<p>Hey I am not a money mad, just want to get a general idea from real MIT people. What does an engineer graduated from MIT usually get paid every year? Say, entry level in industry, with a master degree( or Ph.D?)? Do they get much higher pay than engineers from other colleges?</p>
<p>It would seem that a degree from MIT would get you a job at a better company, which in turn pays more. However, if you begin at a company with an MIT degree and someone else does with a degree from a state school, I'm not sure what would happen :).</p>
<p>My cousin graduated from MIT (he did the 5 year Masters/BS program on EE/CS) and came out with an $80,000 job. So while I don't have the exact figures for the average salery of engineers graduating from MIT (I'm sure someone else here does), it seems like graduating from MIT with an engineering degree is something companies value highly.</p>
<p>Ask and ye shall receive. Look at the following pdf, especially pages 3 and 14.</p>
<p>However, I would caution everyone to pay heed to industry functions. The fact is, plenty of MIT engineers don't take engineering jobs, but instead opt to take jobs in consulting and investment banking/financial services. Consulting and banking are generally held to be 'premier' career paths after undergrad, and MIT is one of the well-trodden paths to get there, along with the other usual suspects of HYPS. So when you look at the numbers earned by MIT graduates with degrees in engineering, understand that not you're really looking at just engineering salaries. You're looking at a combination of engineering salaries, consulting salaries, banking salaries, etc.</p>
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if you begin at a company with an MIT degree and someone else does with a degree from a state school, I'm not sure what would happen
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<p>Many companies have a set standard entry-level salary which will only change slightly depending on your qualifications. Hence, a guy from MIT who is hired at a company, and a guy from a no-name school who is hired at that same company will provide receive similar entry-level salaries.</p>
<p>Of course, where the difference comes in is that the MIT guy is usually more likely to get a job offer from that company in the first place.</p>
<p>Thanks for telling me so many details. Just wondering, how come even MIT engineers earn less than those physicians and surgeons? I really think people from MIT deserve more. :)</p>
<p><em>shrug</em> Welcome to the real world -- talent and income don't correlate perfectly.</p>
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Thanks for telling me so many details. Just wondering, how come even MIT engineers earn less than those physicians and surgeons? I really think people from MIT deserve more
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<p>Well, I'll put it to you this way. The guys who major in non-technical fields at the elite schools often times make far less than a guy who majors in engineering or computer science at a no-name school. For example, I know several people who graduated from Stanford with degrees in the humanities (i.e. English, Art, Classics, etc.) who make significantly less than other guys who graduated from Cal State Universities, but with degrees in EECS. I would say that on a pure talent basis, those Stanford guys may be more intelligent than those Cal State guys. Yet they're making less. Is that fair? You tell me. </p>
<p>That illustrates the central point that the money that you make is correlated to not only how good you are, but even more importantly, how marketable your field is. You can be the greatest in the world in a field that nobody wants, and you won't make much money. On the other hand, you can be quite mediocre, or downright bad at something, but if it's in a high-demand, high-paying field, you will probably make good money. Even a bad doctor probably makes more than a great engineer, but on the other hand, even a bad engineer probably makes more than a great Art History or Film Studies guy. </p>
<p>If it makes you feel better, some of those highly paid physicians and surgeons were themselves formerly MIT engineering students. Plenty of people at MIT pick up engineering degrees and then head off to medical school. Just because you get an engineering degree doesn't mean that you have to become an engineer, and (perhaps surprisingly at MIT), many don't. Many of them pick up engineering degrees purely for use as a backup career, but want to head off to non-engineering careers. For example, about 25% of EECS graduates at MIT head off to consulting and banking jobs, and that doesn't even count those EECS people who wanted to go to consulting/banking but didn't get an offer, so they invoke their engineering 'backup career'. </p>
<p>In fact, I have discussed ths point in great detail here.</p>
<p>In any case, to digress, I would say that if all you care about is money, then don't work as an engineer. You can get an engineering degree, but not work as an engineer. Instead, go to Wall Street and get into financial services, like investment banking. A top investment banker will make more money in 1 year than the best doctor will make in his whole life, and even the entry-level bankers make outstanding amounts of money. Of course, the lifestyle is brutal with 90 hour work weeks and tremendous cutthroat competition to advance. But nobody's ever complained about the money. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.careers-in-finance.com/ibsal.htm</a></p>
<p>And, if it makes you feel better, getting an engineering degree at MIT (or another top school like Stanford, etc.) is a well-trod path to getting into Wall Street.</p>
<p>Our sakky seems a little bit upset about how the top engineers are treated too, huh. Me too. And I love engineering. And 78k/year is not that attractive to me, lol (considering how hard the work is gonna to be). It's 1999's survey though. I don't know if that is the case now. btw, sakky you are a career counselor, right? Yes or no will do. If no I'll go ahead and send you an email to find out. Just a little bit curious. :)</p>
<p>Well, there are engineering management positions (which have quite high saleries), and those filling these positions usually were engineers once.</p>
<p>No, I'm not a career counselor. I am, however, annoyed and mystified that engineering companies will on the one hand, complain that they can't find enough top-level US engineers to hire, and on the other hand, won't raise their engineering salary offers. That's free market economics without the price mechanism, which is ludicrous. It is a basic truism of free markets that if you want the market to supply more of something, you have to increase your offering price. Otherwise, as I pointed out, many of the top engineers at MIT and Stanford will continue to run off to non-engineering careers like consulting and banking. And many of the best students won't even study engineering in the first place, figuring that the payoff is not worth the course difficulty. </p>
<p>I would however point out one thing. Engineering is really good for providing a decent backup career. It's not an outstanding backup career, but at least it's decent. Contrast that to what the guys studying, say, physics or biology get. Or maybe even worse, the guys who major in humanities . MIT engineering students may not be making hugely impressive amounts of money, but they tend to make more than the guys who major in Biology at MIT, and almost always a lot more money than the guys who major in Art History at Harvard. </p>
<p>But like I said, is money is your thang, then don't work as an engineer. You can still get an engineering degree, but don't work as an engineer. Go to Wall Street. Be a banker. That's where the money is.</p>
<p>I will see then. But definitely I'll get an engineering degree first. I can't find a single program better than engineering. (med-school and law-school are too much for me)</p>
<p>An engineer from MIT has a 4 year undergrad degree whereas a physician has a 4 year undergrad degree, a 4 year medical degree and a 3+year residency (receiving pay only while a resident and less than an engineer). So the engineer has 8 excellent years of income before the doctor is earning anything reasonable. Also the physician, in general, is likely heavier in debt. If you raised the pay for engineers then you would create a disincentive to go to medical school and lower the quality of the physician pool.
