Would you quantify benefits of MIT education over engineering degree from UCLA, CalPoly SLO, etc?

When twice the price makes sense? What do you get at MIT that you cannot get at top state schools?

I offer you [this month old discussion](Is paying 60K per year for top engineering schools a wise decision? - Engineering Majors - College Confidential Forums) as a starting point. Feel free to ask more questions if you need more than what that thread covers.

From what I’ve heard, MIT offers pretty good need-base financial aid. In some situations that makes MIT more costs comparable to state schools.

In another thread you state that your family is in the “donut hole” for financial aid. Did you get any merit aid at another school? MIT aid is financial need only, no merit aid.

If you didn’t get any merit money at the state schools either, then it does come down to some hard choices. If you did get merit aid, then go there. Go to MIT for your masters.’

One thing to consider is that living expenses aren’t cheap. SLO, for instance, is expensive. SLO is also hard to get an engineering degree in 4 years. Check their graduation rates. If you have to pay tuition and living expenses for that 5th year, then the money game starts to tilt a little.

In hindsight, the next tier down private schools are better at giving merit aid. They do so to attract those good students. MIT doesn’t give any merit aid out because every student there would qualify. They are just generous with their need based aid.

Cal Poly is getting better at class availability and has completely restructured their scheduling system giving priority based on seniority. With that said, there is still a fundamental difficulty for engineers graduating in 4 years. The curricula are longer than 4 years by design. The typical Poly UG degree is 180 hours. An ME degree for example, is 200 hours. The only way to graduate on time is to bring credits in (or take a higher than what is probably sustainable load every quarter), don’t dodge professors and don’t dodge time slots. If a student goes even one quarter longer than 4 years, it is counted as 5 years in their statistics.

Unlike MIT, Cal Poly can give merit aid, but they really don’t have any to give. Also unlike MIT, which has deep pockets, Cal Poly does not have deep pockets for need-based financial aid. The only students that get grants, for the most part, have EFCs low enough to be eligible for Pell Grant.

As @HPuck35 said, off campus living is very expensive in SLO. Students can pay anywhere from $500 to $1000 per month (or more) for a small piece of a condo or house AND they are all required to sign year long leases even if they won’t be there during the summer. I have to imagine though that anyplace in or around Cambridge won’t be dirt cheap.

So, if you’re in state and your child has to go 5 years at Poly vs. 4 at MIT and you don’t get any need based aid, you’d still be looking at an excess of $100,000 to go to MIT.

Then defining if it’s “worth it” becomes purely a matter of perspective. As I pointed out in the thread referenced above, If you consider debt service on the difference or the opportunity cost of what that money could grow to over a career, a person probably won’t earn enough more with an MIT degree for it to make actuarial sense (have to bring in @smokinact for a full analysis :D).

There are however intangibles associated with the brass rat that few if any other institutions can bring. Whether or not that translates to financial gain or is afforded to every MIT graduate is the big question.

We, with strong buy in from our son, decided to limit his search to good and affordable state programs and good, but not elite private programs known for offering good merit aid (RPI, WPI, Case). He ended up at Cal Poly from out of state and is well on track to graduate in 4 years. Just basing the difference on each school’s COA figures, that’s a savings of over $100,000 compared to MIT and that’s paying the extra $249/hr that OOS students pay at Poly.

Is it just by seniority, or are there other criteria? Some other schools, such as some UCs, used a multiphase registration system, where all students sign up for parts of their schedules before anyone can sign up for the rest, presumably to give all students a better chance at their highest priority courses (in their majors, usually) before students choosing out-of-major electives fill them up. Also, in some of the other schools, departments can specify priority levels other than seniority (e.g. they may give priority to frosh/soph students for introductory level courses, while giving junior/senior students in the major priority for more advanced courses).

http://flowcharts.calpoly.edu/downloads/mymap/15-17.52MEBSU.GENMEU.pdf indicates that the four year plan for ME at CPSLO involves course loads of 15 to 18 units per quarter, for a total of 196 to 202 units (versus the minimum of 180 generally required). 17 or 18 units in a quarter should be doable for a reasonably strong student who is highly disciplined at school work.

Note that CSUs (including the Cal Polys) do have a relatively high volume of general education requirements. These may be seen as desirable for those who want to ensure that all graduates have a liberal arts foundation (considering how pre-professionally oriented the CSUs are), but probably do result in (s)lower graduation rates than they would have otherwise.

