<p>I have been accepted to the undergrad engineering programs of both. I know Tech is definitely more prestigious, but NC State offered me Honors Program and $6k in scholarships (vs nothing at Tech). If my long-term goal is to make it into MIT/Stanford for grad school, is Tech worth the extra $80k over NC State?</p>
<p>Are you in-state for NC State?</p>
<p>I live in NC so I would get in-state at NC State.</p>
<p>Opposite situation here:
Georgia Tech in state or NC State honors out of state?
For Industrial Engineering undergrad program, I see that GT is ranked #1 and NCSU is ranked #10 in the latest U.S. News list. Son is a senior and can go to either. He is also planning to apply to Michigan which is ranked #2 and possibly Purdue which is ranked #5 in this major, but is not accustomed to those tough midwestern winters. It is very important to him to attend one of the top 10 programs in this major and one that grabs instant respect and name recognition on a national level because he wants to be recruited for an excellent IE job on the west coast out of college. NC State is making him feel special and has invited him to apply to their Honors program, whereas he would probably just be one of the masses at GT. Out of state also appeals to him to meet all new people. I’d love to hear any thoughts and opinions out there…</p>
<p>From a high level, NCSU is #31 in engineering, while GT is #4. Overall, GT is #35, NCSU is #101. There’s a big difference between a Top 10 engineering program and a 2nd tier program. Similarly, there’s a big difference between a first tier and a third tier overall school.</p>
<p>As far as IE programs go, the two are extremely different. NCSU specializes in the industrial hygiene aspect of IE and the furniture industry. Neither are covered at all at GT. GT is primarily OR, Supply Chain, and Health Systems. Further, GT’s IE programs is very highly recruited from around the world. Coming from that program with a decent GPA means that you can write your own ticket as to where you work (even internationally). I know many students going to the west coast this year. NCSU, on the other hand, is a regional program recruited from the North Carolina / South Carolina / Virginia areas primarily. Recruiters from California just don’t visit in significant numbers, which is why NCSU focuses on the local industry and needs when training students.</p>
<p>As far as GT, he should apply for the GT Honors program. [Georgia</a> Institute of Technology :: Honors Program](<a href=“http://www.honorsprogram.gatech.edu/index.php]Georgia”>Home Page | GT Honors Program)</p>
<p>I’m in the same boat for ChemE; accepted at Tech and invited to apply (note: apply) for State’s honors program. I’m really just not sure if State has the name recognition and specializations in engineering to make me want to go there.</p>
<p>Many thanks for the helpful insight, BanjoHitter, especially the comparison of IE program content at both schools. You confirmed what I suspected about NCSU being more of a regionally focused and recruited school as well. Now I wonder how west coast recruiters would compare GT, Michigan, and Purdue. Son prefers to go out of state and to a school that is not in the “hood” of a major city, so may have to learn to deal with midwestern winters in order to get similar IE quality to that of GT.</p>
<p>For engineering in general, the gap might not be that large. For industrial, GT is far better, unless you want to design furniture or textile factories…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>GT is not in the “hood”. Try to buy a house near campus. North of campus you have Turner Studios and Atlantic Station ($500,000 for a townhome), East you have Midtown ($300,000 for a condo and some of the most expensive offices in the city), to the West you the new “urban district” with $200,000 - $300,000 for a 1500 sq ft home and some really excellent restaurants, and South you have Downtown, the aquarium, World of Coke, and CNN. There’s low income housing for two blocks between the very south portion of GT and Downtown, but the police have really stepped up patrols of that community and it’s slowing becoming more and more student housing. The people that cause problems drive to Tech.</p>
<p>As far as crime goes, you can compare schools (these are on and off campus of students in 2010, as reported by campus police):</p>
<p>Crime ---- GT----Purdue – Michigan
Burglary-- 42---- 46------- 54
Assault---- 6---- 25------- 34
Robbery— 3----- 1------- 13
Weapons-- 0----- 1-------- 2
Car Theft-15----- 2-------- 27</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I used to hire for positions in California. All three have very similar reputations, but GT and Michigan are seen more in the west.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would actually say that it’s the opposite. NCSU is a regional feeder school that just doesn’t get the national attention of the top schools. If you graduate from GT, Michigan, Stanford, MIT, Illinois, UT-Austin etc, your school will attract employers from all across the country and all across the world. Further, your school is known in the field all across the country.</p>
