financially, no. Nothing has changed about that.
70k is the principle; the interest will add a bunch. I blame Euler.
What about the generally agreed upon axiom that “You shouldn’t go in more debt than your first year salary”? I would not be doing that!
No. I don’t agree with that.
I would say your debt should be less than $65K for 4 year college regardless of salary. It should be less than that for 2 year college unless you go to a medical school Besides student loans you will have to pay car loan, rent or home mortgage loan, and other things.
[quote=boneh3ad]
The location of NCEES is completely irrelevant to the quality of nearby programs. There is absolutely no correlation there. [ /quote].
That is your opinion and I note that you did not provide any evidence that is is irrelevant. There is nothing but the university in Clemson and it doesn’t make sense the NCEES would locate there except for the presence of the College of Engineering at Clemson University.
[quote=boneh3ad]
So… your argument is that Clemson is more prestigious than Michigan because it has professors that graduated from prestigious schools like Michigan? That makes no sense. [ /quote].
I never said Clemson is more prestigious. My point is that Michigan is not more prestigious than Clemson. They are both ABET accredited engineering programs at research universities with qualified engineering professors. So you are saying Michigan is way more prestigious than Clemson but you don’t see how the fact that Clemson hires professors from MIchigan and other colleges that you label as 'more prestigious" is a contradiction? If Clemson hires people who attended ‘prestigious universities’, it must also be prestigious, right?
[quote=boneh3ad]
Basically, Michigan is unquestionably the more prestigious school and it’s not even close. [ /quote]
Sounds like you are doing marketing for Michigan to me. You didn’t provide any evidence for your assertion or demonstrate that you have any independent knowledge of Clemson to rank it is comparison to another college. I assume you are relying on the US News rankings, an arbitrary set of criteria by a 3rd party trying to sell magazines.
In fact, it is not my opinion. Where NCEES is headquartered has no bearing on whether Clemson’s program quality. Boeing is headquartered in downtown Chicago. I suppose that means DePaul is necessarily a great engineering school because otherwise Boeing wouldn’t have built their headquarters there? ABET is headquartered in Baltimore, and they wouldn’t be there if Towson and Coppin State weren’t top engineering schools, right? There are many reasons why companies and organizations choose to put their headquarters in a certain location. Can you provide any actual shred of evidence that NCEES being located nearby impacts the program at Clemson? After all, it is quite literally impossible for me to prove a negative, but since you seem so convinced, you should be able to provide ample evidence proving a positive.
Clemson is a fine engineering school. That has absolutely nothing to do with NCEES, though.
If I am doing marketing for Michigan, I must be pretty bad at it since I have advocated throughout this thread that going there is not worth the cost. The thing about “prestige” is that it is 100% based on popularity. Guess what… so are the U.S. News rankings. So, as a measure of prestige, the U.S. News rankings are wonderful! They both have the same criteria! My point, though, is that prestige does not necessarily correlate to program quality, nor does it necessarily correlate with student outcomes. This is especially true in engineering, not so true in fields like business. This is part of the reason I’ve advocated this whole thread for alternatives to the options that the OP has suggested.
On why the NCEES headquarters are in Clemson…
http://ncees.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/The-History-of-NCEES-full.pdf
Which really says nothing directly about the quality of Clemson’s program (which is very good), but would explain the close relationship between Clemson and the NCEES.
@Caleb1212, I mean no offense, but I seriously question your ability to be successful as a “quant” or a CEO if a simple calculation like opportunity cost is failing to penetrate. You can KNOW how much better a Michigan degree has to be. At $70,000 debt, that number over your career is close to $1M. Is Michigan worth $1,000,000 more than Clemson? You’re an engineer. Do the math.
That off the cuff recommendation of one year’s salary assumes there is no alternative. You have an alternative and thus have the opportunity to make a reasoned analysis between both options. For reasons unclear to me, you seem unwilling to do that.
Dr. Sams may have recommended moving the NCEES headquarters to Clemson but I don’t think that he unilaterally made that decision. The NCEES has a board that generally votes on everything. Dr. Sams has been retired for a long time so it can’t be said that he is keeping the headquarters in Clemson.
The NCEES holds a lot of meetings with people from out of town. For this reason, it would make a lot of sense for it to be located in a big city with a large airport rather than 1 hour away from a smallish airport with few direct flights. Yet the NCEES has decided to stay in Clemson.
Dr. Sams was accepted into both Cornell and Michigan after getting an undergrad engineering degree at Clemson, and this was way back in the 1920s. Obviously those ‘prestigious programs’ view Clemson as a good program, and Dr. Sams was able to get his masters and PhD at Michigan so he must have been well prepared at Clemson.
