<p>I am a high school student thinking about maybe engineering as a major. </p>
<p>My question is how different are engineering programs at tech schools like RPI, Stevens, or Drexel to those of schools like elite private schools not necessarily known for engineering like vanderbilt, Wash U and notre dame. </p>
<p>I know notre dame and vandy are more prestigious than stevens or drexel overall, but is that true in the engineering world ? Do people actually pick schools such as stevens over elite privates ?</p>
<p>The downside to STEM schools is that if you change your mind about majoring in engineering or science, you may need to transfer in order to find a good program in your new major. That varies a lot though depending on the school and the second major of course. </p>
<p>There is also a difference in atmosphere. My son liked the “nerdier” vibe of the STEM schools over the atmospheres at schools where engineers are a minority. This isn’t right or wrong thing, it depends on your personality and what you are looking for.</p>
<p>Well all three of those schools you mentioned as not being know for engineering are actually pretty well-respected for engineering. With the exception of RPI, those three would probably be the top 3 engineering programs you mentioned.</p>
<p>In general, though, in the engineering world, engineering rankings matter far more than overall rankings.</p>
<p>The problem is that outside of New England, Stevens is relatively unheard of. I had never heard of it until maybe a year ago (I graduated with my BS 4 years ago). From what I hear, it is a pretty well-respected school up there in the northeast, but if you are looking for job in another region, it won’t likely carry a lot of weight compared to somewhere like Vandy, which actually does have a pretty good engineering program. If you are trying to get a job in the NYC area, then I bet Stevens has one of the best reputations out of that group.</p>
<p>I’m an electrical engineer for one of the major microcontroller/microprocessor manufacturers of the world. You’ll only need one hand and not all the fingers when you count down from #1. We are based in Silicon Valley, but obviously have a strong presence worldwide.</p>
<p>After telling people my son was considering Stevens, I found quite a few alum and continue to find them. There are several Stevens graduates within our company’s ranks, including a senior director based out West and a senior product line manager based in Germany. I continue to find them scattered around in many companies, usually in high ranking positions, but that could be a function of how many people know where you went to school. I would think the more people report to you, the more people will know your background. Also, the higher up you get, the more your bio is posted for various events. People tend to know where their boss went to school, but rarely can tell you where the guy, two cubicles over, went to school.</p>
<p>While it is true you’ll find most Stevens graduates in the Northeast corridor, this is true of any University located in a metro area. If you contact the placement offices of schools like Stevens, Northeastern, NYU Poly, Columbia (Fu Foundation) or any other engineering school based in a large city, you’ll find very similar percentages of graduates staying local. Does that mean the schools like Columbia or NYU only have local appeal? I think not.</p>
<p>The near constant exposure to the ubiquitous and varied local tech companies results in lots varied opportunities and job offers. Couple that with the fact that many of these metro-based students are already locals, it all makes sense.</p>
<p>The schools located out in the middle of nowhere will have a wider geographic distribution. Not because they have a more national appeal, but because their students are not locals (a lot go home after graduation) and there are not enough local jobs in the school’s region for their graduates. You’ll hear people on cc telling you how wonderful these particular schools are and how universal the respect for them is… based on this geographic distribution. But in fact, if you check with their placement office, you’ll often find lower placement rates than schools in metro areas. This is an exercise I did a couple of years ago, when we were first looking into schools for my son. You’ll also find higher than normal rates of students staying on for graduate work. IMHO, this correlates with the lack of jobs for these graduates.</p>
<p>Of course, based on the fact that your location is listed as Metro NY, that implies that you company obviously has a large presence in Metro NY and will therefore be much more familiar with the local schools than a company without any meaningful presence there. That goes the same for any company in any field in any region. For example, I used to work in Indianapolis for Rolls-Royce, and they hired a lot of people from places like IUPUI, which is not somewhere many places from outside the region hire from, yet here was a major engineering company hiring frequently from their ranks.</p>
<p>You see that all the time. A company, no matter where it is based, will tend to have plenty of employees from smaller and less-known schools within the geographic footprint of all of its major locations. Because of that, I don’t necessarily find your example to be very compelling in refuting what I said.</p>
<p>Now, to be clear, I am not trying to trash Stevens. By all accounts, it appears to be a pretty good school. Its recruiting footprint is absolutely more limited than, say, Purdue though.</p>
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<p>You just named off a bunch of small, largely regional schools. No go look at other examples like UCLA, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Texas and the likes and see if that still holds. They are all in large metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Detroit, and Austin) but have much larger geographic reach than the schools you cited. Those schools absolutely have more of a limited national appeal than the ones I just listed, and not necessarily because they are any worse or weaker.</p>
