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My proof on what? Again you badmouthed engineers from MIT and the like, not me.</p>
<p>Your proof that prestige matters, which is what you’re arguing.</p>
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Please read the Post #111 if you have not already done so. And if you still doubt about it, you can ask @lightnin nicely to give you further information. If I remember correctly, he’s at Stanford, the MIT like, which graduates/engineers you dislike the most.</p>
<p>Yep, I read that post. They take better engineers, because they have the prestige to be able to attract them. Nothing about that suggests that prestige matters.</p>
<p>Who said I hate top schools? I just think that far too many top school graduates are not suited for standard industry work, a sentiment which many employers (and the students themselves, for the record) agree with. They’re better suited for more advanced jobs because that’s what they will do better at.</p>
<p>Near-4.0 students from ANY school are the same in that regard.</p>
<p>I think one thing is clear, GenDad is not an engineer or a doctor.</p>
<p>Engineering and medicine are different than all other degrees in that the rigor and standardization insure nearly every one of the graduates are competent. If you aren’t “cut out” to be an engineer or a doctor, you won’t make it through the training.</p>
<p>GenDad is searching for “proof” where there’s really only evidence. Yes most of it is anecdotal, but I’ve never heard evidence to the contrary of what I’ll offer below.</p>
<p>Three stories:</p>
<p>My father went to MIT. My uncle went to Wyoming. To this day, my father maintains that his brother’s undergraduate education was every it as good at Wyoming and probably better than his was at MIT. The Wyoming degree was good enough to get my uncle into Stanford for his PhD.</p>
<p>I’m a doctor. All around me are physicians who went to schools deemed more and less prestigious by the public. There is no correlation between the quality of their work and success of their practice to where they went to school. In fact within nearly all of the specialties, the best doctors within those specialties, the ones we doctors choose for ourselves and our families, are products of non-prestigious schools.</p>
<p>Lastly, I just examined a retired NASA project manager who worked at Cal Tech and JPL. When I told him that my son was interested in engineering he offered me some advice. He said bluntly that it doesn’t matter where engineers go to school. What matters is their passion for solving problems. He went on to say that in his years at NASA the best engineers that worked for him were the ones from plain Jane schools that had practical educations in problem solving. He said straight up that the engineers from the prestigious programs including his school Cal Tech, were not usually engineers he could give projects about new concepts to because it relied on synthesis into new ideas. “We were doing stuff you couldn’t read about in books, because we were writing those books.”</p>
<p>So, three anecdotes, hardly statistically significant. But, they are opinions from insiders and not ones with axes to grind because they themselves didn’t go to prestigious institutions.</p>
<p>GenDad’s thesis is that the school conveys competence. </p>
<p>My thesis is that at least in engineering and medicine, the degree conveys competence.</p>
<p>If you wanted to correlate anything to competence to further subdivide either of those groups, from my experience, my guess is that it would be GPA in their professional program.</p>
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<p>That’s obvious. The adage about “confidence through ignorance” keeps popping into my head when I read some of these comments about how prestige matters to employers in engineering and medicine.</p>
<p>Prestige is the fallback when you otherwise have no clue as how to judge someone’s qualifications. Those of us who work in engineering have seen firsthand how little correlation there is between school prestige and competence.</p>
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It matters when one is trying to find an initial job, as mentioned by many on CC that colleges well-known nationally have more job fairs attended by large companies. When everything else is equal, school prestige may come into play as stated in the first paragraph of Post #111. But prestige does not matter much at workplace after one has a job as many engineers attested in this thread. A person’s ability is far more important from this point onward.</p>
<p>There always will be grads who’d have difficult time to assimilate into workplace. I don’t think there is a study pinpointing grads of MIT and the like were the worst.</p>
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Students from MIT and the like do have internships, which can turn into a full time job offer. If the grads have done badly, why employers want to offer them continued employment or hire them in the first place if the history is against them?</p>
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I don’t have any problem with that. Different people look at things differently, and determine what is the best way to go about it. My main concern was that it’s very sensitive at CC every time college name(s) being uttered. I prefer to praise and avoid saying negative thing about a college.</p>
<p>I agree that a program’s reputation within industry has some impact on a graduate’s initial job in some cases. The issue, particularly in engineering, is that prestige, as measured by any one of the ranking systems, all heavily influenced by academicians’ opinions of each other, does not correlate to the opinions held by people hiring in industry.</p>
<p>I hate to reference USNWR, because it is so flawed, but let’s face it, USNWR is THE ranking system people turn to. They rank Harvard’s undergraduate engineering #23. Lehigh, Case, Mines and WPI rank #39, #44, #53, #58 respectively. Harvard is widely considered the most prestigious university in the world. I don’t believe that there are many people in the engineering world that would conclude Harvard produces undergraduate engineers than are on par with the rest mentioned above, let alone substantially better as the rank would suggest.</p>
<p>That’s the issue with prestige, who defines it.</p>
<p>Size also matters in determining recruiting targets. Small schools, whether prestigious or not, may not have a high enough yield for employers to bother doing out-of-area visits to.</p>
<p>Small engineering majors may also not be too attractive to recruit at. Harvard may fall into this category, and having to compete with investment banking and management consulting employers is an additional disincentive.</p>
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An interesting thought, I will keep both theses in mind.</p>
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If students were given the choice of the above schools, Id think the majority would choose to go to Harvard (please correct me if I am wrong) even though its engineering may be the weakest among the four. My question would be: Do you think Harvards Engineering would eventually become better and stronger to be on par with the rest of the group due to the influx of better engineering students each year?</p>
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I hope this was not a case that someone on an engineering high horse is thumbing nose at non-engineering CCers simply because non-engineers appeared to be less informed upon engineering matters. I believe the forum is one big melting pot uniting students from all grades (major and non-major), parents, spouses, families, engineers/non-engineers, etc. together by the common interest in engineering education. There should be different viewpoints here and there to be discussed, debated, and hopefully a fruitful conclusion be reached. CC shouldn’t be “my way or the high way”. If anyone had a beef with my view, we could have debated to achieve a better understanding or anyone could simply ignore my comments entirely. But I don’t think that by labeling others view as ignorance would have achieved the desirable effect and made his/her own view less ignorant in my opinion. I wish I was wrong on this account.</p>
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Of the above schools. I’m sure if you took out that key phrase the number of kids choosing Harvard would drop. </p>
<p>I would choose Lehigh or Case Western.</p>
<p>GenDad, you’re humming an entirely different tune than the one you were before.</p>
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<p>Which “key phrase”? What I meant was if each student was admitted to all 4 schools.</p>
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I think you are right and very keen on observation. Earlier I had to fend off 2-3 of yours so I didn’t have time to respond appropriately. My apology to you guys nevertheless.</p>
<p>“Of the above” was the key phrase. I didn’t bot know you meant if they had all be accepted. Ignore my post. </p>
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This GenDad is easier to follow and understand.</p>
<p>My son won’t be applying to any Ivy engineering programs. He visited Brown and Dartmouth. He never even considered Harvard. He ruled out Cornell, widely considered the best engineering in the Ivy, due to class size and location. He has the stats to be competitive, but it’s looking more and more like the only east coast schools he’ll apply to are WPI and Lehigh.</p>
<p>Does prestige matter? Yes, but there are a lot of other factors.</p>