What exactly are your concerns? I don’t think we’re experiencing what you’re assuming. Again, most of these concerns often come from parents who are on the T10, T20 ride or die journey. Many of us have/had high stat engineering students at large engineering publics who are doing great without taking the “elite” path. Many chose their schools for money or fit; guessing several like my own wanted the whole big school experience. There are advantages to being a big fish in a small pond so to speak. They aren’t having issues with higher level math, physics, statics, dynamics, thermal, electrical, fluids… CS and engineering are both in demand, as long as your child goes to an accredited school and does well. I would suggest researching specific schools and their accreditations if you think your child wants to study abroad and return to the US to work. Are you a US resident; if so, what grade (your child) and state? Perhaps it would be more productive if we addressed your specific concerns for your child and offered insight into possible paths specific to your situation.
This! After I sold my business, we entered the relo game with DH. 6 relos in 14 years. There is a whole community of relos who are willing to take on the lifestyle, but there are many more who aren’t. Most of our HS friends still live in our hometown; their families still live there. Their children and now grandchildren go to the same school. It significantly limits their career choices, especially as companies move their corporate offices out of state. Instead of moving, they take on less attractive positions.
Yes on being willing to move and relocate to avoid limiting not just career choice but advancement within the same company. We moved 9 times in 11 years in the front 1/3 of our marriage. We had other moves after that but just 2 in the last 18 years.
We are already seeing the cost of geographic limiting in our D’s friend group that didn’t co-op who are graduating this year. Those students willing to go anywhere, try anything, had multiple job offers to choose from. Those that pigeon holed themselves into a certain area were much more limited.
My D is on an ELDP rotational track (engineering leadership development program) and it will mean moving every 6-12 months for a couple of years. The company pays to move her and there is a bonus on every move. It’s the feeder to the company’s leadership positions. D knows a number of people who have turned down rotational programs because they don’t want to move. Their path out of entry level engineering is going to be long and drawn out if, to quote @Eeyore123, they are location “sticky”.
This sums it up a perfectly as it can be. Too many have been duped into believing that if their prospective engineer doesn’t get into MIT (insert other “elite” brand X here) that they will be doomed. There’s just no evidence to support than notion, and in fact a plethora of evidence proving that it’s false. Students who go to a school that’s a cultural AND financial fit, and then take maximal advantage of their opportunities will do very well, no matter the name on the diploma.
Both duped and doomed are strong words :-). As always the truth is in between. There will always be opportunities available from MIT that won’t be available from Rutgers (our state flagship), for instance. That is just a fact of life. No reason to strongly deny that possibility.
I’m not denying that possibility. What is also true though is that there will be opportunities for Rutgers (or whatever school you want to insert here) students that aren’t presented to MIT students. No one ever mentions this. They simply assume that there will be more and better opportunities at MIT. My son’s company was founded by an engineer with degrees from Cal and Stanford. They have an engineer widely regarded as one of, if not the worldwide authority in his specialty. He did his undergrad at Caltech. They don’t recruit at any of those schools. They don’t recruit at MIT either.
This is not, and has never been a knock against MIT. FinTech aside though, most MIT engineers are well, regular engineers, who will be working alongside engineers from all sorts of schools, all doing good work. There are multiple MIT grads who routinely post here. They say that on a regular basis.
You should be aware that admission to UofT CS, just like Engineering, is also holistic and not based only on grades (but again their version of holistic is not to the same degree as holistic at US colleges). This has been the trend in Canada of late for many highly selective programs and UBC as a whole practices holistic admission for all admits.
Cost is often a function of class sizes. That is a different trade off people make. Separate from ranking. It is a bit of comparing apples to oranges when you are comparing, say, UofT with Tufts.
And U of Toronto is very expensive for US students. Please see here: Tuition & Fees | Admissions & Student Recruitment
I looked at U Toronto tuition and fees for international students and it did not look that affordable to me unless I am looking at the wrong thing. If my kid were accepted at Umass Amherst for CS instate I would not be looking at U Toronto. I feel Umass A is famous enough….
U of T international tuition is very expensive and it’s been steadily increasing over the past while, but US residents do get the advantage of a favourable foreign exchange rate in converting from USD$ to CAD$ which makes it a bit cheaper.
Last post. Thank you all for inputs. It is good to hear different perspectives.
That’s a completely different angle than your first supposition. This thread started with the claim that an admissions process that isn’t purely meritocratic isn’t placing STEM students in the “best” schools. This pivot says we aren’t training and then identifying them. Which one is it?
The pivot also included the thought that a kid in the US who gets shut out of a top CS program here would be better off going to U Toronto than going to a school a skootch “lower” in the food chain in America… which seems totally off-topic to me. But since I didn’t study STEM perhaps my reading comprehension skills are weak?
Admission to UofT CS is highly competitive. There’s no guarantee they’d get in there either.
For kids who are interested adn have a knack for it, CS is one of those fields that is and has been in such demand over the past xx years, not sure it matters what school one attends. (Cal State San Jose – egads, a Cal State say the prestige folks??? – is one of the largest supplier of talent to apple than any other college. Yes, it happens to be down the street, but if prestige mattered that much in CS, the tech world would be importing more grads from other locales.)
No question Toronto is an excellent school, but just little need to pay international rates for CS IMO.