<p>I know there are the top "10" school and there are the top "50" schools but if a student goes to a well regarded college not in these top lists and majors in Engineering, how much does it really matter? </p>
<p>It seems like the majority of schools offer engineering but if they aren't in even the top 100, then are their students really at a deficit?.</p>
<p>There are lots of threads on this, so I’d say you should read a bit. A lot of people wonder this and it depends on a lot of things. Generally the rule of thumb seems to be that top 10/20 will get you recruited across the country, and beyond that you’re primarily relying on regional recruitment. So if regional recruitment isn’t good, it’s probably going to put students at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>There’s probably more stuff I’m missing, but again you really should read the threads that have been posted here before, there’s lots of useful information in them.</p>
<p>If a talented football player wanted to play in the National Football League, do you think it matters if he plays college ball at a Division I program at a well known school with a talented coaching staff against top ranked competition or would a Division III program at a random school be just as good?</p>
<p>If you are wondering how the student will fare in terms of future employment at a “lesser known” school, I suggest finding out what companies routinely recruit at that school. If they fit the student’s interests, that is a good thing. </p>
<p>2009 and 2010 may have been exceptionally tough years for jobs right out of college, but check how graduates have fared in terms of employment.</p>
<p>thanks for the replies. I will hunt through old threads. ClassicRockerDad. I am not talking about “random” schools. I am talking about schools who make the top 100 list of US world news and report of good schools but are not in the top 100 list of best engineering schools. </p>
<p>I think your suggestions seeing who is recruiting and what local companies are hiring from that school are good ones. </p>
<p>This leads me to another question. Do most grads go out and look for work with their 4 yr degree or do just as many go on and get their masters right away?</p>
<p>All the posts are great but you need to look deeper in the engineering program as well as the extracurriculars/research oppty’s. that would interest your son/daughter. For instance, the SAE Formula/Baja teams are wonderful opportunities for all aspects of engineering and other majors to experience real life problem solving which would be beneficial to a prospective employer. Many schools not in the top tier you are talking about do offer this program and are rather affordable. Ignite the passion!</p>
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<p>The short answer is yes: they will have less job opportunities.</p>
<p>There are three reasons a company will come to a school. The first is because an executive from that company went to that school. The second reason is because the school is local to that company. For example, the University of Houston is very highly recruited despite being a 3rd tier school because of its proximity to many engineering and manufacturing firms in Houston. The third reason is because of the school’s ranking.</p>
<p>When a company decides that they need to go to 10 schools (which is based on the number of students they want to hire), the go to the local flagship, a school or two supported by senior executives, then have to pick the other 7. If the company is one of the better paying companies, it will usually start at the Top 10 schools then each year add/subtract top schools (moving down the rankings) based on their experience with graduates from those schools. If the employer pays at the lower end of the scale, it might start a little lower in the rankings.</p>
<p>This means that a Top 10 school will see local employers, employers with executives from that school, and the top paying national and international employers. A top 25 school will see more local employers and a few employers that are lower paying or weren’t happy with Top 10 school talent. A top 50 school will see mostly local and some of the lower paying employers. A top 100 school will see almost exclusively local employers, the employers that go to every school (but don’t necessary target the low tier schools), and government agencies.</p>
<p>Some people then claim that “after 10 years, it’s all about your experience”, but that’s not necessarily true. Where you start your career will ripple through the rest of your career as you’ll have more impressive experience. It’s easier to find a job coming out of Exxon than it is coming out of Joe’s Oil Drilling Company. Someone at a Top 10 school has a much better chance at Exxon than someone at a low tier school. </p>
<p>And that is just for engineering firms. If you have interest in a non-engineering position (consulting, banking, etc) those firms recruit almost exclusively from the Top 10 or so engineering programs. Going to a lower tier schools almost completely eliminates your opportunities at non-traditional engineering positions unless the school is very well known outside of engineering (like Penn or Dartmouth). </p>
