Engineering - Does School Matter?

I think the answer is…it depends. If you look at where a school has folks recruiting, and you don’t like any of those places…then look elsewhere for college opportunities.

My very successful engineer husband graduated from a school no one here ever discusses. His school had a co-op program and he did it. He had several co-ops and was offered a very good job well before graduation. No, he doesn’t work at Google…but that was never his goal.

His goal was to get challenging and interesting jobs in his field (electrical with a concentration on power). Let’s just say, his crappy degree from a less than stellar college has made it possible for him to earn a very good salary, get the types of work he really enjoys, and move up in his career.

You know…not everyone wants to work at Google.

@CU123 wrote:

There is no right answer here. We are all relating our personal experience. As such, it can’t be “ridiculous.”

The OP’s question wasn’t “can you be happy and successful with a degree from a lesser known engineering program?”. The question was - does a name program matter for engineers in terms of choices for future employment and graduate schools? Answering “So and so went to a no-name school and they did fine” isn’t addressing the topic.

YES, you can be happy and successful graduating from any ABET accredited program if you take advantage of the opportunities offered and work hard at finding interesting work. But YES the school you attend matters for all of the reasons stated above. Not everyone wants to work at Google… or Tesla or Disney… but most students would prefer to have that decision be a choice they get to make.

No one is saying that everyone needs to go to MIT to be happy and everyone’s path in life is different but if a future engineer has a choice of schools they should look closely at what each program offers. As stated above - the higher ranked engineering schools got their rankings for a whole host of good reasons, some of which will matter to any given student.

I agree with @Greymeer’s assessment that there are “creative” and “clipboard” engineering tasks. The latter I tend to call “turn the crank.”

I worked for 25+ years at an engineering firm with 4000+ employees. The overwhelming majority of the engineers at the firm did “turn the crank” work, and I agree that it didn’t matter that much where those folks graduated.

But the “creative” work at the firm required a completely different skill set. Some of the problems that had to be solved were first of a kind, pushing the state of the art. The people that excelled at this work (and were hence liberated from the “turn the crank” work) were extraordinarily talented.

The two best “creative” engineers that I ever worked with went to Cal Tech for his BS, MS, and PhD and the other to MIT for his BS, MS, and PhD. I could understand their derivations, but I freely confess that I couldn’t have come up with them myself.

“the most talented high school students will be accepted to MIT, that is not true for Cal State, and it suddenly doesn’t reverse upon graduation.”

These kids are not the same at 18, 22 or 30 (typically when they’re in their second role or job). And it’s not just talent, but interviewing, leadership, working with others etc that determines a lot more. There, the state school kids tend to do as well if not better. But this only applies if the grads go into engr or comp sci, if they go from MIT to finance or consulting, typical path, then name does matter and the kids from the prestige schools will be seen better because they went to the school.

College choices are heavily dependent on parental factors, so that many talented students do not go to prestigious colleges for reasons that are not due to lack of personal merit (e.g. poor family with uncooperative divorced parents will not get FA at MIT). Graduation from a prestigious college often means that the person had sufficient personal merit to get admitted, and sufficient parental/family support in various ways (in opportunities to earn the merit, money to pay for college, and sometimes unearned boosts like legacy preference at many private colleges (MIT is an exception with respect to legacy)).

It is unfortunate, but not all Universities offering engineering degrees post detailed records of their job and graduate school placement by undergraduate field of study. If the object is to define employment opportunities/graduate school opportunities, why not look for the actual related data.? Why make such a big secret of this relevant data if the sample size is large enough to assure graduate privacy?

My background is in engineering and economics. Reliable data is held in high regard, but Universities do not seem to want it out there as public knowledge and we all sit around drawing on anecdotal explanations. This raises more relevant questions than it answers. Yes, we know New York City pays better than Bangor Maine (my area). Let us see the actual job offers from the horses mouth at time of graduation.