<p>It is more about cost versus benefit for the companies doing the hiring. If they have a limited budget to go recruiting, they are going to go to the schools whose graduates they most desire for one reason or another. Using Stevens as an example, it is fairly unknown outside the region, so there are a relatively large proportion of the students from the region originally, and therefore it doesn’t pay off as much for a company from California with no NYC office to go recruit there when most recruits are pretty firmly rooted in the northeast. It just turns into somewhat of a self-fulfilling cycle. The larger schools with the national name recognition are not necessarily better than the more regional schools, but they have been at it for a long time and are well-known around the country so they get students from all over and students that tend to be more willing to move all over so it makes more sense for the more national companies to spend their recruitment dollars recruiting those schools.</p>
<p>In other words, there are great schools that you can attend in both of these groups and both of these groups certainly serve an important purpose. I absolutely don’t discourage students from going to a place like Stevens. I merely try to make it known that there tends to be a difference in the companies recruiting at each type of school and to take that into account when choosing a college. In the end, the best school for an individual is the one that is simultaneously comfortable to them and provides them with the sorts of opportunities they are looking for after graduation.</p>
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<p>Now it is my turn to say something you claim is rubbish. This is rubbish. I will start with the first part of this quote. In doing my undergraduate work at UIUC, there were regional companies clamoring for UIUC grads at the career fair. Lots of Chicago companies were there trying to recruit, but most of my friends went elsewhere anyway and a lot of those companies end up hiring from regional schools pretty heavily as well to supplement the crop they dragged in from the places like UIUC.</p>
<p>As for placement rates, that is a statistic that I don’t tend to trust from any school. For one, they rarely clearly describe what criteria they use to determine if a student has been successfully “placed” upon graduation. Second, the data is self-reported, so it is not necessarily a representative sample. The true data may show exactly what you claim, but we have no real way of knowing that and schools generally are somewhat misleading about their placement statistics. That goes for big schools, too. I am an equal-opportunity mistruster in this case.</p>
<p>Finally, in my humble opinion, your humble opinion here is way off. Out of all the graduate students I know, including myself, probably 90% or more of them stayed on for graduate school because, get this, they wanted to go to graduate school. Many people who have never done graduate school take a cynical view of why people go on to graduate school instead of getting a job, but by and large, the vast majority of graduate students want to be there as their first choice (at least initially; plenty burn out quickly and can’t wait to peace out). Many if not most of them (myself included) had one or more job offers and still chose graduate school. I know I did, and that was even right at the beginning of the recession.</p>
<p>The most important thing about an engineering education is that your program is ABET accredited. Lots of good engineering programs can be found in large publics, Tech schools, mid or small privates and so on. You have to consider what the overall culture of the school is and whether it fits you, how certain you are that you will study engineering and not decide to change to philosophy (for example), and whether you are interested in eventually getting an advanced degree. All these considerations should go into your decision making long with the financial realities.</p>
<p>In terms of finding a job after graduation, internships are important and a co-op program can sometimes be valuable in this regard. If you are interested in finding a job near a major metropolitan area, a university in that area may be advantageous.</p>
Boy-O-boy, do you have it wrong. Corporate headquarters are in Silicon Valley. Major engineering locations are in one other city in the US (several hours flight from New York), Europe and Asia. As for our New York presence, that would be my living room. Yeah, I work out of my home now. Been with the company over 20 years. Perk of the job/position/seniority. So much for your assumptions.</p>
<p>Also, I guess you completely ignored the fact that two Stevens alums, a Senior Director and Senior Product Line Manager were based out West and in Europe, respectively.</p>
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<p>Two things…
First, how the heck can you consider Columbia and NYU “small, largely regional schools”?!? I intentionally threw those into the mix because of not only their national fame, but world-wide fame. How can you not know these universities? One of them is an Ivy, for Pete’s sake. The other is… well… it’s friggin’ NYU! ;-)</p>
<p>Second, none of the locations you selected holds a candle to the Northeast Megalopolis. Heck, they can’t even compete with the MetroNY area alone (8.3M, not including ANY suburbs!). Even LA, the second most populated city (3.8M) in the country after New York, is only between one third and one half the size. You have to combine both LA and San Diego to finally break past 50% of the population.</p>
<p>Atlanta has less than half a million people and is truly isolated. Detroit is pushing three quarters of a million and is also isolated. Austin probably comes closest with “local” opportunities in Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, San Antonio, and even New Orleans. Combined they rise up to just under 6M, but again, that’s just competing against New York, when we really need to consider the megalopolis from Baltimore to Boston. BTW, it’s called a megalopolis because of the overall density of population, even in between the cites. In New Jersey, you have people living in the same suburb commuting to Philly or NYC. Saying 8.3M for New York is a sin. There are actually over 18M people living in a 75 miles radius of Columbus Circle… and that data as 7 years old.</p>