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<p>You have to be careful, though. Most of the lower tier schools won’t tell you how many students Boeing hired from their school, they’ll just say that Boeing was there last year.</p>
<p>Boeing goes to every school as a way to foster brand image (they have HR personnel that do nothing but go from college to college), but they’ll only hire from the low tier schools if the student can walk on water - hiring maybe 1 student every 10 years. On the other hand, they’ll hire dozens of students from the target schools (mostly Top 10) every year.</p>
<p>And you also have to consider the position the person is given. Two students hired into Boeing will have very different careers if one goes into Phantom Works and one just does CAD drawings.</p>
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<p>The BS degree in engineering is the working degree, so you do not need an MS unless you move into certain specialized fields (structural engineering is one) or unless you intend to perform R&D work. And if you’re interested in an engineering MS (though an MBA is more common for engineers these days) most companies these days will pay for it, and most engineering schools offer distance programs (Stanford and Georgia Tech are both Top 5 engineering programs with distance MS degrees).</p>
<p>Thanks BanjoHitter for your very thorough layout on how to look how the “dance” goes with engineering. I can see paying attention to regional location of your school is important in planning where one wants to go to school. It is interesting to hear how the employment process works in engineering. And Sprint31, I can see that finding out about the specific projects the students work on it important. I agree that there has to be activities that infuse enthusiasm and more interest than just taking classes.</p>
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<p>Here’s my take on the matter: If you want to work as an engineer at an engineering firm, than in-major rankings matter a little bit, but they are only a plus factor. That is, a really top candidate from Rutgers is competitive with a less experienced candidate from Georgia Tech. But then again, these firms usually aren’t that competitive so a student from either school should be able to do fine. </p>
<p>I also think that recruiting by engineering firms doesn’t just depend on engineering-rankings. In my experience they’re more inclined to go to state flagships because there are more students at these schools. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if one wants to do something like finance/consulting than the general prestige of one’s school is extremely important and engineering-rankings don’t really matter. </p>
<p>If one wants to grad school, what really matters are research opportunities. Any big state flagship will have quality research opportunities, but small private schools have fewer undergrads so the opportunities will be easier to get. If one goes to a small school without much research, than one will need to do REUs.</p>
<p>Hi Banjohitter
How is Ohio state considered for computer science and engineering as far as good or top schools in your opinion.
Thanks David</p>
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<p>In my experience, if a company decides to recruit two schools (e.g. Rutgers and Georgia Tech), then they consider the students only on merit (GPA and experience). The school name does nothing at that point. However, you probably won’t find the same companies recruiting at Rutgers and Georgia Tech. Also, experience from the two schools will probably be different. At Rutgers you need to work for an internship, at Georgia Tech virtually everyone interested in an internship gets one, as companies line up to recruit from there (because getting into recruiting at GT is very difficult - even in an economic downturn there’s a 3 year wait to get a table at the Career Fair). Heck, even freshman with no GPA have an easy time finding an internship at GT (and usually receive multiple offers).</p>
<p>From my years of experience, your selected engineering area and its “supply and demand” will factor into how much of a “ranked” school you need. For some of those engineering majors, it is so competitive that your school does matter. I am in software engineering, so there have always been more jobs than applicants therefore companies cannot just concentrate on the Top-10 schools. While ChemE, MechE and maybe EE hiring managers will look for the Georgia Techs, Stanfords, Purdues, etc…I.T. and Software Engineering specialists can basically do 2 years at a community college, 2 years at a 4-year state school and as long as they know Java, C++, Linux or Oracle well will get hired. Of course folks will point out working for Google or Microsoft, but those companies will only hold 0.0001% of the I.T./SoftE jobs.</p>
<p>Another thing is that because of supply/demand or certain I.T/Computer skills, the difference in starting salary between the Top-10 school grad and the Top-50 school grad will not be as great. I would say $15,000-$20,000 would be the biggest difference between and Top-10 vs. a Top-50 grad in Computer Science and that could be easily made up with learning the new “big thing” and changing employers.</p>
