<p>So I'm starting SUNY New Paltz tomorrow, but my dad says I have to transfer out after the first two years to a better school like Penn State or NYU. As an NYC resident, we are saving by me going to a SUNY. However, my dad refuses to pay for the final two years if I don't transfer out, and he says I won't get a job with a degree from SUNY New Paltz? So am I totally screwed?</p>
<p>We’re Californians and my eldest daughter graduated from SUNY Buffalo in 2013 with an EE degree. She came back to California and the industries out here didn’t know a lot about the SUNY system, so initially, she had to prove herself when compared to the UCSD grads during interviews. </p>
<p>She is now working as a “software” engineer for a big international engineering firm and she has blown away the managers who have asked her a LOT about her SUNY education:
Why SUNY Buffalo? Answer: full scholarship,
How did you come up with the idea of a management priority spreadsheet? Answer: it was a requirement of a leadership course that all engineering majors needed to complete at UB.</p>
<p>She was recently promoted to the management track, and her employer is paying for her graduate studies for an MS in CS. She just returned from a management training in Washington DC this past week and she was the youngest trainee there.</p>
<p>Not saying that this will happen for you, but you can share with your parents. We are very proud of her and I keep hearing really good feedback from a third party that our daughter has been a phenomenal addition to the company. </p>
<p>The easiest way to learn about your job prospects is to look at a graduate career survey. I couldn’t find one easily online, but if you go to career services in the fall, you can probably get a sense of where people land after graduating. School name only matters insofar as certain companies only recruit at certain schools; if a company recruits at your school, you can get a job there, and if a company doesn’t do on campus recruiting, you can certainly get a job there regardless of where you went to school.</p>
<p>Your major may matter more than your school in terms of your first job prospects out of school (except for a few industries that are very much into school prestige, like management consulting).</p>
<p>What is your intended major? </p>
<p>There is a step up in quality (and employability) with the major SUNY campuses (Binghamton, Buffalo, Stony Brook, Albany). Why not aim for one of those? You will be just as attractive to employers coming out of those as you would coming out of Penn State or NYU (at a fraction of the cost).</p>
<p><a href=“Why You Can’t Catch Up - The New York Times”>Why You Can’t Catch Up - The New York Times;
<p>Interesting article in Education Life in the NYT that addresses your father’s point. Maybe he saw it a few weeks ago?</p>
<p>Of course, the referenced study starts out with the assumption that no public university could be higher than “Tier 3”. “Tier 1” is about 40 private research universities (e.g. Syracuse), “Tier 2” is about 159 private LACs (e.g. Amherst and Wofford), “Tier 3” is a bunch of public research universities (e.g. Virginia), and “Tier 4” is everything else (e.g. Dartmouth).</p>