<p>At the more regional schools (NCSU, Florida, Tennessee, Virginia Tech, Clemson), your degree is known regionally not necessarily nationally. NCSU has a very strong brand in NC, but the brand is substantially weaker as you move away from NC. As an example, what do you think of UC Irvine and UC Davis? Those are incredibly strong engineering schools in California and both are ranked nationally much higher than NCSU. But in NC, I doubt most people know that either school exist, and if they do, they assume they’re step children to UCLA and Berkeley. How about Washington State? Very well respected in WA, not really known in NC or GA. An NCSU degree is considered similar on the West Coast. On the other hand, what do you think of UCLA? That’s similar to how people feel about GT and Michigan.</p>
<p>As far as IE programs go, NCSU gets a pass because there are not really all that many IE schools in the country (certainly not as many as are needed). But, as said above, unless your goal is textiles, furniture, or hygiene, it’s not a good match.</p>
<p>Wow, BanjoHitter, you are knowledgeable about every aspect I need in comparing schools for IE - thank you so much. The crime stats surprised me - I never would have guessed that crime against Michigan students is worse than GT. Sounds like my son needs to focus on those two schools since they are so well known and respected nationally and internationally.</p>
<p>With the colossal sum of money involved and emotion stirred in the pot,
there is good reason to look at the college search objectively.</p>
<p>I graduated from Georgia Tech and went to work for Northrop Aircraft. I worked
with other grads that had attended Temple, Wisconsin, Cal State, etc.</p>
<p>The son of a friend of ours went to Mercer University for engineering. He then went
on to Ohio State and Northwestern, landing a great job in Chicago.</p>
<p>Another friend’s son attended Iowa, got hired by Microsoft.</p>
<p>Rankings? Might mean something, then again-</p>
<p>Proudly, our son got accepted to Georgia Tech as well as other good schools.
But the reality of today is something that can not be shrugged off. It is not
an easy decision for everyone to be saddled with HUGE loans, and strapped day
in and day out.</p>
<p>Just an opinion. Good luck everyone!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The thing about success is that there’s no guaranteed recipe (otherwise everyone would follow the recipe and be successful). So when trying to plan things out, you look at probabilities. </p>
<p>Can you go to Temple and end up as an executive at GE? Sure, if you’re hired into an entry position at an affiliated company, you’re assigned to a high-profile project because of something you did in school, your boss quits and you’re temporarily promoted, while promoted the project launches and is highly successful, before a new boss is hired Immelt wants a presentation to potentially roll the project out to other companies in GE, you make a great presentation and he appoints you to lead the best practices rollout, you hire some really great employees that do their job and make the roll out successful, and you save GE hundreds of millions of dollars. (granted, that’s only one path, but it demonstrates the point)</p>
<p>Can you go to Harvard Business and end up as an executive at GE? Sure, if you’re hired by Bain, work up to partner, work on a highly successful project for GE, then GE brings you on full-time.</p>
<p>When looking at things ex post, it’s easy to say “There are two GE executives, one from Harvard and one from Temple, so college rankings don’t matter.” What you miss in the meantime is the Harvard graduate took a path that was easier and required less luck (and had better alternatives, which I didn’t get into), while the Temple grad needed a ton of luck through an improbable rise. </p>
<p>If you were at the start of the journey, and had no idea what opportunities and challenges lied ahead, you’d probably want to start as the Harvard grad rather than as the Temple grad. Though, you might be better off as the Temple grad under some circumstances, you’re more likely to be better off as the Harvard grad.</p>
<p>My son is having a similar challenge deciding between the engineering programs at Va Tech and Ga Tech. He loves VT: the campus is beautiful and rural (he’s not a big fan of “inner city life”), the food is top notch, the student population is diverse (in terms of majors and interests), the dorms are mostly very nice, course and degree programs are broad, they offer co-op programs for engineers. He is eligible for Honors program at VT but we won’t hear about that until April. When we visited Vanderbilt we heard from one of the Engineering department heads there several times that certain aspects of their engineering programs were modeled after VT’s.</p>
