<p>I am a senior in high school and need some assistance in making a choice on college, since I haven't been able to conclusively pick one over the other in the past week.</p>
<p>I live in Michigan, and Kettering University and Michigan State University (I am also considering another University that will wipe 80 percent of tuition) are my top two choice; I plan to study Electrical Engineering.</p>
<p>I have read several times that MSU has great employment prospects for almost all of their students.
On the other hand, Kettering is a private university and is not known as well nationally (assumed based off of relevancy and topics shown). The main thing that separates Kettering from other schools is their co-op program in which you will work for half of the year (at a respective engineering company) and go to school for the other half of the year, and you repeat this process until graduation. Another thing that is heavily promoted from this is almost guaranteeing a job after graduation with the company you have been holding a co-op.</p>
<p>There's two major issues I have with Kettering:</p>
<ol>
<li>I feel that the classes being reduced to 10 weeks per term would be rather overly stressful to manage</li>
<li>It's a private school, and it's expensive. However, it'll come down to about 12-14k a year if I were to give all of the potential earnings I'd get from co-ops to educational expenses</li>
</ol>
<p>There's a few things I am skeptical about Kettering as well:
Many of the employers stated that they account the time during co-op towards work experience, job tier/rank, earnings, salary, vacation etc. However, the starting salary (according to their given poll) is a little over 58k. This isn't bad for getting out of college, but it's low considering almost all Kettering graduates will graduate with over 2.5 years of work experience that will almost all be accounted towards work experience. I was surprised that the starting salary was under 60k for being so.</p>
<p>What also makes this rather disheartening is that I have read several times (here, other forums, and people) that a good engineering student at any accredited engineering university can get a solid starting job, so I'm wondering if the investment in a private school education (which would get me approximately similar returns after college) is worth it.</p>
<p>I'll add some other things to discuss if I remember.</p>