<p>^ [Published</a> in WSJ.](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Salaries_for_Colleges_by_Type-sort.html]Published”>WSJ.com)
Source: The same PayScale, Inc., survey that braden posted.</p>
<p>Hope you’re still around, Blackroses, as I don’t get by here that much anymore.</p>
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For the right student with the right fit for Mudd, yes. It is that great of a school.</p>
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Maybe you could point him to this link for a prof with similar credentials whom my S (who is now two years out of HMC) had freshman year and was very fond of… <a href=“http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dodds/cv.pdf[/url]”>http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dodds/cv.pdf</a></p>
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All true.</p>
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Also true 
.</p>
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Cornell is a great school. It is a prestigious school. It is also cold and can be depressing in the winter, especially for people used to Cali’s wonderful winters or who aren’t into skiing and ice hockey. Forget the airfare; try looking at flight schedules to get you to Ithaca from Cali. :)</p>
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I’ll start with research opportunities. S stayed at HMC to do research one-on-one with a prof during the summer after his frosh year. He ended up as co-author on a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal and was awarded a small external fellowship with a monetary award that went to his dept. For the following summer he applied for NSF-REUs and was accepted to every one. He chose Cornell and spent a fabulous summer in Ithaca, working under one of the top research scientists in the field. The next summer he again had his choice of REUs, all from the most prestigious schools. He chose to spend that summer doing research in Germany and had a ball. He never, at any time, felt that his background academic and research preparation from HMC put him at a disadvantage compared to peers from other schools; if anything, he felt he was as equally or better prepared than his peers. During his senior year at HMC, he presented at a national research conference and won a top award, including a small monetary amount.</li>
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<p>Don’t know how to address “Prestige/Network.” When S was accepted to grad school at Stanford, one of the faculty members he spoke with was an HMC grad who’s now an assistant prof in the dept. Even in Germany, working around top scientists from all over the world, he didn’t meet anyone who hadn’t heard of HMC (and one scientist from China was very familiar with the research of one of his profs at HMC). He’s won two highly competitive graduate fellowships. So the worst you can probably say is that HMC certainly didn’t hurt him. ;)</p>
<p>As for school ranking… I’ll leave that to the myriad sources available on the web. That discussion could (and on this website’s forums often does!) go on forever. Simplest to say that the ones you’ve listed are all top-notch research universities and a very different experience from HMC for an undergrad student. Wherever you wind up, think about using the summers to expand your experience, either uni -> LAC or vice-versa, maybe throwing in an internship at a lab or in industry if you can.</p>
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You’re welcome!</p>
<p>As for graduating statistics (salaries and such),
Every Mudder (before graduation) completes a very extensive survey of his/her experience and plans after graduation. The survey actually is a study set up by UCLA and takes quite some time to fill out…hundreds of questions on scan-tron. (It took me about an hour to complete it)</p>
<p>So those numbers are probably a bit more realistic than you think!</p>