<p>Those universities all have top flight Engineering programs. I would say salary differences at programs of that level would be due to geography and industry, not quality of program. Company X recruiting students for its offices in region Y would make offers of practically equal value to sudents from all those programs.</p>
<p>I agree with barrons. Salary information is very hard to come by. It is possible to gather salary information of fresh graduates, but even that is going to be spotty atbest.</p>
<p>A reliable source of salaries for employees of the state can be found at most newspapers (this gives salary listing by job title but doesn't specify which university or how many years of experience they have). </p>
<p>Unfortunately, salary is a guessing game and I wasn't prepared for the fact that most people right out of college (in non engineering or finance fields) make under 35K a year. This caused a lot of stress for me and my wife who were counting on making certain amounts of money to repay student loans before grad school. </p>
<p>A good resource would be recently graduated students from the departments you are considering. The administrators for the departments can provide you information for recent graduates.</p>
<p>Take one of the Big 4 accounting firms... they could offer $36,000 for St. Louis and $44,000 for NYC, and $21,000 for Flint, Michigan (JK on the Flint).</p>
<p>Alums of top-ranked programs and univerities on the East Coast, Mid Atlantic and California are going to have higher starting salaries and higher mid-career incomes (on average of course) because the cost of living in the Mid Atlantic, Northeast and California is much higher than the cost of living in the South and Midwest.</p>
<p>Alexandre is correct. For the major aerospace companies, job description and geographic location are the primary factors in determining starting salaries for college new-hires, with some latitude given for the a specfic individual's skill-set. But school name, but itself, is not a factor.</p>
<p>My apology to those associated with the automotive industry and my side reference to Flint, Michigan salaries -- but its funny and sad also how the worm turns. -- in this case because of american arrogance.</p>
<p>In the 1950s or thereabouts, a fellow named Edwards Demming (sp?) espoused systems of continual incremental improvement in production quality. find defects, fix them immediately. little by little one moves toward zero defects.</p>
<p>Detroit thought Demming was a nuisance and pest. So he went to Japan, where he was embraced for his forward thinking and common sense. </p>
<p>And we know the story of the 70s, 80s and 90s. It took Detroit until this decade to get the quality up to acceptable standards. The irony is that now that american cars are very well made indeed, with few defects, the public perception is still one of lower quality with is not justified.</p>