<p>However, he looks at the rankings and sees GT is #5 in engineering and VT is #24 and wonders if he would be missing out on a better education at GT. We are OOS for both so the cost will be comparable and not a factor in our decision. He hasn’t chosen a focus in engineering yet but is leaning towards EE, CS, or Mech. E. Would like to hear other people’s perspectives on this…thx</p>
<p>Personally I love loving near the hood. It’s culture. Living, breathing culture.</p>
<p>O think you should choose Tech, mostly because that’s where I’m going (tenatively)</p>
<p>AS a GT alum, I would be willing to bet the normal classes at GT are above or on level with honors courses at VT or NCSU. Given the same level of effort from a student, you would stand a better chance to get a better engineering education at GT no doubt in my mind. </p>
<p>That’s not meant to say that any given individual at VT or NCSU could excel there with the right amount of effort and end up with a better education than an average GT graduate.</p>
<p>The money is a whole other question. I paid out of state tuition to go to GT, but that was a long time ago and the difference between instate and out of state was not that much. Now days, I doubt I would do the same thing again. It just depends on your available resources.</p>
<p>Would they? Honors classes across good public institutions are generally very similar. As in really good, and normally much smaller and conducted in a different manner than the non-honors counterparts. In fact, often honors courses end up somewhat easier and less stressful on students than the large, and perhaps weedout non-honors; as in, even if the content in an honors course may be more difficult, the tough non-honors classes have the “sink or swim” feel whereas the honors students get a lot more attention and support so you are really comparing apples to oranges. It wouldn’t be fair to compare VT and NCSU honors to Tech simply because it could be argued that even some of the honors sections at Tech are less tough on students than the harder lecture professors, especially for intro. classes like physics. What I would argue, is that Tech is likely better overall. As in, the non-honors courses are taught at a higher level and with more rigor. Whether or not this is particularly good depends on the prof. teaching because I wouldn’t consider high rigor with bad teaching as getting a good education. And unless we went and observed classes at GT and its peers, we can have no real outlook on teaching quality in traditionally difficult courses. IMHO, if VT had much better teachers for these with rigor perhaps a little lower than Tech, VT has an edge there. But I doubt this is the case) because I seriously doubt that the great bulk of the courses taken by an honor student will be honors. Honors is more so an experience that extends beyond the academic realm (like you of course get certain “perks” from being in honors than taking smaller classes with a more less traditional approach. Basically classes more similar to smaller or mid-sized classes at some private colleges). </p>
<p>Anyway, if money wasn’t an issue or if one got significant fin. aid, I would go to Tech. I think the peer group is more interesting and higher caliber. At least that’s what the entrance stats. say.</p>
<p>The biggest difference you’ll see between GT and VT or NCSU is, as mentioned already, how well the degree travels. NCSU and VT are primarily local feeders. The degrees are well respected if you stay in the same state as the school or in the area. And because of sheer alumni base, they’re very strong presence within their states. </p>
<p>The problem for VT and NCSU start as you travel away from the schools. In Texas, for example, you won’t find all that many VT or NCSU graduates, and the degrees aren’t all that well respected when compared to local schools (Texas A&M, UT-Austin, Texas Tech, Houston, UT-Dallas, UT-El Paso, Texas A&M Kingsville, etc.). </p>
<p>GT, on the other hand, has much more national presence (the largest GT alumni groups are in Texas and California). Your degree does not decline in value as you leave Georgia, or even as you leave the US (GT degrees have international recognition, which VT and NCSU don’t really have). </p>
<p>So, at the end of the day, if your goal is to live and work in NC, VA, or a neighboring state, those schools make sense. If you have interest in more flexibility or interest to work elsewhere, a higher tier school like GT makes sense.</p>
<p>Thanks for all of the thoughtful feedback to date. This was very helpful and I did not get the sense that any of you were “waving the GT banner” even though this is a GT discussion group.</p>
<p>I think the most compelling argument for GT is the portability of the degree. I totally understand the issue. I have an EE degree myself and have worked in or near the industry for the last 25 years. I believe you when you say that the GT degree will be more recognized outside of it’s local area, but I am wondering if anyone can present evidence that this is the case.</p>
