You mean this? “Employers that cares college names won’t see nameless BS to Ivy MS as good as just Ivy BS.”
There are some employers who would only hire from a set of well known top colleges. If your BS is not one of them, but your MS is, then you might get an interview from those employers due to your MS degree.
HOWEVER, such employer might still look down on you due to your BS degree, even though you earned MS afterward from a top college they do hire, during the hiring process.
MS is often just not a big deal and there is no reason to go for it except some special occasion, such as being able to get BS+MS in 4 years using AP & CC credits, or if it is funded (rare) or there is good scholarship (also rare). MS is often full pay even for those who would qualify need based scholarship for BS, so you would be adding 1~2 years of debt instead of income for not much benefit (unless you couldn’t find employment with your BS)
As you can see, MS is a revenue earning program for colleges and admission is much much easier than BS at the same competitive colleges, unlike funded Ph.D. at the same colleges that is even harder than BS. And employers know this, obviously.
Anyway, that is only until you get hired. Once you are in, then only your job performance will matter.
By the way, Ph.D is a big deal. If you get a Ph.D, then it doesn’t matter where you got your BS, and your starting pay and promotion prospect could be much better than BS, if you get a job that does want Ph.D.
What do you want to do after college? For traditional process engineering roles, a master’s degree is basically worthless (and treated as such) for most employers. If I remember correctly, the oil supermajor I started at paid an extra 6 - 8K/yr for an MS grad as opposed to a BS grad. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to a mediocre raise after the first year of work. In some cases, there can be significant disadvantages to getting an MS.
A PhD is completely different and will put you in the running for completely separate roles – the career paths eventually converge when you get high enough in the company. The bump in pay isn’t significant enough to justify the extra 4-5 years in school.
The common theme is:
Continued higher education in chemical engineering in general will not reward you with significantly higher pay to justify the years in school
Just a master’s degree will not be enough to qualify you for roles (in general) that a bachelor’s degree would not qualify you for
A PhD may be worth the time-investment if it’s what you want to do. A master’s degree isn’t worth the time or money if you can get your target job immediately after undergrad
As far as the prestige of the school:
The prestige of the school doesn’t matter, AS LONG AS THE SCHOOL HAS CLOUT IN THE INDUSTRY THAT YOU WANT TO WORK IN. Higher ranked schools will give you OPTIONALITY in career choices that lower ranked schools will not. My chemical engineering cohort @ Michigan has people in every industry: management consulting, investment banking, oil & gas, software, private equity, venture capital, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc etc. I went into a fairly traditional career path in O&G and work alongside extremely capable & bright engineers/managers from “lower-tier” schools like Texas Tech/Texas A&M/LSU/Washington State/etc. At this point, school doesn’t matter. Both LSU and Michigan will get you into O&G in the Gulf Coast, but the LSU kid will have a tougher time breaking into management consulting in New York than the Michigan kid.
As a last piece of advice - don’t study Chemical Engineering. Do CS instead.
She goes to Florida Tech (post #3). She’s just likes to argue about everything, so if everyone is doing mechE or Aero Eng, she’ll do something else. She took an intro to engineering course and tried them all, and decided on civil because she likes building things. It’s been a good choice for her and she had a nice internship last year that she arranged herself
I said she goes to Florida Tech. She’s just likes to argue about everything, so if everyone is doing mechE or Aero Eng, she’ll do something else. Thus civil. She actually took an intro to engineering course and tried them all, and decided on civil because she likes building things.
Using @Pro28 's example, getting MS from UPenn through Bryn Mawr College’s 4+1 program may not give all the management consulting interviews in NY that getting BS from UPenn gives, but it can give some. BS from either college will give plenty of high quality engineering job interviews. And the college name’s help or MS degree’s help ends at that point.
By the way, Bryn Mawr’s programs only add one year so MS might be worth. especially its program with CalTech that used be even funded.
My Dh and oldest ds are both chemEs. The companies they work for hire from across the spectrum of universities and all new hires, regardless of USNWR rankings, start at the same level/same pay. (So a UM equivalent grad is working right alongside a UAH equivalent grad doing the same/similar job for the same pay.)
Industry has a different perspective on what they are looking for than popular college ranking sites. If a program is seen as producing good engineers, industry will recruit their grads. Our ds’s degree is from a school similar to UAH in college rankings, but it is a very desirable innovative program in employers’ perspective. That is the view that matters bc that is where the recruiters go.
