ivy league edu for engineering worth $200K?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>From the NYT Opinion Pages "Does It Matter Where You Go to College? " [The</a> Specialization Trade-off - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/11/29/does-it-matter-where-you-go-to-college/the-specialization-trade-off]The”>The Specialization Trade-off - NYTimes.com) :</p>

<p>The average elite university graduate earns almost $54,000 in an entry-level job… [although presumably engineering graduates make more].</p>

<p>From the UT Austin School Cockrell of Engineering website:</p>

<p>Average Annual Starting Salaries , 2009-2010 UT Austin Cockrell School of Engineering
• Aerospace Engr. $58,833
• Architectural Engr. $58,500
• Biomedical Engr. $59,945
• Chemical Engr. $69,790
• Civil Engr. $58,880
• Electrical Engr. $65,717
• Mechanical Engr. $65,072
• Petroleum Engr. $80,879</p>

<p>A starting salary of $54,000 on the east coast is not much. Adjusted for the cost of living it is like making $30,000 to $40,000 here in Texas. And if you are one of the lucky ones in the top half of the Cockrell salary survey, making a starting salary of say $100K in Houston or Midland, that’s like making $140K to $160K in Boston or Stamford CT. In this case it is unlikely that you would ever been able to repay the $120K premium for an Ivy education because the starting salary differential goes the other way, in favor of the education at UT.</p>

<p>Plus you can use merit scholarships and AP credits at publics so the cost may well be less than $80K and you may be able to graduate in less than four years (so you can co-op one or two semesters) or at least you can take a lot more engineering courses than you would at an Ivy if you take credit for AP.</p>

<p>My son was admitted to UT Austin and to a number of Ivy and elite east and west coast schools, he looked at cost of the education vs. starting salary adjusted for the cost of living, and Texas was the best choice by far. Plus the students at the top of the entering class (engineering honors students at Cockrell) generally receive scholarships, some of them covering the full cost of tuition. There are a number of excellent public engineering schools, but not all are located in areas of the country where the economy is unscathed at the present time, and not all of them offer substantial merit scholarships to students ranked at the top of the class. Cockrell undergraduates (first-year and current students) received more than $4 million in merit-based awards in 2009.</p>

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<p>If you want to actually pursue a career as an engineer, in say the defense sector, then going to a state flagship is an excellent idea. I think that these schools have better student life and atmosphere than the top privates.</p>

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<p>Ivies are terrible for engineering majors. There are much better alternatives (UC Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, UMichigan, Georgia Tech, UT Austin) that are either equally priced or cheaper who are much better suited for engineering majors. </p>

<p>I think someone might’ve mentioned this, but again the only ivy worth going to is Cornell if you want to do engineering.</p>

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<p>State schools are cheaper only if you reside in one of the states in question. What if you don’t? The vast majority of Americans do not live in one of those states. </p>

<p>Furthermore, even if you do, depending on your financial status, the financial aid packages at the Ivies are often times so lavish as to make the costs actually less than your state school. That’s right - less. </p>

<p>*Jennie D’Amico first heard the news in an ecstatic e-mail from her father in Brewer, Maine. It was December 2007—the middle of her sophomore year—and Harvard had just announced a range of new financial-aid policies aimed at easing the strain on middle- and upper-middle- income families like hers. The bottom line for D’Amico’s parents: their expected contribution would plunge from a little more than $30,000 per year to about $13,000. It was, she says, "sort of, ‘Wow, Harvard now costs less for me than the University of Maine’,</p>

<p>…Parents in the $120,000 bracket, for instance, will now pay about $7,000 less for a child studying at Harvard than at the University of California system, according to figures compiled by the Project on Student Debt.*</p>

<p>[College</a> Guide: Financial Aid for the Middle Class - Newsweek](<a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/2008/08/08/a-financial-earthquake.html]College”>College Guide: Financial Aid for the Middle Class)</p>

<p>A California student whose family earns $90,000 pays around $25,000 in total costs at UC; the same student entering Harvard in the fall would pay about $6,300 to $10,300.</p>

<p><a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120846172336223781.html[/url]”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120846172336223781.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>what is the income range for a middle upper class family like the one ^ you are describing?</p>