<p>The reason I ask is this: We live in New England, Massachusetts specifically. I understand the premise about certain non-local degrees being recognized here. While schools like Cornell, RPI, CMU, Johns Hopkins, CalTech, Berkeley, Stanford, UT Austin, and Purdue fit this list, I’d have to say from my personal experience, GT was not in that category. In fact, it was very shocking to me to see it ranked so high when my son started considering engineering colleges recently. So I have been wondering why that is. Has GT attained this high ranking relatively recently (within the last decade)? If so, that would explain my disconnect because I don’t work with and hire engineers per se any more. Is it that GT grads typically don’t come to New England to work? (weather? politics? our less than “peachy” personalities? LOL)</p>
<p>I’m wondering if anyone out there lives outside of the Southeast (preferably New England or California) who can attest to the “legs” on a degree from GT and how it is valued outside the local geography (say as compared to VT and then as compared to a school like CMU).</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>I know many people from Tech who end up out west. I have no idea about New England. Also, I’ve found that students from New England or the upper mid-Atlantic only talk about certain schools (I have a friend who does CS at Emory, and I asked why he didn’t go to Tech. He said that, before coming, hadn’t heard about it, and when I explained it, he naively believed that the Emory degree spoke louder because the school was ranked higher overall in USNews. I retorted, “not for a CS degree. A New York company is not going to hire you over a competitive Tech applicant”) . They are either in New England or rank really high “overall” in USNews and have high prestige (for example, I had a friend from New York say that the students at Tech can’t be better than UVA because UVA ranks higher. The reality is, the stats. of Tech students are actually higher than UVA despite Tech admitting 50 or so percent and Virginia in the 20s or high teens. UVA is simply more popular) . I’ve heard students from the northeast say stupid things like: “Georgia Tech can’t have classes harder than Emory because it’s a public school”. So I don’t think the prestige among the general public is what matters. An employer from any part of the country will know about Georgia Tech more so than what can be a provincial public sphere. Another issue is that pre-dominant engineering schools aren’t as popular among the applicant pool. MIT gets significantly less applicants than those schools ranked near it (and even those much lower) and the same goes for Tech. It seems that privates can live off of prestige though. Public schools need prestige and high popularity (like Berkeley and UCLA to name a few) to get as much attention among normal, everyday people, especially those in areas completely loaded with prestigious institutions (where the prevailing view among top students may be that you primarily shoot for schools in that area and a few outside).</p>
<p>Again though, employers are smarter than this and if they are in the engineering, science, and technology sector, they certainly know which schools stand out. I think New England and the upper mid-Atlantic has something going on culturally that often skews what defines a good school for a person (it’s the “haven’t heard of it, must not be good” mentality that seems prevalent among many of my northeastern colleagues. Makes no sense, most people up from where they are have not heard of Emory but somehow it was good enough to attend. Guess it’s more of a “haven’t heard of it, it’s not good, unless it’s a top 30”). Seems too much about the rank and name to the point they assume high ranked schools are legit great at everything they may want to do and don’t deeply research the school in context of their personality and aspirations (as in, they assume that their aspirations will magically come true at a “top 20” even if the dept. of their major is weak). Just go on the Tech website and figure out the accomplishments of students (there is a lot of media on their emphasizing some of the great things they’ve done with not all of them confining their accomplishments to the south).</p>
<p>As someone who has lived and worked as an engineer in California, Texas, and Chicago, I can tell you that GT has a very strong presence in those areas. The brand is especially strong in Texas. I didn’t get the same impression from VT or NC State. In fact, many people out west confuse UNC and NC State. </p>
<p>GT’s brand in Chicago is strong, but not nearly as strong as California or Texas. But this might be because Chicago is so crowded with Big 10 engineers (especially Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State, and Michigan State) that there’s not much demand from non-Big 10 engineering schools. I suspect you might see the same situation in the North East, where the demand for engineers is drawing down over time and some large schools already flood the market.</p>
<p>As far as other schools that have a strong presence nationally: Illinois, Michigan, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA. MIT and Caltech are known but I didn’t run into too many graduates.</p>