<p>One has to look at the overall ROI or “return on investment” when looking at schooling. Unless the student can get a “free ride” or is from a rich family, what is the difference between the Purdue grad with a $600 student loan bill and the state grad with no student loan bill? Furthermore, 5-10 years from now, your school name will NOT matter in I.T. or Software Engineering…can you design a data warehouse will matter.</p>
<p>I won’t even go into other outside factors like obtaining security clearances or being an independent contractor…both which significantly boosts one’s salary.</p>
<p>Good to know one area of engineering where the competition might not be so great. thanks.</p>
<p>BanjoHitter, what support do you have to back up your claim that even freshmen at GT usually receive multiple offers of internships?</p>
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<p>Well, the assumption is that software and (especially) IT even qualify as ‘engineering’ at all. See below.</p>
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<p>Then at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to pose the question I asked before: what are the clear and actionable yet non-obvious steps a student could reasonably take to learn those skills: IT skills in particular? For example, I can agree that a CS program could teach you reasonable C++ or Java skills. But I am not aware of many CS programs - or any other engineering program for that matter - at the top universities that will actually teach you significant data warehousing, Oracle, or most other IT skills. That then raises the question - if you never learn those skills in school, how do you garner a job where you could learn those skills? Similarly, what are the clear and actionable but non-obvious steps that a student could take to become an independent contractor or obtain a security clearance? </p>
<p>To be sure, therein the above paragraph perhaps lies a key insight: if you want an IT career, do not attend a “high-prestige” engineering school, not only because such a school doesn’t actually help you, but it may actually hurt you relative to a low-prestige school which may actually teach you practical IT skills. In other words, you should actually be willing to pay more to attend the less prestigious school. However, I suspect that this is advice that, for many reasons, nobody is actually going to take, not least of which is that few high school seniors actually know what they want to do with their careers, and are certainly unwilling to make a high-risk bet on an IT career. What if they choose the low-prestige school for an IT career…only to find out that they don’t want to do IT anymore? </p>
<p>But that then opens the door to a related question: what should students choose not to learn if they want to succeed? Let’s recall that performance is relative, so if you just learn what everybody else learns, you’ll just be at the same level as them, which has been established to be not a great level. [Payscale</a>](<a href=“http://www.ehow.com/info_7752008_average-salary-computer-science-major.html]Payscale”>http://www.ehow.com/info_7752008_average-salary-computer-science-major.html) estimated that the average starting salary for CS graduates was $53k, which while not bad, is lower than that of most engineering disciplines. To earn a relatively high salary is to necessarily mean being different from the others, which means not learning/doing things that the others are. </p>
<p>To be most helpful, the advice about what to choose not to do should be non-obvious. For example, simply saying “Don’t be lazy” is not particularly helpful, as everybody knows that they shouldn’t be lazy. What would be most helpful is to identify those topics that current students think they should do but that they actually probably shouldn’t. GT, I believe you mentioned a few on other threads before, for example, you specifically stated that students probably should not learn compilers, as there are practically no jobs available in that space. I would propose that courses on advanced algorithms - unless you’re headed for a research career - is probably not particularly useful. Unfortunately, many CS programs require that you take an adv. algorithms course rather than highly practical courses on, say, Web applications or computer security. </p>
<p>Or, if you’re not comfortable with stating that certain things should not be learned, then perhaps a hierarchy could be proposed where courses are categorized into ‘more’ or ‘less’ useful buckets, and students would then be well advised to spend more time on the ‘more’ useful courses.</p>
<p>Sakky,</p>
<p>Even though the CS job market caters more to I.T., you will never hear me say “dont take Algorthms”. In fact I would tell all CS majors to take Algorthms. As a even more general rule, I urge I.T./I.S. majors to take the core CS courses (like Algorthms, Data Structures, Programming Languages and Operating Systems) and urge CS majors to take I.T. courses (like Databases, Networks and Information Assurance).</p>