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<p>gunster, do you realize how silly you sound here?</p>

<p>out of about 200 undergraduate Engineering departments in universities with PhD programs, Cornell and Princeton’s Engineering departments rank 8th and 11th, respectively in USNWR.</p>

<p>Then when comparing Cornell with Princeton Engineering, you have to look at the specific department, for Princeton has certain Engineering departments that are better than Cornell’s, such as Chemical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering where Princeton is ranked in the top ten and Cornell in the 15-20 range.</p>

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<p>Sakky, our experience was that the great financial aid from the Ivies is for those with the appropriate income and asset level and at least TWO students in college. For families with substantial assets or only one student in college (as well as for those with higher income levels) the Ivy financial aid packages are in fact much less impressive. Moreover, the Ivies to which my son was admitted included as part of the aid package a student contribution from summer earnings which was rather high compared to what an average student could make at a minimum wage job (if the student could find employment at all in today’s distressed economy!) and a requirement to work a campus job. Another factor that many students are not aware of (and which may be an issue for top students) is that merit scholarships are generally of little use at an institution like the Ivies where aid is in the form of need-based aid rather than merit aid. We were told by Stanford, Princeton and Yale that these outside scholarships could be used only to offset the student on-campus work requirement and the summer work requirement. For many students that means that a minimal amount of outside scholarships can be utilized at an Ivy. Finally, a factor that really bothered me about need-based aid at the Ivies and elsewhere is that there is little auditing and verification of the information reported. I was completely truthful on the applications, but due to the huge payoff I imagine that many people are tempted not to be honest, and if so the system rewards untruthfulness.</p>

<p>As for the statement that “state schools are cheaper only if you reside in one of the states in question,” this is absolutely not the case. For top out of state students the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M do in fact give in-state tuition to those who receive at least $1,000 in merit scholarships from the university or the department, although there is a cap on the number of vouchers allocated to each department. Students admitted to the engineering honors program at UT Austin are likely to receive such a scholarship if SAT scores are high enough, and National Merit finalists and semifinalists automatically receive generous scholarships at Texas A&M along with an in-state tuition package. Although UT Austin does not give merit scholarships at the university level any longer, several departments in addition to engineering do have scholarships which would qualify the student for consideration for in-state tuition. In addition under current Texas law (although there is talk of changing this rule) residency to qualify for in-state tuition can be established by purchasing real estate in Texas. Wealthy out of state residents will purchase a condo for the student in Austin or College Station, thereby qualifying for in-state tuition, and the student will rent the extra bedrooms to other students to offset real estate taxes and other expenses. Buying a vacation condo on Padre Island would probably also qualify for the tuition break. For engineering students interested in employment in the energy industry, Texas A&M and UT Austin are ranked #1 and #2 in national rankings for petroleum engineering; UT Austin has seven engineering programs ranked in the top ten nationally. For select engineering students in-state tuition is available at Georgia Tech and Michigan as well, although only a handful of these scholarship opportunities are available. My son received this package from both schools. We looked at only publics with top ranked engineering programs; I would imagine that other lower-ranked state schools have lower standards for the in-state tuition vouchers. </p>

<p>A final factor to consider in the Ivy vs. public analysis is that the big salaries one hears of for Ivy grads are not starting salaries and are likely due to the graduate degrees (law, medicine and business) that Ivy grads traditionally pursue after graduation. If you have to add in the cost of a graduate degree in order to get a good job, an Ivy League education may not be a bargain even if financed with substantial financial aid. A case in point is Cornell, which has a respected engineering program. Statistics for their 2009 engineering grads: 38.6% employed, 42.4% attending graduate school, and 19.0% involved in “other endeavors” which includes travel, volunteering and job search. Or consider Dartmouth graduates, who have the highest mid-career median salaries in the nation. 2009 salary statistics for Dartmouth bachelor’s degree recipients show a median starting salary of $40,000 and a range of income from $2,500 to $100,000. (That $40,000 median starting salary in the Northeast adjusted for the cost of living equates to under $30,000 here in Texas and this income level certainly makes it nearly impossible to pay off any college debt.) Dartmouth graduates apparently generally go on to graduate and professional schools in order to command the impressive mid-career salaries.</p>

