<p>How hard is it to get a good GPA from a public engineering school like University of Illinois, Purdue, or University of Michigan (from the viewpoint of getting into a good grad school). I heard private schools like Cornell/Princeton make it hard for undergrads to get a good GPA and hurts their chances for grad school. I was wondering if this was true for publics as well.</p>
<p>Conversely, would it be worth it to go to a less prestigious undergrad (Arizona, UMiami) for the GPA and admission into a top grad school?</p>
<p>For graduate schools, the prestige of your university matters a lot. Unlike professional schools (med school, mba, law, etc), graduate schools really want to take the very best students so they are much more subjective than objective. They don’t have an admissions committee reviewing applications, it’s more about the professors seeing which students they think will be a valuable asset in research. So, a letter from a famous professor in a prestigious university will be worth so much more weight than just GPA alone. With that said, you will need to go to a prestigious university AND get a good GPA, not just one.</p>
<p>Oh, but I’m speaking from a point of view of getting into a prestigious graduate school. If you don’t care what graduate school you get into then I think you can just do whatever you want.</p>
<p>For a non-thesis MS degree, some good work experience, a few A’s and B’s in some graduate courses taken as a non-degree grad student and payment from your employer can sometimes override what you did as an undergrad.</p>
<p>That isn’t really true. Going to a prestigious undergrad school can put you over the edge if you are borderline, but if you come out of a smaller school with solid stats you won’t be at some ridiculous disadvantage. The biggest advantage, as you alluded to, is that you do have better access to those prestigious faculty, so you are more likely to get more impressive recommendations. However, in my Ph.D. program right now, I have colleagues who came from MIT and a guy who came from McNeese State. Honestly, prestige is not one of the biggest factors. It is more in the middle somewhere.</p>
<p>What about the difficulty of getting a good GPA. Is it harder at Illinois, Michigan, Purdue, Florida than say Arizona or UMiami. I would need a pretty high GPA if I major in Industrial engineering and go for a respectable MBA, or Civil and get a respectable MS, right?</p>
<p>It is hard to get a high GPA anywhere. Generally, grad schools are familiar with the difficulty of all the major programs and will probably subconsciously figure that in. Like I mentioned above, if you are borderline, going to a well-known school can put you over the edge, and this point is a large part of why that is true.</p>