<p>Just some advice to the youngsters out there. After about 10 years in the EE field, I've come to the conclusion that prestige doesn't really matter in engineering. Don't base your decision on a school purely on numerical college rankings. All engineers are paid the same whether or not you graduated from a non-ranked (ABET) school or Georgia Tech. I've met very intelligent professional engineers from schools that I didn't even knew existed. Since the professors do a pretty good job of limiting graduation rates and ensuring quality within the field, there is ALWAYS a job out there for new grads. </p>
<p>It's much more important in engineering to get the degree than where you actually went to school. I think I read somewhere that only 1/5 students that start in engineering actually graduate. Go where you feel comfortable, but can succeed. Does it really matter if you went to a Top 50 school, but didn't finish? </p>
<p>That 1/5 figure is either seriously wrong, or UIUC does a lot better at retaining engineering students. I am going with the former. In my entire 4 years at UIUC, I know MAYBE 4 people who dropped from engineering. I have a feeling that the stat is a lot closer to being 1/5 of people DON’T make it to graduation, not the other way around. In fact, go look at the USNWR engineering rankings and look at the stats next to the schools for about the top 50. One of the stats is graduation rate, and they are rarely below about 75%, and that is usually on the low end.</p>
<p>Aside from that, go read that previous thread if you really want to see this discussed ad nauseum. Long story short, prestige matters, but only in certain circumstances. It will help get you the interview, but not the job or the raise. The biggest area it DOES help with is grad school, where going to a prestigious school can help push you over the edge if your other stats are slightly below average.</p>
<p>Though I agree with the premise “people from any college can be successful,” I disagree with the conclusion that “therefore, all colleges are equal.”</p>
Cal Poly SLO has an extremely good engineering reputation in CA. Certainly better than UCD/UCSB/UCI. I’d reckon that Cal Poly SLO has a better engineering reputation than UCLA/UCSD.</p>
<p>My first response to that is that may hold for only the schools in the top 50 - what about the rest? There are hundreds and hundreds of schools that offer engineering. An examination of only the top 50 schools expressly nullifies the notion expressed by the OP that rankings don’t matter. </p>
<p>Secondly, while engineering students may well indeed graduate, for the purposes of this thread, the real question is whether they graduate with degrees in engineering. Many engineering students can indeed switch to Recreational Studies or some other creampuff major and graduate. But that’s hardly the same as actually graduating from engineering. </p>
<p>We should also bear in mind that only about half of all US college students actually manage to graduate in 6 years, regardless of major. It’s hard to see how engineering majors would be able to boast of a higher graduation rate than the national average, given the difficulty of the curriculum.</p>
<p>I tend to agree that prestige doesn’t really matter in engineering. But therein lies the key - in engineering. Many engineering students at the top schools such as MIT and Stanford do not actually intend to work as engineers, instead preferring to work as strategy consultants, investment bankers, venture capitalists, hedge funds, private equity, and the like. Nearly half of all MIT undergrads who enter the workforce take jobs in consulting or finance. These are jobs for which prestige and college rankings are paramount, as firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs recruit at only a small and circumscribed set of highly ranked schools. </p>
<p>As to whether it is wise to major in engineering if you don’t actually intend to work as an engineer, that’s a different question for a different thread. All I will say to that is that most people do not find themselves working in the field in which they majored. For example, most economics majors do not become professional economists, most history majors do not become professional historians, most math majors do not become professional mathematicians. I therefore do not find it terribly surprising that many engineering students will not actually work as engineers.</p>
<p>I have heard that anyone graduating from Webb Institute usually gets the highest paying jobs and their pick of employers. I think they only take 100 kids per year, but its free so if you are a die hard engineering fan and want to work in the world of naval/maritime go for it!</p>
<p>sakky, sure surveying schools in the top 50 (and I only did 50 because that is all that is readily available from USNWR on a cursory glance) will leave a bunch of schools out. Of course, since we are talking about ABET accredited schools here per the original post, we look at the main ABET website to see that there are roughly 600 accredited engineering colleges and universities within their jurisdiction (the US). That top 50 represents about 8.3% of all engineering schools in the country. That is a sufficient sample size to say that the overall graduation rate isn’t likely to be too far off of that of these 50 institutions. Additionally, the way that USNWR defines graduation rate when doing engineering rankings is the number of people who graduated with engineering degrees.</p>