<p>My son chose to attend the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT Austin because it is ranked #5 in the nation in his major, because the engineering placement office is strong, because the cost of attending after the merit aid package was less than the cost of attending an Ivy with need-based aid, and because Austin is a great college town. If he decides to go on to graduate or professional school I do not believe that his chances of admission are any less than they would have been with the Ivy degree.</p>

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<p>“Dartmouth graduates apparently generally go on to graduate and professional schools in order to command the impressive mid-career salaries.”</p>

<p>Yes a large number of them do, and all of those individuals are excluded from the mid-career salary survey you were probably looking at, which considers only people with terminal bachelor’s degrees. If it was that Payscale thing.</p>

<p>“If you have to add in the cost of a graduate degree in order to get a good job, an Ivy League education may not be a bargain …”</p>

<p>True, if you have to, and you otherwise wouldn’t have to.
But consider that possibly some material portion of those people don’t actually have to get a graduate degree, but rather they want to, to get to a more desired (and maybe more lucrative) ultimate destination, and they can. Maybe there are people at some other schools who would share their priorities, but can’t get into those same graduate programs at the same rate, and that is why immediate employment is disproportionately more the best option for those people. Possibly.</p>

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<p>Opportunity Value$ of Education (thread title, mine, so I won’t quote)</p>

<p>DS calls M and informs her that he thinks that he could have gone to a OOS or local university instead of his undergrad education at an ranked engineering, private school.</p>

<p>Background:
DS did very well in public HS, NMS. His M tells him that he should try for the top schools, for which he does. I tell him when he was a hs junior, that he should not let money be an issue for his undergrad education. We had initially funded an UGMA and its investment did very well up to 9/11. He applies to top engineering schools and gets in to a few of them. Our assets and his UGMA puts us at full pay and his education is eventually funded by loans and the UGMA. He finishes undergrad with a slight net positive balance. The UGMA functions as envisioned 21 years prior. DS does very well as an undergrad and gets into a funded, MS program at a ranked, world university. He obtains multiple global internships from big company. He finds employment at a ranked, nearby OOS, as Staff, assisting grad students and postdocs complete their projects besides doing special gofer work for the PI. </p>

<p>The message he gives us.
DS tells W and says that after his undergrad, the grad school, the internships, and the university where he is works, have smart students who are from not so well known, state, and private universities. He rarely comes across people who have his educational pedigree. He says that perhaps he could’ve gone to a less expensive undergrad university and saved his educational trust fund for other stuff.</p>

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<p>All of these problems are also just as true - and arguably even more so - at the public schools. For example, let’s face it, surely plenty of people fudge their data to get financial aid from public schools. The problem is almost surely worse there given the relatively fewer anti-fraud resources per student that public schools have to ferret out such abuse. Many (probably most) public schools also place strict limits on the amount of outside scholarships one can utilize without impinging on your financial aid. Public school financial aid packages are also heavily affected by how many other children the family may be paying for. {And, to be honest, if you have a high income and are paying for only one child, I frankly don’t have that much sympathy for you. After all, I don’t come from a family with a high income. } </p>

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<p>Interesting that you would bring this up, after formerly decrying the lack of auditing and verification regarding Ivy financial aid systems. Seems to me that you’re agreeing that plenty of fraud seems to happen with the public schools as well. </p>

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<p>Then by that standard, I think I should now be allowed to invoke the example of my brother. He could have gone to a state school and paid in-state tuition. I assume that he probably could have obtained a merit scholarship that would have made him eligible for in-state tuition at one of the Texas state schools as well.</p>

<p>He did none of that. Instead, he went to Caltech, who offered him a full merit scholarship with stipend. That’s right - merit. In other words, instead of having to pay to attend a state school, he got paid. </p>

<p>So the point is, if you want to talk about exceptional OOS students qualifying for in-state tuition via merit scholarships at state schools, then I think I’m allowed to talk about exceptional students qualifying for merit scholarships at top private schools. If you work hard, you can get one of those scholarships. My brother certainly worked very hard. </p>