<p>So again, the colleges on your list MUST export students, because their local economies can’t handle them all nearly as well as megalopolis schools can. Also, those remote schools are large, well known primarily for their large presence in college sports, and attract students from all over the country. These students tend to return to their regions of origin after graduation, making it appear as if companies from all over are recruiting them. Although there is certainly recruitment going on, the results are amplified because there is also the function of where these kids are looking for jobs. </p>
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<p>We’ll have to agree to disagree. I believe most of the schools on your list NEED recruitment days/fairs because they are not co-located with ubiquitous opportunities. There is a need to import them for their students. They way they do that is to make it convenient for companies to recruit… make a fair and present all their students at once.</p>
<p>And if you were a company, where would you spend your bucks? …at a school you KNEW most of the students have to leave, or at a school where you knew you had to compete with the the myriad opportunities of the megalopolis?</p>
<p>Although the megalopolis schools also have recruiting days/fairs, they are not nearly as dependent on these events to find spots for their graduates. There is near constant interaction with regional, national and international corporations in places like Baltimore/Washington, Philadelphia, New York City and Boston that simply can’t be dreamed of anywhere else. The whole school year is a placement/job fair.</p>
<p>As for graduate school…
Well… It’s fact that more kids stayed on for graduate school, due to lack of jobs, when the recession hit. If you look at these schools placement records for the percentage of students going for graduate degrees, you’ll find a higher percentage of kids staying for graduate school in remote areas than in metro areas. And that is comparing like for like schools, as much as that is possible. </p>
<p>Why would that be? Similar academic exclusivity (as per average HS GPAs). Similar cost. One can assume similar socioeconomic positions. Why would such similar populations of students decide such dissimilar paths? Coupled with the lower placement percentages overall for the remote schools, I come to my opinion about why graduate school percentages are different.</p>
<p>May I ask how your opinion takes these data points into consideration? Or are you suggesting the remote kids just want graduate school more than metro kids do. Wait, I forgot you conveniently blasted the placement statistics from all schools as utterly unreliable. So you’re actually saying all the metro schools are liars and they don’t have better stats than the remote schools. My mistake.</p>
<p>I thought that most people go to grad school because they want to go to grad school. Most people who can’t find a job usually can’t get into grad school. </p>
<p>Second, I think you can easily find high level people from many many different undergrad schools.</p>
<p>I know in the schools I’ve been associated with the number of graduate applications fluctuate with the economy. When it’s down, more people apply. The number of students accept also, usually, goes down as funding from government entities and companies get tighter.</p>
<p>I suppose it may be different for unfunded MS programs, though. Maybe the excess of Starbucks in large metropolitan areas provide ample career opportunities, so their students don’t need to worry about a grad degree.</p>
<p>Sorry I’m interrupting. I wanted to ask this because I just felt that people here are experienced enough to answer my question.</p>
<p>Do electrical engineering graduates with above 3.6 GPA from Chicago get recruited for high paid jobs (typically $90,000-$110,000) without much difficulty? Or is that something that happens only in a dream? Chicago is also a large metropolitan area, isn’t it?</p>
<p>EDIT: I think the college plays a big part here. I’m talking about Illinois Institute of Technology.</p>
<p>If you’re talking about starting salaries, I think you need to reset your expectations. Think more like $55K to $65K and be happy if you get an opportunity to make more. This will vary with your location more than your school.</p>
<p>Contrary to quite a few of the opinions on this site, where you went to school is not the primary defining factor. Make sure you go to an ABET accredited school is the #1 priority. Getting decent grades and doing CoOps/Internships is also key. Make sure you’re involved with some challenging research projects. If you can’t get something officially, get a few buddies together and do something on your own… and do something impressive/difficult/time-consuming… not “yet another” quad-copter. Show us you haven’t spent all your free time playing games on your computer or XBOX. We look for people who appear to love electronics and want a life that included electronic design. </p>
<p>Impressive work history and an obvious love for your chosen field will often trump even the best school’s pedigree. </p>
<p>Once you’re 5 years out of college, nobody will even care where you came from. It’s all experience and capabilities after that.</p>
<p>Engineering is not like other fields. Your pedigree only goes so far. It’s one of the few professions in which you are tested every day. It’s actually quite a maverick field. If you’re good at what you do, you’ll excel and finances will not be an issue, unless you’re foolish financially… or marry the wrong women. ;-)</p>
<p>No. There has been a recent spike in grad school enrollment due to the economy. Kids coming out of school couldn’t find jobs, so those who could went to grad school and hoped the economy would recover somewhat before they got out. Or at least they’d have a competitive advantage.</p>