<p>Why?</p>
<p>Let’s say that a developer with an I.T. degree cannot figure why their front-end application is not compiling. The I.T. major knows how to “apply” the use of the software but not the “nuts and bolts” under the software. The CS major knows from their Data Structures and Programming Languages courses how “in general” a data structure may interact with a programming language. Therefore, a CS major can more likely identify a bug in a certain language/data structure/operating system combination because the CS major knows about program linkage, loading, parsing, etc. The I.T. major probably has to call vendor support.</p>
<p>On the other hand, since so MANY computer jobs are in I.T. (I.T. = transmission (networks), storage/retrieval (databases) and manipulation of data (coding,etc)), a CS major should take AT LEAST a network, database and web courses just as backup in case they have trouble securing that artificial intelligence, embedded systems, compiler design or parallel processing job that they REALLY want.</p>
<p>Taking some I.T.-like courses will get you in the door to have access to learning the more advanced I.T. skills like data-warehousing or information assurance. Employers won’t consider you for I.T. jobs if you go through an entire CS program and skip something like database systems. One of the reasons why I have been able to stay in databases so long (and I was talking to another elder DBA about this too) is because databases is usually an elective in many CS programs. To this day, many new CS grads do not take databases. I mean, why are so many DBA’s and Data Architects oldheads like myself? I am currently on a team with a bunch of young Java developers and they look at the database like it is some black box.</p>
<p>Next point…</p>
<p>As far as “prestige” of schools, some of my opinions are from what I have seen in my 20+ years of work. Now I am product of state universities: Michigan State undergrad and U-Wisconsin grad school. Now U-Wisconsin is top-15 in a few engineering grad programs but get this…Computer Science is not even part of engineering at U-Wisconsin. Furthermore, I work in defense where is all about defense contracts. The contracts will state that you (an employer) will supply some engineer with this educational background (BS/MS/PHD). Since the billing rate is the same narrow range, there is no provisions for an MIT grad or Georgia Tech grad. The Feds just want the person to have the required degree. Add in needing a security clearance (which actually is the #1 criteria), you have now almost taken WHERE your degree is from out of the picture. Prior work on other related contracts will help an employee so if that University of Wyoming grad worked on some other federal contract and did well, he/she has earned some additional stripes. That Wyoming grad can now parlay those stripes into more money with probably a new employer since your biggest salary increases come via employer changing.</p>
<p>To tie in your earlier question about how does one learn these in-demand I.T. skills, you take advantage of that slight door opening you received. You also take advantage of…and I have to say it…the federal government always wanting what is “hot” whether they need it or not and it will waste taxpayer dollars. Once your foot is in the door, your school is never mentioned…unless there is some water-cooler talk about the BCS football games.</p>
<p>I say this because TO ME, too many posts seem like these future students feel like they will get a Georgia Tech or U-Michigan degree and you will be on the fast track to some high-paying management gig (which I touch on in another thread). They will be highly disappointed…at least when it comes to the computer and information sciences area of employment. I cannot speak on EE, ME, ChemE or PetroE.</p>
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<p>Aren’t many IT/IS major programs more like a subarea of business administration, and thus do not include sufficient prerequisite course work to take the advanced CS courses you list (indeed, it can be argued that such business oriented IT/IS majors are too light on the technical stuff needed to do an efficient job as a system, network, or database administrator)? Also, wouldn’t the CS database course be more in-depth than the IT/IS database course (meaning it is much more worthwhile to take the CS database course rather than the IT/IS database course)?</p>
<p>While much of the CS job market caters to IT/IS, there is quite a bit of difference between the jobs of people who develop and QA the IT/IS software and the jobs of people in the IT/IS departments who use the IT/IS software.</p>
<p>as an OOS Michigan Engineering student all I can say is god I hope so</p>
