<p>Most of these discussions are biased and subjective. It is clear that many contributors have a preference for one school or the other and base their arguments on subjective points. Lets look at the facts and then you could base your assumption on that. If we make the assumption that starting salaries are a pretty good indicator of how employers rate a particular school and hence how “good” a school is, then we would rank MIT slightly ahead of Rose according to payscale.com who gave the average starting salaries of MIT at $68,600 vs. RHIT at $65,100 for 2013.
Yet its not that easy, when we look at where the students work after graduation we see that the majority of the MIT grads work in Massachusetts or NY while the majority of the RHIT grads work in Indiana or Illinois. For argument sake lets say Chicago vs. Boston.
Now things take a slightly different perspective, $68k in Boston is the equivalent to $56k in Chicago according to the CNN cost of living calculator.
What that tells me is employers are actually paying a premium for RHIT students, they obviously know the costs of living is less in the Midwest but still pay up for these students, over 9k.
So MIT may have the international rep and the headlines but employers are telling us that some relatively small school in the Midwest is producing graduates they are willing to pay a premium over MIT grads for. Quite frankly I was not familiar with Rose but apparently Google, Microsoft and the NSA are. I spoke to admissions recently just for the heck of it, (I have a son looking at engineering schools in 2016 and was bent on him going to CM or MIT) and apparently CS majors last year were getting incredible offers and the avg was close to 80k…</p>
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<p>Let’s stop you right there. This is not a good metric. The logic you use to draw your conclusions almost makes sense until you look at the geographic distributions of salaries for graduates of a single school and realize that, when adjusted for cost of living, those graduates often make more in the Midwest.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say RHIT is bad. Salary just is not just not really a good way to measure school quality. RHIT is still a fantastic school. It is so different than MIT though that I don’t see a really good way to compared the two. Suffice it to say you will have plenty of opportunity for success coming from either program.</p>
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There are a few problems with this analysis.</p>
<p>First, the geographic distribution of graduates is not identical (as you noted) nor homogenous (as you approximated). While it is indeed likely that RHIT grads are on average going to areas with lower costs of living, putting a number on that difference is quite complex. Your number is not much better than a stab in the dark.</p>
<p>Second, the employment outcomes from these schools may well be quite different. Salary surveys do a poor job of addressing those students who go into grad school (as so many MIT grads do), or who gamble a bit by entering or creating a start-up company. On the first point alone, an MIT student is about twice as likely to go to grad school as an RHIT student (39% vs 20%), and payscale.com specifically omits those with grad degrees! </p>
<p>Third, none of this data comes from scientific surveys, they are all through opt-in reporting of salary data. It is a bit risky to place too much reliance on this kind of information.</p>
<p>No Kendall Square at Terre Haute. 'nuff said :)</p>
<p>MIT is a great school, IF it is the right fit for a student. But for most students comparisons are a moot point since more than 90% of applicants are rejected. </p>
<p>The accepted students should by all means visit during the school year - MIT was at the top of DS’s list until he returned for a February visit. He just didn’t like the vibe. He far preferred schools with undergrad, project emphasis - like Olin and Mudd. (He never warmed to the location of RH / Terre Haute). It’s all about fit. </p>
<p>Note that students who are accepted at MIT (or are almost good enough to be accepted) will have terrific merit scholarship opportunities elsewhere.</p>
<p>MIT does have a great undergraduate research opportunities program (UROP). It is not required but I would highly recommend it. When I was there (many moons ago), I took part in a UROP project that was funded by NASA. It was a small group and we got a lot of face time with one of the senior profs who was heading the project. It was cutting edge research and a couple of guys turned it into their MS and PhD research. I got credit for it during the school year and it became, basically, a paid internship over the summer.</p>
<p>MIT, IMHO, places more emphasis on research than teaching. To go their and not participate in a research project of some kind is really wasting a good opportunity.</p>
<p>I’ll agree that the location of RHIT leaves a lot to be desired. Here in Indiana it’s known as “Terrible Haute”</p>
<p>Once again lets try and stay objective. The labor markets are efficient and a excellent measure of a schools quality in spite of bone heads’ statement, “This is not a good metric.” I would argue it is the most important metric. Certainly better than ACT scores or subjective opinions. After al,l it is what employers are saying graduates are worth after they graduate and if it is not a “schools quality” call it “marketable skills”, in either case it is meaningful and key measure.
The facts are employers are consistently paying a market premium for Rose grads especially when you weigh in the regional cost of living statistics. WHY?
They obviously agree with bone heads brilliant deduction, “that does not mean RHIT is bad.”</p>
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I do not disagree that it is a good metric, I just disagree with putting much value behind what is really a pretty minimal attempt to sample it. What is the confidence in those unscientifically obtained, geographically blind, graduate-degree-excluding numbers you noted? It is like saying “speed is an important measure of a car” and then judging cars by the morning commute times people post on your facebook page.</p>
<p>The only way it’s a good metric is if you restrict the scope to the desirability of each school’s graduates in single industries in single geographic areas. Otherwise you have the influence of geography playing a much larger role than the quality of the school. You have to restrict it by industry, too, because obviously you could compare all the investment bankers from MIT to the traditional engineers from RHIT and come up with a wildly skewed result.</p>
<p>This is why I say it is a bad metric. There are too many other forces at work here that affect a graduate’s salary besides the school he or she attended, and you have to account for that. Blind salary comparisons, especially from self-reported website surveys like Payscale, do not account for any of that and so are not a good metric for determining school quality.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I never said ACT/SAT scores or subjective opinion were better measures or even in any way valid. In fact, if you really want to know my take on what is a valid and objective measure, I’d say that I’m not aware of one that exists. This is why, and you can fact-check this, I always advocate that students select a school by matching it to their career goals and not based on an arbitrary ranking system.</p>