<p>This isn’t news and don’t take my word for it. Talk to any admissions counselor at any university and they will tell you exactly the same thing. Grad school enrollment fluctuates inversely proportional to placement opportunities.</p>
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<p>Yes, I agree. That’s why I added the comments I did after I said I found many Stevens graduates, mostly in positions of management/power. People tend to know where their boss, or their boss’ boss, went to school, but they rarely know where the guy two cubicles down went to school. So, IMHO, I was more likely to be told about management types from Stevens, not worker bees.</p>
<p>I disagree with that. First of all, you can make upwards of $90,000 at companies such as google, microsoft. It does matter in terms of undergrad school because they only really hire from certain schools and you have to have a certain GPA. </p>
<p>But even $70,000 to $75,000 is pretty common for an average EE.</p>
<p>I also think that the undergrad school matters because it determines your first job. Your first job is pretty important for career progress especially in engineering.</p>
<p>I was being realistic and giving advice to a kid attending decent school in the mid-West with a 3.6 GPA. The sooner he gets his expectations in line with reality, the better.</p>
<p>It is HIGHLY unlikely he will find an EE job straight out of school for $90K. </p>
<p>I did mention my range would vary with location. Salaries are higher on the coasts. He could probably add $5K if he was willing to go East or West.</p>
<p>I agree that it is rare to find such a high paying job starting out as EE, but it is not impossible. I think if that was his dream, he worked hard, and networked enough, he has a good chance of getting such 90,000 to 110,000 starting EE job. </p>
<p>Also, back to the original OP question. I think that schools such as Notre Dame and Vandy are more nationally prestigious and are better for finding jobs nationally. I know that was definitively true when I graduated. </p>
<p>To this day, I have never met an engineer from Stevens.</p>
<p>I ignored nothing. I never said that the employees from a given school must work in the local office of a given company. It simply greatly increases the odds that you get hired by a company out of a more regional school if that company has a location in that region and is therefore more likely to be familiar with it. There are some real gems of schools out there that people outside the region likely have no idea exist. Stevens may well be one of these. I have not passed any sort of judgement on it since I have absolutely zero experience with it and am not from that area.</p>
<p>I will happily stand corrected in terms of where your company is or isn’t located. In a situation like that it just means that your company, for one reason or another, hired a Stevens graduate and really liked what they got out of that hire, so they decided to go back. Good for them. For regional schools that, in my experience, seems to be the exception rather than the rule.</p>
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<p>I don’t claim that Columbia or NYU are small or largely regional. What I will claim is that the Fu Foundation and NYU Poly, their engineering schools, are relatively small and regional compared to somewhere like Purdue. Columbia is a pretty well-recognized program so perhaps I should have just specifically excluded them in my original post. Clearly those two overall schools are very well respected and nationally recognized. However, most people outside of New England don’t immediately jump to NYU’s engineering program when describing their strengths. A lot probably don’t even know that it has one. That was my point. That isn’t to say they aren’t good engineering schools, simply that for the most part, they are not as well known outside of the Northeast.</p>
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<p>That is all true, but it isn’t the point of that portion of the discussion. The statements I made were in reference to your statement about schools in major metropolitan areas tending to keep their graduates nearby. If you are now acting like that statement only applies to the NYC metropolitan area, then the original statement contradicts itself. These are all major metropolitan areas with obviously large amounts of industry and commerce occurring, even if it isn’t on the same scale as NYC, so if the idea that any school in a metropolitan area tends to keep its graduates nearby was true, then it would almost certainly apply to at least some of the places I mentioned.</p>
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<p>Atlanta as a city has less than half a million but the metropolitan area has roughly 5.5 million and has a ton of industry and major corporations. It certainly should apply here.</p>
<p>Metropolitan Detroit has about 4.3 million souls and is an industrial city and home to the largest concentration of automotive industry in the world. It certainly has engineering jobs, even though that industry is still recovering from the big hit it took.</p>
<p>Austin has all those major metropolitan areas within 3 hours and itself is a miniature Silicon Valley, as I am sure you are aware.</p>
<p>The point here is that just because a metropolitan area doesn’t measure up to the megalopolis doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have the same potential to keep its graduates nearby. This idea might hold water if the megalopolis had the same number of colleges in it as do these other places, but the density of colleges and universities in the megalopolis is actually quite high and most data implies that the density of universities, especially the “good” ones, is significantly higher per capita in that region.</p>
<p>So, the “local” economy in the megalopolis may have largest region with the most jobs to fill in the US, but it also has easily the most universities from which to fill those jobs. To my knowledge, specific data does not exist, but if you normalized the number of jobs in the region by the number of graduates being pumped out in the region, I would bet there would be no substantial difference between most of the areas if you averaged it to remove the effects of recessions or booms in certain industries.</p>