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<p>I offer the algorithms course as an example for the basic reason that many - probably most - IT workers are using packaged solutions for which they’ll never be able to (legally) teach the inner algorithmic workings. For example, if you’re a Cisco networking guy - and Cisco admin remains one of the higher paying specialties in IT - your knowledge from your algorithm course might indeed help you to determine that one of your routers is suffering from an IOS looping bug. But so what? You can’t do anything about it. As a matter of policy, Cisco is not going to give you access to IOS source code. In fact, they won’t even let you manipulate the inner computations of the router’s software at all without violating your support contract. All you can do is report a bug and hope that Cisco releases a hotfix, or else just simply not use that feature that is looping. </p>
<p>The same is true of Windows Server or Exchange admin, which seems to comprise the bulk of IT jobs nowadays. While Microsoft does offer a limited ‘Shared Source’ code initiative, the vast majority of Windows admins will never invoke it. Heck, even if they did, how many of them would actually then dare to modify Windows source code? Most Windows admins instead follow conservative policies that require no such technical depth, such as rollbacks to prior versions of software that did not exhibit any bugs, or simply never installing any Windows software onto a production network until a service pack or two has been released. </p>
<p>{Note, it is for this reason that many successful IT workers don’t even have CS degrees - or in some cases, no college degrees - at all. Heck, some of the most successful IT workers that I know never even graduated from high school - and certainly never took any advanced CS coursework - yet now make far more money than many experienced CS graduates do. They’re living proof that you don’t really need to know advanced CS topics to be a successful IT worker.} </p>
<p>But fair enough, if you don’t like my example, then perhaps you could offer some of your own. Exactly which courses do CS majors commonly take that they probably should not? More precisely, which CS courses do students commonly think are marketable, but actually are not? {Again, you offered the example of compilers in the past, to which I would heartily agree. } </p>
<p>Otherwise, we’re simply stuck at the same impasse as before. To recommend everything is to recommend nothing. A proper strategy includes not only things you should do, but also what you should not do. </p>
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<p>Actually, it’s not clear that you identified that slight door-opening of which you speak and which seems to be key to your strategy. Exactly how does somebody find and enter that open door? What exactly does somebody have to do to get that first job that will eventually lead him to Federal contracts and security clearances? You say that the Wyoming grad can parley his first contract to more lucrative ones in the future, but how exactly does he obtain that first contract?</p>
<p>I push on this point not to badger you but for the simple reason that CS programs - both prestigious and no-name ones - mint thousands of new CS graduates every year. Many, probably most, of them would surely like to obtain the cushy, high-paying yet low-demand (i.e. 40 hour workweek) IT jobs of which you speak. But the fact is, many, probably most, won’t. They’re stuck in dead-end tech jobs with little opportunity for advancement or development of marketable skills. </p>
<p>For example, I can think of a number of developers for Microsoft, ostensibly a gold-plated employer with numerous opportunities…but who are stuck building bug fixes for obsolete versions of Windows and Office that Microsoft no longer even sells anymore (but is contractually obligated to support). They’re not really learning any ‘hot’ new skills. Nor are they being given the opportunity to switch. They’re assigned to that job, and they either do it, or quit. Nevertheless, even if they do quit, Microsoft will simply assign somebody else to that job. Hence, there will always be some people stuck in low-potential jobs. </p>
<p>So the question then is, how do you avoid being that person? What exactly do you have to do? As we are talking about relative performance - as not everybody in CS is going to get a desirable job - the question then becomes what should you doing differently from the others, specifically what should you not be doing that the others are doing?</p>
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<p>I’ve spent many years recruiting there and have an about 50% acceptance rate (offers accepted / offers made) offering $25/hour to freshmen with no college GPAs. I’ve also talked to students (to figure out why my acceptance rate is so low at such a good salary level from a well respected company) and anecdotally found this to be the case (typically 2-3 offers per student). </p>
<p>Most other schools at which I recruit (and that includes good schools like TAMU and UIUC), my acceptance rate from freshman is near 100%. Actually, sophomores are usually near 100% as well (though they are offered a little more). </p>
<p>It doesn’t surprise me, though. GT’s career services and co-op department are routinely ranked as the top in the country. They work very hard to bring in recruiters and students are very well prepared for interviews (which makes recruiters want to come back).</p>