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<p>Then by that token, I can say that surely plenty of lower-ranked private schools have relatively low standards for full merit rides. I am quite certain that my brother - having obtained a full merit ride at Caltech - could have surely obtained a full ride at plenty of lower-ranked private schools. </p>

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<p>And that might carry significant weight if indeed top engineering students actually wanted to work as engineers. Yet, as I have discussed on numerous threads on CC, the sad truth is that many engineering students at top schools such as MIT and Stanford - do not actually want to work as engineers at all, but instead opt for other careers, such as finance or consulting. </p>

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<p>But often times they are starting salaries, such as in the aforementioned finance and consulting positions which hire directly out of undergrad.</p>

<p>Consider the lamentations of Nicholas Pearce:</p>

<p>Even at M.I.T., the U.S.'s premier engineering school, the traditional career path has lost its appeal for some students. Says junior Nicholas Pearce, a chemical-engineering major from Chicago: “It’s marketed as–I don’t want to say dead end but sort of ‘O.K., here’s your role, here’s your lab, here’s what you’re going to be working on.’ Even if it’s a really cool product, you’re locked into it.” Like Gao, Pearce is leaning toward consulting. “If you’re an M.I.T. grad and you’re going to get paid $50,000 to work in a cubicle all day–as opposed to $60,000 in a team setting, plus a bonus, plus this, plus that–it seems like a no-brainer.”</p>

<p>Read more: [Are</a> We Losing Our Edge? - TIME](<a href=“http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156575-6,00.html#ixzz17aeWOU3Z]Are”>http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156575-6,00.html#ixzz17aeWOU3Z)</p>

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<p>Sakky, my intent was to compare merit packages at public institutions against financial aid packages for the middle class at HPYS. We used up all college savings while my husband was out of work for three years but since he is finally working again (although just a few years from retirement age) we qualify for little financial aid even with the generous formula used by HPYS due to the fact that we have two in college only one of the four years. We qualifed for zero grants (only loans) from public universities, which are much less generous than the Ivies, and to accept financial aid would cause my son to lose substantial outside scholarship money anyway. </p>

<p>I had my son pick three of the four HPYS institutions and nine others (both public and private) which I expected to give him substantial merit aid, three from the top twenty national universities list and six ranked in the top twenty in engineering. (I was concerned that employment or graduate school prospects might suffer at schools too much farther down on either list, so arbitrarily looked at only the top twenty.) He was admitted to all and received about $1.1 million altogether in aid offers from these twelve schools, of which $250,000 was anticipated need-based aid from the three HPYS schools and the remainder was merit scholarships, generally full tuition for four years from the private colleges and out of state tuition waiver from the public universities. Unfortunately Caltech was not on our list because it does not give merit scholarships to undergraduate students. (Caltech gives purely need-based aid now, just like the Ivies.) However, his list contained several schools ranked in the top ten in his engineering major. I looked long and hard but did not find anything approaching a full ride of the sort you describe at an elite school in the league of Caltech, MIT or HPYS. (Of course graduate study in STEM subjects is a different story.) </p>

<p>The best financial deal I found for engineers (and all National Merit Scholars out there can probably get almost this much) was a full ride at Texas A&M, which has some good engineering programs and very good employment prospects due to an extremely strong alumni network. However, I felt that the best value for an engineering student was UT Austin, where the cost of tuition and room and board after engineering scholarships can be as low as $10,000 a year for both in-state and out-of-state students, where placement is very strong, where preference is given to UT Austin undergrads applying to the highly ranked UT Austin engineering graduate programs (in the form of a lower GPA requirement) and where starting salaries are quite high. The UT Austin engineering degree means a lot in Texas, and less on the east and west coasts, but most of the jobs are in Texas anyway. The average starting salary for 2009-2010 UT Austin engineers of $66,570 earned in the Houston, Texas area equates to $106,264 in Stamford, CT after cost of living adjustment (according to cnnmoney.com ), and $90,000 starting salary for UT Austin engineers hired by the majors in the energy field equates to $143,665 in Stamford, CT. Energy companies also often pay a substantial hiring bonus in addition to this salary, for a total first year package equivalent to over $165,000 in Stamford, CT. As an aside, my older son’s MIT interviewer said that in my son’s case UT Austin would be a better choice than MIT given his goals. I would not suggest that anyone apply to UT Austin unless entering an honors program; the rest of the university is quite different. </p>

