<p>Well, I don’t think that we completely disagree and everyone wants the best for their children. And we’re not supposed to talk about it but being a woman in engineer is a bit challenging. It is not the most family friendly profession. When both parents are meeting deadlines and working 60 hours a week, well you just can’t do everything a the same time. Many women take time off for a while. I paid for college mostly on my own. If my parents had wiped out their savings for me or remortgaged their house, I would feel guilty about taking time off. I just think there should be a practical balance.</p>
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I guess I am seeing that theme come up, but not between types of school; engineering in general. I see the general concept batted around that as long as the program is ABET accredited, any program is identical to any other. I simply do not believe that to be true.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to be offensive.</p>
<p>@ItsJustSchool, I completely disagree with your assertion that more money guarantees anything. Intangibles, by their nature are difficult to quantify. It’s really a myth that name guarantees anything. It might, but it well might not. Then what name(s)? For how much money? For what expected return?</p>
<p>@seal16, just like the fact that all UCs are not created equal, neither are the CSUs. The truth is, for ME, Aero, BME and CS, Cal Poly is harder to get into than any UC. That says something. The fact that they are Apple’s number one school says something. The fact that overall across all majors only UCB and UCLA are more selective says something. I’m not sure what the “Cal State Flavor” is, but I don’t think, other than with friends at cocktail parties who are still in the dark ages, it matters one iota that Poly is a CSU. In fact, for engineering, it is an advantage. They don’t offer PhDs so all their resources are directed at undergrads. Just out of curiosity, what is the Cal State Flavor?</p>
<p>@eyemgh The UCs are the research universities in California. That means that they are better funded, support graduate education, and tend to hire more renowned faculty within their fields. Your degree from a UC would have more prestige. The CSUs are the teaching institutions in the state. You are more likely to be taught by the professor, but the professor won’t have the “name” of the ones at UCs. Faculty at CSUs spend more of their time teaching, and less doing research. The UC schools have extremely supportive Alumni groups. You are going to get a lot more support out of college (undergrad or graduate), in the professional world if you are a UC Alumni member, especially UC Berkeley or UCLA. And also likelihood of getting into a great post-grad program.</p>
<p>Then the BIG question is how does that translate to the undergraduate experience and then into the working world as an engineer?</p>
<p>Here’s what one of our family members told us. He has a PhD in engineering from Stanford and many successful years in both academia and the private sector. He recommended undergraduate at a big name research institute only if you know you will go on and get a PhD. His words “If you want to BE an engineer, go to a school with a great reputation for teaching engineering.” Although highly supportive of Stanford for graduate work, he recommended Cal Poly over Stanford, his own alma matter for undergraduate engineering. </p>
<p>Your mileage may vary, but remember, for the most part all the names and all the toys will be off limits to the undergrads.</p>
<p>Also, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying all CSUs are great. Certainly they are not. I’m cautioning against painting with broad strokes. Each institution needs to be assessed individually. To say that any UC is better than Cal Poly, simply based on the fact that it is a CSU is not supportable by any real metric beyond dated cocktail party opinion. </p>
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<p>Since I brought up ABET earlier, I might as well weigh in on this. Of course the programs are not identical. Some schools may have a connection to a particular company, or faculty with a certain perspective on the world, or any number of differentiating factors. If any of that floats your boat, then go there - but the education you receive will not be substantially different. ABET sets a minimum standard for accreditation which is not exactly easy to achieve, and that is why you can attend any of them and be assured you will receive a proper engineering education.</p>
<p>Only the attendee can decide where the value is, but for me the value is attending an in-state public school. I did that 20+ years ago and have never regretted the decision.</p>
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<p>This is only a half truth. Yes, ABET sets, as you said yourself, a minimum standard for accreditation. It means that as long as you go to an ABET school, you will have all the opportunity you need to become at least a competent engineer.</p>
<p>That said, not every school strives for the minimum. ABET sets the bar required for competency, but programs go above and beyond the minimum to varying degrees. The real question, then, is how these schools are going above and beyond and whether that is an advantage for a particular student.</p>