<p>In other words, I think that my point is perfectly valid that the 1 in 5 stat is probably the number of people who DON’T finish in engineering, which is still a high rate. Saying that 80% of people who start in engineering finish up elsewhere is simply ludicrous.</p>
<p>Also, as an aside, sure the top 50 has places like MIT where the numbers are ridiculously high for graduation rate, but then it also has places like UIUC where it is a big state school and you would imagine the numbers would be lower than average. The top 50 has a good mix of large, small, public and private universities, so it is a pretty good, representative sample. In addition, if rankings really don’t matter as the original post says, then you wouldn’t expect the schools that aren’t ranked as highly to have any appreciable difference in those stats.</p>
<p>And for the record, I am taking that stance that school rankings, for the most part, don’t matter. They certainly don’t dictate your success or your potential for success. They do have some areas where they help, in that they can help push you over the edge for graduate school admissions and fellowship awards, and can help land you an interview, even if they can’t actually get you the job. That goes for any industry that an engineering major is attempting to get into, even the traditional engineering fields. Then, once you get into that company on your own merits, not the merits of your school, your future success is 100% dictated by how you perform on the job.</p>
<p>Uh, no, in fact, the precise opposite is true: your point is perfectly invalid for your sample is by definition not random. You said it yourself - you looked at only the top 50 ranked schools. If you have chosen 50 randomly selected schools, I might be able to agree with you. But you deliberately cherry-picked the very best schools who one would expect to have above-average graduation rates. Heck, graduation rate (or, rather, the ‘above-par’ graduation rate) is an inherent component of the USNWR ranking system. It would be like me arguing that height doesn’t matter in determining basketball success… and then only surveying a sample of NBA players. </p>
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<p>And again, the way to show that is to actually take a random sample of schools - not just the top 50 ranked schools, for that does not prove anything. All you are doing here is simply looking at schools that are doing relatively well. What about those schools that aren’t doing well? </p>
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<p>Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that job performance is often times not only hard to measure, but also highly arbitrary. What somebody thinks is good work, others will disagree. This is particularly true in the case of large-scale projects where individual responsibility for specific project components is difficult to ascertain, and where the outcome itself is a matter of taste. This seems to be particularly true in the case of consulting and other business strategy functions where there are no truly ‘right’ answers that the clients can determine - for if the clients knew what the right answers were, they wouldn’t need consultants in the first place - and therefore the value of the solutions produced is almost solely a matter of perception. That is why consulting firms hire from the most exclusive schools because they rely upon that appearance, deserved or not, of expertise. The same can be said for much of the world of high finance - investors continue to pour billions into private equity as an asset class despite the academic literature showing that it actually produces below-market returns. To paraphrase one pension fund manager: it’s highly intimidating to have a bunch of Harvard and MIT graduates marching into your office and pitching a bunch of fancy graphs and regression tables that you don’t really understand.</p>
<p>What difference does it make if it is the top 50 schools if the rankings don’t actually matter according to the premise of this thread?</p>
<p>Oh well, even if it is a poor sample, the fact that this 8.3% of schools has an engineering graduation rate of around 75% or better means that the remaining 91.7 percent of schools have to have an average engineering graduation rate of 15% in order to bring the total graduation rate down to 20%. Personally, I find it very hard to believe that nearly 9 out of 10 schools in the US can only graduate 15% of their engineers with an actual engineering degree. That is a HUGE disparity between the first 50, and you might expect more of a gentle decline in graduation rate as you go “down” the list of schools rather than some sudden drop off after the top. Additionally, you might imagine that a school who only graduates 8% of their engineers (since some will have to be below that 15% to make up for the ones above it) would have a hard time getting accredited. I don’t know all of ABET’s standards, but I would imagine that they look poorly on historically terrible graduation rates.</p>
<p>I never said that graduating from engineering was easy, or that it is not an accomplishment to do it. However, based on the fact that such a large portion of schools has a 70%-80% graduation rate, it is pretty foolish to assume that the graduation rate of all the schools is around 20%. That a near practical impossibility due to the fact that it would require so many schools to be so low, and thus hurt their chances for ABET accreditation, and if they are not accredited, then they don’t fall into this argument.</p>