<p>Of course as you suggest, someone who qualifies for a better financial aid package than my son did at private colleges (and who could therefore perhaps attend an elite college at no cost) and someone who can afford to pay $200,000 plus for an undergraduate education would both likely have a completely different analysis than I. And my son has nothing but good impressions of Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Wash U. Vandy, Rice, U Mich, Georgia Tech and the other great schools that accepted him. They are all wonderful schools, he would have had an incredible education and doubtless would have been very happy at any one of them, but unfortunately he had to narrow his list to only one university, and his decision was made easier because money was an issue for us and because need-based aid packages were not as generous as we initially expected them to be. </p>

<p>For out-of state students thinking of applying to a Texas school, I’d like to clarify that buying real estate in Texas is specified under the Texas Education Code (Title 19, Part 1, Chapter 21, Subchapter B, Rule 21.24) as a method of obtaining resident status and access to the out-of-state tuition waiver program, so it is in no way fraudulent to do so. This is a second way to obtain in-state tuition, in addition to the tuition waiver given to scholarship recipients, and it is my impression that med school students from out of state often purchase a condo near the medical school to utilize this provision. Potential engineering students who have been accepted to a number of Ivies and are therefore reading this thread are likely however to have high enough SAT scores to obtain an engineering honors scholarship and therefore qualify for in-state tuition at UT Austin. Moreover I would strongly suggest living in honors housing in order to avoid the typical UT Austin student (enrolled in neither honors nor engineering) who contributes to the university’s reputation as one of the nation’s top party schools. Unfortunately the university as a whole has little discretion regarding whom to admit due to the state’s top ten percent rule guaranteeing state university admission to the top of the class at any high school statewide, no matter how poorly these students have performed on the SAT or in mastering the subject matter that is supposed to be taught in high school. Fortunately engineering students will not interact with such students in classes, or in the honors dorms.</p>

<p>Finally, your point that some engineering students have no intention of practicing engineering is an excellent one. For these students the university’s placement record in prestigious graduate and professional programs or placement record in fields such as finance and consulting would be areas to evaluate in ranking college choices in lieu of evaluating hiring outlook and salary levels in engineering. For us the deciding factors were that UT Austin is ranked #5 nationally in chemical engineering, the merit aid is generous for engineering honors students ($4 million in merit-based awards in 2009), the starting salaries seem extremely competitive, and the graduate programs in engineering are strong (seven departments are top ten nationally, both the graduate and undergraduate programs). I hope we made the right decision; it is frightening to think how one’s life changes based on which fork in the road one chooses. For my older son (also a ChemE major) the decision to attend UT Austin has been a very good one.</p>

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We’ve had this discussion before, but Caltech gives exceptionally few merit scholarships. I believe last year’s freshman class received a total of four. On the other hand, every single National Merit Finalist who applies to Texas A&M will receive a very generous scholarship package.

There are not a whole lot of less-selective private schools that can match the engineering reputation or alumni connections available at Texas A&M. That’s not to say that they don’t exist - Northeastern comes to mind as a possibility, thanks to their innovative coop program. But - in general - the advantages of the private school over the public evaporate as selectivity decreases.

And - as we have discussed before - this argument is a strawman. I would never tell someone with the clear goal of becoming a banker or consultant that Texas A&M is just as good as Harvard because - for them - it isn’t. Mr Payne clearly addressed this issue in the second post in this thread:

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<p>In case anyone is hoping to work hard enough to qualify for that full ride plus stipend from Caltech, here is the answer from the Caltech website: merit-based scholarship funds are not available for freshman applicants.</p>

<p>DO YOU OFFER MERIT SCHOLARSHIPS [AT CALTECH]?</p>

<p>In order to strengthen our need-based financial aid program even further, we have redirected our freshman merit-based scholarship programs to our need-based financial aid program, effective with the class that entered in September 2009. [Frequently</a> Asked Questions - Caltech Caltech Undergraduate Admissions](<a href=“http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/faqs#scholarships]Frequently”>http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/faqs#scholarships)</p>