And many who start out as engineers don’t stay in that specific role. The benefactor of the mega million dollar gift to the graduates of Morehouse yesterday. Robert F. Smith, began his career as a chemical engineer.
Now yes, he went back to school, getting an MBA from Columbia and his career took him in a different, very successful direction, but he started out as a Chem E from Cornell.
Yes, there are some very wealthy people in Texas who started out as engineers. One of them was a student of my dad’s who endowed a chair at UT in my parents’ names a couple of years ago. 
“Apple and Facebook show a slightly more uniform distribution in the top 4 consisting of Stanford, Cal, USC, and CMU.”
According to Linked-in, Apple’s top 4 is Stanford, SJSU, UC- Berkeley, UT-Austin, followed by USC, UCLA, MIT, CMU, UC-SD UM.
Facebook top-10 is UCB, Stanford, CMU, Washington, UCLA, SJSU, USC, Cornell, UI, UM
Now Stanford, MIT and CMU are much smaller schools to the public unis on the list, so you do have to factor that.
Only relating my own experience of 35 years in the engineering industry, but our state of the art servers were designed by mid-level UC grads, one of which is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. My tennis buddy worked for a Cybersecurity startup that just got bought out by Blackberry. The founder went to the University of Colorado. This is typical in my experience. I have found that in industry, seeing things through to completion in a timely manner is not reflective of the engineer’s intelligence or the school one attended, yet it is highly prized by employers. Perhaps that is why I’m not seeing engineers’ success correlating with the school they attended.
That is all anecdotal information, not really relevant to the overall percentages. Need to take an Occams razor approach, if, generally speaking, the smartest most talented individuals attend the top schools then they, generally speaking, will have the most success. Doesn’t mean there won’t be other success stories out there.
It’s Occam’s razor, btw.
your generalizations are still way off, it’s not just talent or smart in high tech companies, you have to be able to work with others, lead people, network, you can innovate and disrupt all day along but if you can’t convince people it’s a good idea or help get it to market, you won’t have impact. It’s far more important to be shrewd than smart.
thanks
“Berkeley EECS survey results are at https://career.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Survey/2018EECS.pdf . Fewer than 1% of respondents appear to be working in a finance type job”
Agree, Berkeley EECS grads pretty much will go to Google type companies or startups hoping to be the next Google. They’re taken care of pretty nicely in the bay area, maybe the only program to have more gravitas than Stanford CS out here. So not sure how valid it is using them.
Good catch 
. It would appear that it’s going to be a non-issue for DS19 as he has decided to turn down a top rated Engineering program for Physics. He fully understands the employment/income implications, and it is his decision to make, but as a parent I’m torn. I do think Physics is a better choice for him than Engineering, but I worry about his future employability.
If you hunt around college first employment info (spotty at best) several different types of finance opportunities can be seen. Many, I’m sure, are CS type opportunities due to the expanded use of chatbots, early fraud detection, and loan screening. Banks like Capital One and Bank of America probably fall into that category, and they are probably featured at many college job fairs… Other firms (both large and small) are investing in quantitative capabilities and are most likely more targeted in their recruiting as they are looking a more specific set of skills.
Here is a general career survey of physics graduates:
@ucbalumnus Thanks.
Maybe I’m wrong, but in my dated, non-comprehensive experience:
Most engineering employers recruit mostly regionally. The one I worked for did that. They recruited at basically all the engineering programs that were proximate. You could get a job there from a tier 1 program, or a regionally proximate tier III, if you were good enough.
But out of region that firm only went to about a dozen schools. And those schools were all big name for engineering talent.
So I would say that from a top program you may see more opportunities out of region.
My experience at a large Global engineering company headquartered in the Midwest we recruited at all the top engineering programs including a trip to the far reaches of the Upper Penninsula to Michigan Tech and made an annual trip to Georgia Tech but no engineering programs east or west. So yes I think with rare exceptions recruiting is proximate.
@momofthreeboys Michigan Tech is a solid school. My best buddy at work is a MT grad. Super accomplished. Retired brigadier general. But he said it’s the coldest place he’s ever been in the winter. Lol.
Recruiting regionally for engineering jobs is done because there is no reason to go outside the region (plenty of skilled graduates in the regions), as implied by several here.
In addition, it is not advantageous to recruit from far away because employees from far away are much more likely to leave, creating a lot of churn in that particular job.
I roll my eyes whenever HR brings in a golden nugget from California…that lasts for about a year. ?
Thinking of this as the kid who didn’t want to go to school in a nearby state now wants to find a job there. Might have been easier if she had taken Mom’s advice 4 years ago. Isn’t that always the way.
Recruiting relationships between the school and companies are important, not just for post graduation jobs but for internships. That’s where I think some of the top name engineering schools shine a bit brighter.
Definitely agree that going to school in an area where you see yourself living permanently needs to be a consideration. The first destination surveys are great in showing where students land after college and most will show students staying within the same region.
My S must be an outlier then if internships are any type of indicator. Over the last three internship cycles he has interviewed extensively with local SV type companies, but he has been flown out for many other interviews: Alexandria VA, Phoenix AZ, Seattle WA, Austin TX, NYC, and Dallas TX. He found out early that he had to limit his travel especially to the east coast as it results in missed lectures for classes that have attendance requirements. In this cycle he turned down an interview in Armonk NY due to attendance pressures. The company then set up a very interesting telepresence interview meeting that sounded fun.