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<p>And you are right in that job performance is hard to measure, but that is still what your future success will be based on. If you work for a big company, your success will be based on your superiors’ perception of your job performance. In most places, your performance will be fairly accurately quantified on most occasions. Are some of your good performances going to slip through the cracks and be unnoticed, sure. Are you likely to also get better reviews than deserved on some project once or twice. Probably. Regardless, your school is not going to play a difference in how your performance is perceived once you get to 5 years into your career, because at that point, everyone is judging you on your career.</p>
<p>Consulting offers an obviously different set of circumstances, like you said, and you won’t get hired as a consultant most likely if you came from East Bufu State, but that is a very small subset of “engineering jobs.” Now I won’t proclaim to be an expert in consulting since I have only worked in more traditional engineering industry jobs and as a grad student, but I would imagine that you could get into consulting from one of these small schools if you supplement your school with several years of quality work experience. You can correct me if I am wrong on that of course, but I would think that if you worked as a successful project engineer at GE or something, that would look pretty good to consulting firms looking to hire.</p>
<p>Do the non-ranked ABET schools attract the same hiring companies? No. A school like Georgia Tech will attract recruiters from all across the world and in many different industries. The non-ranked ABET schools usually just attract local companies. If you’re a hiring manager in Boston, and you decide to travel to Texas to hire an engineer, and engineers all cost the same (as you claim), why would you go to UT-Dallas and not UT-Austin?</p>
<p>Also, the higher ranked schools have better Co-Op/internship programs, they allow for an easier transition to a non-engineering field, and they attract a higher caliber of professors and students, which leads to a more rigerous education (see the thread posted by vblick for an example).</p>
<p>When you get into the work force, the low level engineers - those doing the plugging and chugging and project management - are usually a wide variety of engineers from a wide variety of schools, all making similar money. But start to move up the ladder and you see a very disproportionate representation of top engineering schools. The reason? The education and preparation is better and students from top engineering schools usually start in a better place.</p>
<p>In simplest terms, where you graduate from may help you land your first job. After a couple of years in the field its only your experience that matters. In fact, I have looked past MIT and Ivy grads for entry and junior level jobs if for no other reason that I was never sure how long theyd stay with the firm before they headed off to grad school or greener pastures.</p>
<p>And dont forget it may have been those Harvard and MIT engineers working on Wall Street who came up with the credit default swaps and derivatives that were so successful [sic]. Just ask any of them who had consulting contracts with Lehman Bros.</p>
<p>I believe that a nice State University is good enough. I think finance students need to get a top ranked school, but not engineers. I believe ‘going to a top university’ is so hyped by the finance students that this hype extends to the engineers too.</p>
<p>Agreed. I have also not hired MIT/Berkeley/Georgia Tech engineers in the past for various issues.</p>
<p>However, what you’re missing is that first job in instrumental in a person’s career, even 40 years later. Raises, promotions, and job responsibility are all incremental. As a quantitative example: say I hire two engineers, an MIT engineer at $70,000 / yr and a University of Alabama engineer at $50,000 / yr. If I turn around and promote these two individuals a year later for identical performance, the MIT engineer will probably go to $90,000 / yr and the UA grad will go to $70,000 / yr.</p>
<p>The same argument can be made for job responsibility. Two engineers apply for a position. The MIT graduate had an opportunity to go work for Exxon as an R&D engineer. The Alabama graduate went to work for a small firm in R&D. The Exxon / MIT engineer is more valuable because he the Exxon name behind him.</p>
<p>And that’s even neglecting the value of a top degree. When an MIT graduate is up for promotion vs. other people, you will hear people refer to his university in a positive way, even 10-15 years later. The Alabama graduate won’t get the same recognition. The reason is that admission and graduation from a top university is a signal of quality, and consciously or unconsciously, that impacts many people. The unconscious thought of “He went to MIT? I couldn’t get in there…” really seems to impact people.</p>
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<p>Do you have support for this claim? Otherwise, it is merely irresponsible speculation. </p>
<p>Why not blame MIT engineers for 9/11, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Zodiac murders? They may have been responsible, and I doubt you understand circumstances surrounding those incidents, either.</p>