I suspect this lack of real data drives the social perceptions and we fall back to university acceptance rates as a proxy.

Can someone please explain this to a country boy?

@retiredfarmer , I don’t believe universities have this data that you desire. Employment offers and acceptances don’t go through the university, so schools are reliant upon surveys of graduates, which can be biased, inaccurate, not detailed enough, etc.

Agree with above posts that an ABET certified program is a must, and look at their internship and job placement record. If grad school is a plan, look at that too.

Just my .02: my daughter was a CS major at Penn State. Not a T20 school at all, but not too shabby. She had high end internships (Shell Oil and Accenture) from her freshman summer and beyond and was immediately hired out of school. She has friends from school who are working at Google and Microsoft. But she, and these friends, are “go getters.” My daughter attended every career fair she could; was active in the Society of Women Engineers and attended Grace Hopper conferences. She was active in networking and getting her resume read. That kind of thing makes a difference, in my opinion.

When it comes to the actual interviews for CS jobs, only skills matter. If the interviewer sees that you are competent, it doesn’t matter what school you came from. My dad went to Tsinghua University and a long time ago, he had an interview where the interviewer was from MIT—in the interview, my dad was asked to explain some code, but he instead pointed out mistakes that the MIT grad made, and also had to explain code he wrote that the interviewer couldn’t comprehend. He was hired immediately.

Edit: Wait I just realized that Tsinghua is just as prestigious at MIT rip

The undergraduate school name is not a career maker. You still have to demonstrate that you can work hard, learn, work with others, and excel in your group. The MIT grad with a 2.2 GPA will be fine, but he/she is likely not going get funded to go to a name grad school or hired by Intel/Lockheed. The kid with a good co-op/research, interpersonal skills, and a 3.95 from Alabama-Huntsville likely will.

Nationally, almost half of incoming freshmen engineering students do not graduate with an engineering degree within 6 years (ASEE, Engineering by the Numbers, 2017)). Its better at the top schools because of the quality and higher math background of the students. But there is serious competition at all engineering schools. I personally do not recommend going to a school for engineering where you are not academically (GPA+test scores) in the in the top half of admitted students.

@OhiBro

Some evidently do. WPI has had this data going back to at least 1976 when I was working there

To see the complete list of 2018 employers/grad school/salary results go to https://www.wpi.edu/student-experience/career-development and drop down to a box headed “First-Destination Success.” which reads

"Nearly 95% of graduates (bachelor’s, master’s and PhD) from WPI’s class of 2018 were successful in securing employment, admission to graduate or professional school, military service or volunteer work (Peace Corps, City Year, etc.) six months after graduation – a remarkable success rate based on data from almost 90% of the class.

Now click on “Post Graduate Report”

There is a complete contents listing. on this PDF report. Look for your major of interest and click on it to go to your area of interest… They give hiring companies, number of graduates, accepting graduate schools, average salaries actually accepted and the percent of graduates reporting. I do not believe that your top 100 universities do not make the effort to collect this data.

It strikes me as strange that other Universities might not do the same. Why the secrecy when they have viable graduate samples?

This data can also be helpful to students when they are selecting majors. How does the BS graduates opportunities in Biology compare with a Biomedical Engineer’s with they both have just the undergraduate degree? What companies actual hired there. Where did the all actually go to graduate school, not just a highlighted few?

This approach makes much more sense to me than looking at the application rejection rate from secondary school and /or asking your friends if they are impressed by the University’s name. Why wouldn’t the famous “top 20” want to know?

I thought it strange when I went to buy a vehicle and found out after a few questions that the salesman did not really know the vehicle. The curious want to know! They do not make up answers.

Are Google, Tesla, or Disney likely to dismiss an otherwise highly qualified applicant who attended an ABET accredited program because the college they attended was not prestigious enough or not ranked highly enough?