<p>For example, from the undergraduate perspective, the nice thing about some of the larger research institutions is that they tend to offer a wider variety of technical electives than do smaller programs or those who have met the ABET bar and no more. I consider that to be a real strength, as it lets student do a bit of specializing if they know where their interests lie already or just feel like exploring a topic a bit deeper than a program that just barely meets the ABET standard would be able to offer.</p>
<p>@Boneh3ad That is assuming that a student gets through the weed-out courses to actually select from those technical electives. I just get the impression that studying in a large engineering program is more of a crap shoot just to graduate with an engineering degree.</p>
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<p>One shouldn’t go into something assuming from the outset that one will fail, so it would be silly to avoid a program with such benefits just because of a fear of failing. It’s certainly better to plan on success and put yourself into a situation that gives you the best post-success outcome. What situation that may be varies by individual, so I certainly am not saying the large programs are the best situation for everybody. Weed-out courses are a myth anyway. Most people who find themselves in that situation either had insufficient preparation and bit off more than they could chew right off the bat, or else they, for whatever reason, lacked the level of motivation required to make up for any shortcomings.</p>
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<p>This has much more to do with the type (public or private) of the university than anything else. Public universities, which represent a large fraction of the large, juggernaut engineering programs, are obliged by their nature to admit a great many students, many of whom are weaker students from the outset. They therefore typically have a higher attrition rate.</p>
<p>In other words, consider a class of students who are able to be admitted into both a large, powerhouse state school (let’s say Purdue, for example) and a small, selective private school (such as Harvey Mudd, say). If you look at only that subset of students who attend Purdue, they aren’t likely to have a noticeably different attrition rate than Harvey Mudd’s program does. The high attrition rate at the larger programs is going to be heavily weighted toward the low end of the distribution of admitted students who probably wouldn’t have been admitted to a place like Harvey Mudd.</p>
<p>Of course, this isn’t to say that a place like Purdue is always better than a place like Harvey Mudd due to the large array of electives. Quite the contrary. The feel of those types of schools are extraordinarily different, and that must be factored into any decision on the part of a prospective student. A miserable student, no matter how intelligent, is more likely to fail than a happy student regardless of which program they attend.</p>
<p>The moral, then, is that choosing a school is a fairly complex calculus with a lot of different factors weighted differently for different people. In my opinion, the most important of those are cost, campus culture, breadth of electives, relationship with industry, and preparation for graduate school. How exactly a student and their family should weight those, is really quite personal, however.</p>
<p>“it might eat up all our savings.” - That makes it a no-brainer. You will need savings for retirement. </p>
<p>“Gates, with the support of his venture capitalist father and the rest of his family,…”</p>
<p>Where did you get this information? Gates’ dad, Bill Sr., was a partner at one of the two “big time” corporate law firms in Seattle. Certainly enjoyed an very upper middle class lifestyle, but I have never heard that he was a venture capitalist. Perhaps he has become an investor subsequent to the rise of Microsoft Corporation, of which I would be surprised if he didn’t own many shares of.</p>
<p>@LakeWashington, perhaps “Angel Investor” would be more accurate. He was/is a multi-millionaire power broker (depending on what percentage of Americans you put in the “middle”, I guess he could be put in the middle class, Do you consider any grade below an A+ to be “in the middle range of grades”?) back when a million dollars was a lot more than it is today. He inherited millions and earned millions more. He was/is involved with much of the business community in Seattle. He apparently was not a member of any officially recognized venture capital firm. In the generic sense, he is no stranger to venturing his capital on means of controlling production- so he is a capitalist, who invests some of his wealth in speculative new ventures- a “venture capitalist”.</p>
<p>My major source, when I think back on it, is the book, “Pour your Heart Into It,” where Howard Schultz discusses some of the early days of deciding to market the italian coffee shop concept in America, and his discussions with financiers to get Starbucks started (after purchasing the name and mermaid trademark from Alfred Peet). Bill Gates Jr. (Bill Gates’ father) played heavily in this, though the timing of this dealing was well after Microsoft was established. I had read more along these lines in various magazines (probably airline magazines).</p>
<p>This was all off-the-cuff from memory (that post and this post), not extensively researched and footnoted.</p>
<p>Thank you everyone.</p>