderful learning environment. The campus art museum had world reknown pieces of art. People who had changed the world spoke on campus regularly. The financial endowment provided resources not available at other schools. I could go on and on. My point is that sometimes “prestige” is something that is earned. Don’t go to a school only for prestige. Go to the school to partake in all the things that make it prestigous. Go there because that is what you want. if you want other things, or if the school doesn’t have the precise program you want, then going there just to put the sticker in the car is silly.</p>
<p>Not to move the topic away from engineering, but since you brought up medicine, I’ll chime in. My cousin went to ordinary state schools (not particularly prestigious) for undergrad and med school. He did his residency and fellowship at a different state school, outside the “top 25 med schools”. He is now 40, a gastroenterologist in a major city, and considered a go-to guy in the region for certain complicated cases. He has become highly successful and respected in the field, despite lack of a “prestigious” diploma. It’s all about what you do with your talents.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what “success” is. My grandfather graduated from Columbia medical school, but died penniless. Other doctors in the area sent patients to my grandfather who they knew or suspected couldn’t pay. He died in 1961 so he practiced medicine in the era before insurance. An Ivy League education wasn’t the path to riches for him.</p>
<p>Think about it like this: Do you go around asking doctors, engineers, pharmacists, etc where they graduated from? You will eventually get to your career goal as long as you work hard to get there. But honestly, in the end, when you apply for jobs, companies are gonna care more about your experience rather than your GPA and college. Your GPA might matter in the beginning when you are starting out your career but later on, it’s not gonna matter. But where you go doesn’t matter as long as you create your experiences and make your college years memorable.</p>
<p>I ALWAYS check a potential doctor for where they went to school.</p>
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<p>The problem isn’t so much about your level of talent, it’s about how others perceive your level of talent. That perception by others is what gives us the opportunities to succeed in our society, oftentimes regardless of our actual abilities.</p>
<p>Having a less prestigious diploma in a field such as medicine can be catastrophic to your career despite the fact that you might have performed exceptionally well in med school. Our culture is one that judges heavily on which colleges we get into rather than our actual performance during college - this is the case in many fields, not just medicine. Is this type of judgement logical? No, it isn’t, but it’s human nature. </p>
<p>Prestige, as it relates to education, has always been viewed by the average person as a rudamentary indicator of a person’s innate intelligence. You never hear someone say, “Oh he got a 3.8 at MIT, he must be smart!”, you hear “Oh he went to MIT, he must be smart!”. What happens during college is irrelevant to most people.</p>
<p>I am Nebuchadnezzar the great and powerful! Fear my wrath! In the words of T-Pain “you ain’t hardcore unless you hexacore.” Apply the same logic to engineering school prestige.</p>
<p>Steadfast and Resolute,
SeriesofTubes</p>
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<p>Across all but the most hyper areas of the US, maybe NYC and LA, this isn’t true for health care providers. The degree comes with an assumed competence and respect no matter where it’s from.</p>
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<p>I agree with you from an employer-employee competence point of view, but as far as the average Joe is concerned, he wants the doctor who graduated from the most prestigious (or big name) medical school. Some people even go so far as to judge a doctor on his/her undergraduate school.</p>
<p>Again, there is no logic behind this judgement, since it largely ignores any accomplishments or successes made IN medical school. However, most people are too lazy or unwilling to spend the time to find out how good a doctor really is, so they instead rely on the “big name school” factor.</p>
<p>I can honestly say that in the community I practice in, it has no bearing.</p>
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<p>What are you, Niles?</p>
<p>I, for one, would pass down the opportunity to go to grad school at one of the fancy schools in the Northeast or in California, because I don’t want to live in those places and I also don’t want to be surrounded by all of that elitism. Don’t assume that the school a person went to is the best they could get into or that they didn’t adequately learn their field at the school they went to.</p>
<p>Schools like Princeton, Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, etc… tend to have the highest paid graduates.</p>
<p>However, there are two interjections here:</p>
<p>1.) Harvey Mudd is an engineering school (and engineers are paid more, on average.)
2.) Correlation does not imply causation (maybe the schools didn’t prepare them to be good workers and make money, but very possibly it was the students who had a general aptitude picked elite colleges while in high school, and whether or not they went to an elite school, they would still be making the same amount of money.)</p>
<p>Frankly, I think that the correlation implies partial causation.</p>
<p>The highest paid graduates thing is largely irrelevant. What many people fail to consider when looking at starting salaries is cost of living. It is a HUGE factor, if not the primary reason behind the variation in starting salaries.</p>
<p>Google, for example, may pay their starting engineers ~$100k a year, but the reality is that $100k a year in the bay area is the equivalent of about $55k in less expensive areas of the country. [Want</a> proof?](<a href=“http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/cost-of-living/]Want”>Cost of living: How far will my salary go in another city? - CNNMoney)</p>
<p>Is something like $2k/year more starting salary really worth $150k more tuition (+ interest)?</p>
<p>Third party recruiters are looking for engineers with specific skills so prestige plays a much less role. Recruiting from companies which hire new grads are of course care about where they have graduated. Companies will hire grads from more elite schools if everything else is equal. If companies tell that prestige has No roles in hiring, they are either not telling the truth or the whole truth. Most of the time, if companies are not getting large number of grads from elite engineering schools, why they even talk about prestige as a factor? And there are other time that they are just not interested in grads from elite schools because these grads may come with demands, egos, etc.</p>
<p>If anyone does not believe a role of the prestige factor, just look at the faculty list of the schools you have attended, are attending or thinking to apply. There is a great pecking order for where they graduated from, i.e. U Penn engineering faculties are more likely to have received their PhD at MIT, Princeton, and UC Berkeley than the other way around.</p>
<p>Academia cares about pedigree far more than industry does.</p>
<p>^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^</p>
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That’s the point, varying degree of impact. If a recruiter or a company HR tells new grads that the schools they have gone to makes NO difference in hiring, they are lying. Yes, after engineering students who get hired, it may not matter much which schools they come from, but their ability to succeed.</p>
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It all depends. Apparently, it is worth it to many high school seniors. Otherwise why hs graduates are not all taking the free-ride at much less prestige schools?</p>
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Me too. Why not, when a doctor’s skill can mean right or wrong in diagnosis/treatment or even life/death for you and members of your family?</p>
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<p>This will often manifest itself in the schools they visit to recruit at, but it does not mean that those from other schools will be automatically excluded if they find the company and apply. Bigger companies are likely to have larger lists of schools they recruit at, due to needing more employees and having more recruiting resources to do visits. Smaller companies may recruit mostly locally and maybe at a few non-local schools that they see as good.</p>