<p>I think some of the schools gain notoriety from their sports programs, and that helps draw students to them. I really don’t think it is a major factor in companies recruiting those schools. If they were bad at producing engineers, companies from all over wouldn’t keep recruiting there because the product they hired would be substandard and it would eventually hurt their bottom lines. Sports programs (in some cases) may help, but it wouldn’t be enough to overcome a substandard product for any by the most daft of company hiring representatives.</p>
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<p>I certainly do disagree with this. Even Stevens (is that horse dead yet?) has a Career Fair. It isn’t like those are simply left to the “isolated” schools to host. Most engineering programs have career fairs. Some are part of a larger campus-wide fair for the smaller schools and some are engineering-specific at the larger schools, but most schools do have them. The companies that recruit at those fairs are generally the companies that are actively recruiting at those schools. Most companies do have a targeted list of schools they prefer to hire from, and it is usually the top schools in their field, schools they like in the regions where they are located, and schools they have hired from in the past with good results.</p>
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<p>I could certainly see that being the case. In fact, I wouldn’t even doubt it. That said, I don’t think that says anything about why the larger schools have national career fairs. All it does is show that the megalopolis schools in question are rather regional. The counterpoint is that the larger and more nationally recognized engineering programs in the megalopolis like MIT, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, and to a lesser extent RPI have large national career fairs and send graduates all over the place.</p>
<p>These places certainly could be considered exceptions, but the point is that so could the rest of the schools you are denigrating for being “isolated” and requiring the export of their graduates. They all certainly have more locally-oriented engineering programs nearby that are still good schools, and those schools would tend to keep graduates closer to the area, much like the schools you are mentioning.</p>
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<p>I don’t necessarily disagree with this idea. Like I enumerated before, though, I disagree with the idea that the jobs are that much more plentiful per regional college graduate up in the megalopolis.</p>
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<p>Yes, graduate applications spiked when the recession hit, but as RacinReaver already alluded to, that doesn’t mean enrollment went up substantially. Those having a hard time finding jobs are going to tend to be less qualified for graduate study, and the schools themselves were hit by the downturn as well, so they couldn’t scale up enrollment to meet all the new applicants, so what actually happened was that graduate applications went up but acceptance rates went down and enrollment stayed relatively flat. It grew slightly, but graduate enrollment had been constantly growing from 2004 all the way until 2011, dating to before the recession, so there is nothing to imply that the slight increase in enrollment was due to the economy, only the large spike (I believe it was around 8%) in applications.</p>
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<p>At issue is the fact that these schools not only send graduates out across the country, but also draw in students form around the country and world. In doing my undergraduate work at Illinois, I had friends from all over, including plenty who came out there from the megalopolis. In the most recent statistics, slightly more than half of the engineering students at UIUC were from out of state, so clearly they draw more than just those people from the area around the school. Similar trends exist at other schools. It is therefore more likely that these schools send more students to graduate school because the types of students they tend to attract are those who are putting a great deal of importance in rankings (for better or worse) and go to these major research institutions, then are more likely to be exposed to the research track of engineering and therefore are more likely to decide on graduate school.</p>
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<p>I dismiss them as unreliable because, by nature, these stats are self-reported, and one of the fundamental tenets of statistical analysis is that completely voluntary surveys are not representative samples of a population because they are not actually random. They may be sent out randomly, but the responses are not random. This is not a bias against any time of school, but a bias of how that information must be collected in the first place.</p>
<p>Thank you for your responses. Okay, I really should have mentioned this. The salary bracket I gave there is for a job with an experience of 3-5 years. I know that the average starting salary for an EE grad generally ranges between 60k to 70k. I will be looking to pull out comfortably more than this average.</p>
<p>I’ll make sure I have research and internships on my resume. And I am not someone who spends time with playing computer games. Gaming is not something I’m interested in. Anyways, I’ll remember your words and I’ll try to come out with a good GPA and some meaningful practical knowledge.</p>
<p>Also, I seriously wish that I don’t marry a wrong woman! :p</p>
We are based in Silicon Valley, but obviously have a strong presence worldwide.</p>
Wait, I forgot you conveniently blasted the placement statistics from all schools as utterly unreliable. So you’re actually saying all the metro schools are liars and they don’t have better stats than the remote schools. My mistake.</p>