Many Clemson engineering professors help prepare questions for the FE and PE exams. Clemson students have a high pass rate on the exam. Also, many of the Clemson professors have taught PE review courses at Clemson and at the University Center in Greenville SC. Clemson is a good place to go to college if as person is serious becoming a professional engineer.
On the difference between causation and correlation there’s an excellent xkcd comic showing how the rise in cancer diagnoses preceded the rise in cell phone use and concludes with the startling “cancer causes cell phones.”
Neither Coppin State or Towson appear to have an engineering school so that was a silly analogy.
Both Baltimore and Chicago are huge cities. In contrast, there is basically nothing in Clemson but Clemson University and being 1 hour from a smallish airpot is not the most convenient location for an organization that goes to a lot of conferences out of town. The NCEES was originally located in the civil engineering building on campus, and its current location is still on the Clemson campus although across the lake from the academic buildings. To argue that the NCEES located to Clemson and it had nothing to do with Clemson University being located there seems highly illogical to me.
I’m still waiting for you to provide one shred of evidence that Michigan is a ‘far more prestigious program than Clemson’ in the eyes of employers, and provide one shred of evidence that you have any specific knowledge of Clemson’s engineering program. So far all I’ve seen you do is make the assertion. You have not demonstrated that the NCEES being located is not an indication that they view Clemson is a
Continued from my previous post. Hotel wifi having issues.
I’m still waiting for you to provide one shred of evidence that Michigan is a ‘far more prestigious program than Clemson’ in the eyes of employers, and provide one shred of evidence that you have any specific knowledge of Clemson’s engineering program. So far all I’ve seen you do is make the assertion. It doesn’t seem rational for you to argue that is not a good thing for engineering students at Clemson that many of their professors are involved with the NCEES and have insight into the exams. Also, if there are two competing claims, we don’t have to assume your claim is the right one, as you appear to believe.
[quote=boneh3ad]
If I am doing marketing for Michigan, I must be pretty bad at it since I have advocated throughout this thread that going there is not worth the cost. The thing about “prestige” is that it is 100% based on popularity. Guess what… so are the U.S. News rankings. So, as a measure of prestige, the U.S. News rankings are wonderful! They both have the same criteria! My point, though, is that prestige does not necessarily correlate to program quality, nor does it necessarily correlate with student outcomes. This is especially true in engineering, not so true in fields like business. This is part of the reason I’ve advocated this whole thread for alternatives to the options that the OP has suggested. [/boneh3ad]
This is an odd statement given upthread you asserted that Michigan is far more prestigious than Clemson. I think that prestige does correlate to program quality. I don’t understand what the point of using the word prestige unless you are talking about quality.
But you see, that’s precisely my point. Just because an engineering-heavy organization is located in a locale does not mean that nearby schools necessarily have good engineering programs. It also doesn’t mean they have bad engineering programs. Really, it has no real correlation in the grand scheme of things.
In the particular case of NCEES I am not claiming that its location has nothing to do with Clemson being there, but that it has nothing to do with the quality of Clemson’s engineering program. At the time of selecting that site for an HQ, it was run by a guy with Clemson roots and who was a current employee of Clemson. It was a move born of convenience, essentially so that guy could continue in both roles at the same time easily. I am sure that if a guy from MIT had been running it at the time it would be in Boston now, or if a guy from Fresno State was in charge at the time it would be HQed in Fresno.
Further, at no point have I implied that Clemson’s program is poor in any way, so I am not sure why you’ve become so defensive.
Are we perhaps inadvertently arguing semantics here? Here is the dictionary definition of “prestige”, which is how I have been using it (and have assumed you have been using it).
From [Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prestige):
prestige, noun, often attributive pres·tige \pre-ˈstēzh, -ˈstēj
1: standing or estimation in the eyes of people : weight or credit in general opinion
2: commanding position in people’s minds
Note: This says nothing about the actual quality of something. Prestige is about perception. However, prestige is exactly what the highly subjective U.S. News rankings measure. They are a popularity contest; they are not a measure of actual quality. They are a measure of perceived quality, and a rather direct one with a large sample size, at that. Michigan is far more “prestigious” than Clemson. That does not mean that it is far better than Clemson. These are two different metrics.
Like I said, I’ve argued against the OP going to Michigan in his circumstances so far in this thread. I fail to see how this makes me pro-Michigan or anti-Clemson. All I am doing is point out that Michigan has a higher level of prestige based on an existing large sample size, as well as based on my own experiences in dealing with other engineers as an engineer myself, as an engineering graduate student, and as a professor of engineering.