Spend some time loooking at the different universities’ career center websites. See if they have fall and spring recruiting. Do they have information on co-ops. See what industries are recruiting on-campus. You can even call the HR depts at different companies and ask if they hire chemE grads from school x.
Fwiw, my advice would be to make sure you maintain a high GPA, seek out on-campus research opportunitie, co-op (do not view co-ops as limiting your options by delaying graduation—view co-ops as real job experience in industry), etc. My ds graduated during the recession when many companies were laying off employees. Kids that had low GPAs or no co-op experience had a much more difficult time finding jobs. My ds had multiple job offers and knew where he would be working after he graduated months before he completed his degree.
Of course AP scores matter to tippy top adcoms. And especially the math-sci classes, when your interest is engineering. You can’t get credit for an AP until admitted. Adcoms are the gatekeepers.
OP is just applying to more now. It’ll be several months until he learns what his final choices are. It’s premature to tell him which colleges will get him a job four or 6 years from now. What he needs is the best opportunity to learn, thrive, and experience the field (internships, research, co-op, etc.) That will come at many choices and depend on his own drive and output.
Some on CC act as if only prestige matters, only that paper. There’s a lot more to consider.
No matter where you go, you’ll need to earn the next opportunities. If you do well, you will have choices.
@SculptorDad, are you an engineer? Do you work in engineering? I’m curious because a lot of the very strong opinions you’re stating here don’t match up with what we were told by folks working in the industry back when we were looking for answers to similar questions a few years ago.
UAH is an excellent choice if you’re interested in aerospace or if merit money is vital. It won’t be the same campus experience as some of the flagships you may be considering, but that may not matter to you.
And, I’m sorry, anybody earning 3s on AP exams is unlikely to be admitted to an Ivy or comparable school unless they have some other amazing hook.
Those 3+2 and 4+1 programs are VERY expensive and, in my experience, FEW students complete them. That 4+1 Penn master’s in engineering program, for example, does not offer financial aid for that fifth year. Do the math on that one.
Top students in chemical engineering get good job offers pretty much everywhere, but don’t assume because you were an A student in high school, you’ll be graduating summa from even an ordinary flagship. There’s lots of competition at all of these schools, and the publics, in particular, can be ruthless in how they weed out lesser students.
Same as you, it’s what I have asked and heard from people who hires engineers. But I don’t see anything you wrote contradicting with what I have wrote. Can you please specify what don’t match?
That’s exactly what I said. MS programs are usually full pay for everyone.
The other one, 3+2 Caltech master’s used to be funded, in the beginning at least. There are other very rare programs that are not financial burden. They are so rare I put “(rare)” each time I mentioned them.
Almost everywhere. But not everywhere. There are some employers who would only hire newly graduated engineers from top 10~15 name brand schools, as official policy, while they don’t care it for experienced engineers. They are not common and, in my opinion, you can just ignore them while applying colleges.
If you were talking about MS prestige won’t completely cure lack of BS prestige at such employers, well a manager told me several years ago that he wouldn’t discriminate based on BS degree if a candidate has MS degree. But now he tells me otherwise that where you got BS is more important than where you got MS if that’s your terminal degree, and advises against such 4+1 program’s small boost unless the cost don’t matter. So there is an anecdotal data.
What type of student would be admitted into an “employer favored grad school” after being unable to get a “decent” job? The entire premise doesn’t make sense to me.
What do you mean by “don’t qualify” there? Whether it’s an Ivy BS or “nameless BS” + Ivy MS that gets you the interview, you’re not going to get the job if you “don’t qualify” regardless.
Bryn Mawr does’t even offer a BSE. Are you thinking of Swarthmore?
@talexr, have you tried posting in the Engineering Majors forum? I think you’ll get more informed opinions there than in a general college admissions forum.
For clarity’s sake for the OP, 3+2 programs are not MS programs. They are 3 yrs, typically at an LAC, with a transfer for 2 yrs to a university with an engineering program for 2 more yrs. It is a 5 yr path for a BS engineering degree.
My personal perspective is that for strong math/science kids that it is a poor choice. Most students, especially those who know what they want to pursue and have had a rigorous math and science high school education, will be better served enrolling directly in an engineering program and using that 5th yr for co-oping instead. Not to mention that for a student concerned about cost that a 3+ 2 program is automatically a 5th yr of expenses.