The list of colleges where desired companies hold recruiting events may surprise some posters in this thread. For example,even the most desired tech employers, like like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook attend career fair day at Missouri S&T, just as they do at certain elite colleges. Over 20,000 recruiters are registered at San Jose State’s career center, which probably rivals the number of registered SV recruiters at nearly any other college.

You mentioned Disney, which is not centered close to “elite” colleges, so the most represented colleges on LinkedIn for engineering/CS employees working at Disney are ones located closer to Disney – UCLA, USC, and UCF. Similarly if you look at company divisions that aren’t located near elite colleges, the most represented colleges are generally more correlated with location than they are with eliteness or rankings. For example, I arbitrarily choose Google Atlanta due to being early in alphabetical order. The most represented colleges for engineering/CS employees on LinkedIn working at Google’s Georgia location are GeorgiaTech, Georgia State, and U Georgia,

Many colleges do publish lists of employers that attend career day events, as well information on recent graduate employment, sometimes separated by major. Such information can be helpful, rather than making generalized assumptions about rankings/prestige/eliteness/…

Again we mix this up they are not hiring the university they are hiring a graduate that has a history of success, intelligence and diligent work which is the kind of student MIT admits. You can and do get that from other universities like Cal State but in MUCH MUCH smaller numbers. The simple fact is the most intelligent, driven, hard working students who want to be engineers attend MIT in droves, it is the “Mecca” of engineering. Period. Now since they only admit a small number of qualified applicants, sure you can find the same qualities in a number of comparable schools (CT, UCB, UM, Stanford) but as you go down the list the numbers dwindle.

@retiredfarmer Thank you for this link. Yes, I would certainly be interested in this information if universities have it. WPI seems quite active in acquiring these numbers compared to other schools. (92% knowledge rate compared to national average of 65%)

But, even for WPI, salary information is only based on 1/3 of students that provide that information, and it is aggregated for privacy reasons. For a data hog like myself, this is only marginally useful. For example, how skewed are the salary numbers by those employed in high-cost areas?

I would probably only consider graduating rates, and employers if I were deciding on a program, which is certainly better than having no information. Kudos to WPI.

Personally I remember a friend of mine interviewing a Cornell CS major who had a B- GPA and how she blew away the other candidates in her knowledge of data structures from other schools that had 4.0 or near 4.0 GPA’s.

The employer survey at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf found that among tech employers, college reputation was the least influential surveyed factor in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions. Instead employers generally focused on relevant experience in a work environment, including past work during college and internships.

One area that college attended is likely to have more influence is among which employers attend recruiting events. However, as I’ve stated it’s not just MIT that is getting recruiters from the most desired companies. In my earlier post I mentioned Google, Facebook, and MIcrosoft recruiting at MIssouri M&T. The same could be said for many larger public colleges. If you want to work in a particular location of the country, attending a public college near that location may give you a leg up over MIT in terms of recruiting, networking, and strength of alumni network among those area companies. I’d suggest looking at the actual list of which employers are recruiting on campus and actual career reports of recent graduates, rather than assuming that they won’t bother with colleges that don’t have as high a concentration of stellar students as MIT.

Again not hiring the college, hiring the individual. I will absolutely agree with you on this - it doesn’t matter if you graduated from MIT or Cal State, however I never came across an MIT grad that did not impress, came across plenty of graduates from other schools that didn’t impress at all. So I I can have it both ways where it doesn’t matter what school you graduate from but at the same time it does because I’m interviewing an individual not a college.

I once knew a cs grad from the university of Massachusetts. Amherst with a high gpa. He went on earn his PhD and is Chair of the engineering department at Hamilton.

These personal anecdotal stories don’t tell you much.

In reality. Over the long run the unique abilities and characteristics of an individual outweigh the pedigree.

People with pedigrees or paying dearly for their children to obtain this pedigree hate to hear this message. They’ll fight it to the end.

Yes. An incredibly gifted, hard working and personable Harvard or MIT grad has huge upside. No doubt.

But not every person stops growing in college. Some peak much later in life.