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<p>Or, conversely, that they aren’t willing to risk the chance of flunking out. Many, probably most, engineering students who flunk out of top engineering programs could have successfully graduated from a lower-tier program. </p>
<p>What complicates the situation is that many lower-tier schools will not admit a transfer student who had flunked out of their previous school, regardless of how difficult the program had been. For example, I know some people who after flunking out of engineering at Berkeley, encountered difficulty securing transfer admissions to lower UC’s and even CalStates - schools that they had been easily admitted to as freshmen applicants. In essence, they would have been better off had they never gone to Berkeley at all but instead had simply entered the workforce after high school, for after doing so, they could have simply applied those other schools as freshman-admits are surely have been admitted. Sadly, it is better to not try a difficult program at all, than to try it and perform poorly. </p>
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<p>I would similarly argue that anybody who can be admitted to Berkeley for engineering can also be admitted with a full ride to a low-tier school that offers engineering. So while I agree that somebody choosing Stanford or MIT over Berkeley for engineering may not be engaged in a rational, purely financially based calculation of outcomes, so is the person choosing Berkeley over engineering over a full-ride at a lower-tier school. </p>
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<p>And that’s the crux of the debate: what exactly is the benefit for the average undergraduate to have “top” engineering programs? Clearly, it doesn’t seem to translate into significantly higher engineering salaries.</p>