I have both degrees and I would not have pursued a medical degree if engineers were paid more, it would not be worth it to me.</p>
<p>Well, I mean, some would argue that physicians (especially specialists) are overpaid.</p>
<p>I will have, at the end of my training, a 4-year undergrad degree, a 6-year Ph.D., and a 5±year postdoctoral fellowship. I’ll have been paid during both the Ph.D. and the postdoc, but even the postdoc payscale is significantly lower than the resident payscale – a first-year postdoc is paid about $40,000, while a first-year resident is paid $57,000 at my hospital. I’ll never touch the earning potential of a physician.</p>
<p>Dude, ride the startup train, make money young so you don’t have to worry about it your entire life. Go to MIT wanting to make mad cash, not to get a good degree.</p>
<p>I read somewhere a few years ago that many, if not most of the top executives at the famous companies and firms nationwide actually have engineering degrees. Now I don’t know if they did management or whatnot, but I know that many people choose that path. I mean look at Larry Page and his partner (sorry, don’t know his name off the top of my head). They both did comp sci but are heads of Google. It’s just from engineering, your salary is determined by what path you choose. I know one of my friend’s sisters is going for this, they’re doing engineering but to rise in the ranks and eventually make big money. Or yeah, you could make a start-up and if you’re lucky enough or skilled enough, you just might become the next Apple or Google and become a bajillionaire. Btw, this is assuming that we graduate from MIT, right?</p>
<p>@cpraf104 It’s not about how apt you are at programming or anything, really - it’s about having the right ideas, hiring the right people, and marketing it the right way.
The fact that Larry Page is a computer scientist only means that he made the prototype of the idea possible. Now he’s purely a businessman - he’s got engineers to do his dirty work for him. What I’m saying is - You don’t want to be one of those engineers, you want to be Larry. Those engineers may have graduated MIT, but the fact that their programming abilities are better than those of others doesn’t mean they get paid more, or are more successful, than others who aren’t as good.
Ride the startup train. Think of a startup now, make your money young, and be Larry when you’re older.</p>
<p>My friend who graduated engineering 2 years before I graduated with my BSEE went straight into mechanical engineering. By the way, we both attended state schools. I went into engineering for 3 years then pursued medicine. A full 20 years after my graduation, we have the same net worth. Though I make 4 - 5 times his income, but I’ve spent years without pay and incurred a lot of school debt.</p>
<p>I think that is something that is forgotten when we analyze income. Income and net worth are different. How much money did the MIT or medical school graduate have to borrow? How many hours did they have to work? And what type of jobs did they pursue?</p>
<p>Here is my advice: make the best of your MIT education and dream big. If you entered UG with big dreams, don’t chase a regular engineering job when you graduate or you will find yourself making regular pay. I’ve worked with engineers from top schools and found nothing special. The engineers who were previous technologists always ran circles around the other engineers. But we were always paid the same. Remember, pay is a function of supply and demand, not your alma mater.</p>
<p>Btw, Larry Page’s partner, Sergey Brin attended UG at University of Maryland.</p>
<p>Why someone decided to bump an 8 year old thread is unclear to me but you can find current data on MIT graduates earnings here <a href=“http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation12.pdf[/url]”>http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation12.pdf</a>. You can find mean starting salary by major and field although I think bonuses are not always included which skews some of the data. The response rate is also pretty high so it presumably representative of the entire class unlike other sources such as Payscale.</p>
<p>Starting salary data is, IMHO, always a little funny to look at. Starting salaries for BS degrees even harder to make any real conclusions about. Many of the better performing BS people go straight into grad school and so don’t figure into that data. Some people go into startups which typically pay less but have other perks (stock options, etc.) that can make them very attractive.</p>
<p>The company I worked for, a large aerospace company, used to publish a lot of salary data. Coming from MIT, I had one of the highest starting salaries for a new hire. So, they did differentiate. However, when you looked at the salary ranges over time, the lowest to highest salary for new hires was THE lowest range for any given number of years of experience. So, your school got you a SLIGHT bump, but after that it was your engineering talent that drove salary increases.</p>
<p>One interesting thing you could see in the graphs was that the average salary for engineering started a steady decline after about 10 years. The top of the range (actually the 90th percentile) still showed a growth although the rate of growth started to slow at that point. Why did this happen? Well, some of the higher paid engineers were moving out of the engineering pool at that point and moving into management, bringing the average down. The top kept growing as some of the top engineers, who stayed in engineering, became “subject area experts” and were rewarded as well as non-executive managers at my company. But they were were smaller in number.</p>
<p>So, salaries are more a function of who you are and not as much as where you went to school. However, more of the talented individuals do go to top schools, skewing the data in those schools favor.</p>