The NCEES exams are all very basic material that any engineer coming from any reputable program should know or should be able to remember relatively easily with a bit of studying. Further, the knowledge transfer between NCEES and Clemson is almost assuredly working in the opposite direction here. Engineering professors and departments are not bound by NCEES exams in terms of what they teach; they are bound by ABET accreditation. ABET sets a fairly high minimum standard that all accredited programs must meet, and then NCEES makes licensure exams that are based on knowledge a student coming from an ABET program should have.
In other words, Clemson professors aren’t going to NCEES, looking at the exams, and then going back to class and teaching the class what to expect. In reality, they are teaching students based on a nationwide standard, then going to NCEES and helping make exams that test students on meeting that standard. Further, there are professors from many universities that consult on those exams, and the standards for passing those exams are widely published such that nearly every university I know of offers some form of exam preparation for passing licensure exams. Additionally, there are almost certainly signed confidentiality agreements between these consulting professors and NCEES, so they aren’t allowed to tell students any more about what is on the exams than what is already publicly available at any other school.
Sure, but my claim goes with the existing consensus that is based on years of data. Your’s refutes that. The burden of proof is on you. So, before you do that, let me reiterate my own position: Clemson is a good engineering program. Clemson’s program is not necessarily any better or worse than the one at Michigan. Michigan has a better brand name by a fairly substantial margin, and therefore is more prestigious, and this say exactly nothing about actual program quality.
I am a licensed electrical engineer, and I never heard any engineer say Michigan has a ‘better brand’ than Clemson.
I don’t recall engineers talking about ‘brands’ of engineering colleges at all.
You’ve provided no evidence that employers view Michigan as having a ‘better brand’ than Clemson. You can make the assertion all day but that is not evidence. I think the burden of proof is on you. You’ve mentioned ‘data’, what is the data?
I never said Clemson professors tell students specific questions on the FE exams. That is a baseless inference that you made.
If the OP wants to work in Michigan or the midwest, it makes more sense to go to Michigan to take advantage of the large alumni network working in the region.
Going to Clemson could give you an advantage if you want to live in the southeast given the large number of Clemson grads working in the region.
Not that I put much stock in this, and it’s pretty far astray from the original topic’s intention, is a Michigan MS worth a gazillion dollars more than Clemson, but I’d think Michigan’s engineering ranking of 5 by USNWR and Clemson’s ranking of 75 pretty well bolster @boneh3ad’s point. The USNWR methodology for engineering is based 100% on institutional reputation as ranked by said institutions. Will that difference make a career earning difference sufficient to offset the massive opportunity cost of the debt? No way.
Why do you keep ignoring when I answer this question. The two largest components of the US News rankings are essentially a survey of the Deans of engineering schools and of companies that recruit from schools that have appeared on the list. Therefore, they are basically a measure of prestige (again, not actually quality, just perceived quality). Those rankings have been published since, I believe, the early 1980s, meaning that’s some 30 years of data on this topic that amounts to a time history of the prestige of various programs. According to that data, Michigan is far and away the more prestigious program (#5 vs #75).
But again, this is not a measure of actual program quality, as I’ve mentioned several times before. ABET ensures that all accredited programs have a pretty high minimum standard. A survey of perceived program strength is just a popularity (or prestige) contest.
You either haven’t talked about it, or haven’t traveled the country much interacting with engineers all over. Clemson’s brand is much stronger in the Southeast than it is, say, in California. Michigan’s brand carries quite a bit of clout globally. At any rate, even at that, this is anecdotal evidence. The data associated with the rankings is actual, hard data that has been publicly available for decades.
First, I never said anything about Clemson professors telling their students “specific questions.” What I said is that they weren’t coming back and giving them insider information about what to expect. At any rate, I will point you to this quote:
So if by that statement you weren’t implying that professors were passing information to their students, then what benefit would this quote actually have for Clemson students? If you don’t think that Clemson professors are passing insider information to their students, then they aren’t providing their students any benefit that professors at other schools cannot also provide. For example, I teach at a school located several time zones away from NCEES headquarters, but I have no problem teaching things that are going to be featured on the FE and PE exams when needed. I don’t have to be able to walk to the NCEES headquarters to be able to do this.
We could debate the relative alumni networks all day, but it seems clear that neither of us are likely to have actual hard data on that issue. I can’t speak to Clemson’s network, but I do know that Michigan’s is not remotely confined to the upper Midwest. It has substantial national and international reach.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: CC is not a debate site. I am closing the thread.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: The OP has requested that I reopen this thread. I will give it a try, but please stick directly to the topic and don’t get into pointless debates.
:)) :)) :))
Thank you @MaineLonghorn 