I was thinking generally and not ChemE specific. But now that you mention it, let me think of one.
Supposedly you got 3.0 GPA from a barely accredited university’s BS where your admission was automatic as long as you could pay (I guess it would be more common for Business degree than ChemE degree but let’s just do it for the sake), and the employer you want to apply wouldn’t give you an interview.
Then you got a MS degree at a well known university (since it would be easier to be admitted to MS program than either BS or Ph.D), and the same employer would more likely to offer an interview thanks to your MS degree. I don’t see this happening often. It would be very RARE.
That’t my point. College name brand only give you interviews, albeit could be more interviews, and not jobs. So don’t focus on it too much and focus on getting the actual skills that will get you the offer after the interviews.
3.0 gpa can be problematic, to begin with. The way top grad programs select, that’s a hurdle. Add that your grad research interests and experiences need to align with the grad faculty interests.
Top performers looking for top jobs, (however they define that,) have a better shot than middling students. Same for grad school chances.
Of course, some work requires more than a terminal masters. And some does not.
Let’s not confuse OP. He’s still at start, hasn’t begun college courses, doesn’t even have all his acceptances lined up. Hasn’t even finished applying. And plans can evolve.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, yes, thanks for clarifying that about the 3+2. In addition to all the reasons you cite as to why it isn’t the best choice for a lot of students, I have yet to meet or read of ANYONE who went that route. I’m sure they’re out there, but they’re kind of like unicorns. Theoretically, they’re intended for the student who wants to receive a true liberal arts education BEFORE settling into engineering (thus, the fifth year), not so much the math/science-focused student, but they’re mainly used as a marketing tool in my experience.
The 4+1 with UPenn that Haverford and Bryn Mawr offer (and maybe others at this point) is four years for a BS in physics or math typically, plus one year for a master’s in engineering. While Haverford and Bryn Mawr (and Penn for undergrad) offer need-based aid, when we investigated the program at the start of its first year, it was made clear to us that no FA was available for that fifth year at Penn. That’s a VERY expensive year.
@SculptorDad, thanks for clarifying. I think the one thing that separates engineering from business (or whatever) is that, assuming it’s ABET-accredited, there really are no “barely accredited universities” with ABET-accredited engineering programs. There are 150 colleges and universities in the US with ABET-accredited chemical engineering programs. Granted, there’s no doubt a big gap between MIT, Caltech & GT and several of the smaller colleges offering the degree, but, in general, if it’s a large public uni with an ABET-accredited program, you should be fine.
Obviously, if money is not an issue, go to the school that offers the most prestige (or whatever floats your boat), but one of the upsides with an ABET-accredited engineering degree is that, due to the uniform rigor of the degree program, you can get a fine (and sometimes better) education at a more affordable public school.
Probably the most common cut-off GPA for employers deciding which college students to interview is 3.0. So the college student with a 3.01 GPA is likely to have far more interview opportunities than the college student with a 2.99 GPA.
Schools like UAlbany where I go is huge in business. So the science isn’t very strong, however, they still have classes that can weed you out. For example, in the math department calculus, 1 and 2 have a departmental final where every student takes the same final. The departmental final is really hard and if you have a bad professor some of those students don’t even make it out. They drop the course and change majors. I was very lucky to only have to take calculus 2 because let me tell you. If I took calculus 1 at my UAlbany I would have failed. I’m not sure what major I would be in now. Luckily I only had to take calculus 2 and beat the final. So if you are saying that State schools are easier, you are wrong.
You’re getting ahead of yourself. You haven’t actually started going to college yet Most college students change their major at least once before they finally settle on a a course of study. For chemical engineering, the school prestige is going to matter a little more than other STEM majors because the job demand is different, so you want to pick a school that can give you some good job placement. Just make sure it’s a school you can afford. At this point, don’t even give graduate school a second thought until your last year of college.
Theoretically, they’re intended for the student who wants to receive a true liberal arts education BEFORE settling into engineering (thus, the fifth year), not so much the math/science-focused student, but they’re mainly used as a marketing tool in my experience.
Most college students change their major at least once before they finally settle on a a course of study. For chemical engineering, the school prestige is going to matter a little more than other STEM majors because the job demand is different, so you want to pick a school that can give you some good job placement. Just make sure it’s a school you can afford. At this point, don’t even give graduate school a second thought until your last year of college.