There really is no straightforward answer to this question. Excellent students attending top state schools have about the same opportunities as graduates from MIT. If you don’t believe that, consider the fact that there are state school alums working at any prestigious company you can think of. Ultimately, your performance in college matters most – if you do well enough, the vast majority of companies would love to have you work for them.

About the only two exceptions here would be if you wanted to work for a prestigious finance firm, or as a faculty member at a prestigious school.

Bottom line (and this is just my humble opinion, based on working in engineering for 10 years), the MITs of higher education are great schools but very much overrated in terms of what advantages you will have over those who attend other schools.

For this most part, this can even be overcome by studying with a well-known advisor at a state school and through the connections you make during graduate school (which are typically related to who your advisor is).

One possible quantitative measure: Return On Investment (ROI). Here are the first ten of Payscale’s top ROI colleges for 2016:

  1. Caltech
  2. MIT
  3. Harvey Mudd
  4. SUNY - Maritime College (IS)
  5. SUNY - Maritime College (OOS)
  6. Stanford
  7. Colorado School of Mines
  8. Georgia Tech (IS)
  9. Princeton
    1. CMU

http://www.payscale.com/college-roi

Payscale’s ROI ranking is not restricted to engineering degrees, but given that many of the above have a preponderance of engineering students (Caltech, MIT, Harvey Mudd, Georgia Tech, CMU) one can get a rough idea of the relative value of engineering degrees from these universities.

Re: #8

That list mostly reflects the financial ROI of engineering majors, rather than the schools.

@whatisyourquest, ROI data, especially as applied to a whole university, and PayScale in particular is virtually meaningless. There are lots of threads on this, but the gist is that the data is all voluntarily provided and it HIGHLY favors schools where most of their degrees awarded are technical in nature.

@ucbalumnus, that’s a great question. I really stay out of my son’s hair when it comes to that stuff, so I don’t know the details, other than athletes and honors students get priority. It used to be a very bizarre system that was intended to be egalitarian, but could punish older students. There were 12 rotations, assigned by last name and set in stone from the time of enrollment. Based on the randomness of the system, some juniors and seniors ended up with VERY late rotations and spots for their classes were all gone. Couple that with only offering the senior design classes I, II and III F,W, and S respectively, missing one pre-requisite could set a student back a full year. They’ve fixed both of those problems.

Re #9, I agree. And this thread, according to the title, is focused on engineering.

@eyemgh I must be missing something. Since the Payscale data “HIGHLY favors schools where most of their degrees awarded are technical in nature,” doesn’t that make the data all the more relevant for this thread, which pertains specifically to engineering? Certainly, Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, Cal Poly SLO, etc. should not be included, but why can’t one use the data to rate (in financial terms) the value of an engineering degree from Caltech, Harvey Mudd, MIT, CMU, etc.?

PayScale also heavily favors universities with alumni with high rates of survey completion and that are located in regions with a disproportionally high cost of living (and therefore disproportionally high salaries). It also includes non-engineering jobs, so places like MIT will be skewed by the fact that they have a higher rate of people going into things like finance, which is useless if we are trying to talk about the value of the engineering degree for engineering jobs.

The ROIs you posted are for the whole university. The thread is specifically comparing MIT which is almost 100% technical to Cal Poly where engineering represents only 25% of the student body. The ROI at schools like that are pulled down by majors like Child Development, Philosophy and History.

^ This thread seeks to identify the “benefits of MIT education” over an “engineering degree” from other universities. I don’t see that the subject is limited to engineering degrees that lead to engineering jobs. Perhaps the OP should weigh in and clarify.

Ok, here’s an ROI ranking that is restricted to engineering:

http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/top-25-ranked-engineering-programs-with-the-best-return-on-investment/

Apparently, this one too comes from PayScale, so there still is that.

That is irrelevant. Both possible permutations of the original question have already been answered. The OP has been informed that, according to most of us in here, for engineering employment, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. However, MIT and its ilk may be a better choice when considering non-traditional careers for engineers like finance or consulting.

Even then, none of this controls for the effect of geography. A school like Purdue is kind of hosed here because PayScale does not control for geography and cost of living. A Purdue grad making $60k in Indianapolis likely has a higher standard of living than a MIT grad making $90k in Boston, and the proportion of Purdue grads living in Indianapolis is going to be fairly high, while the proportion of MIT grads living in Boston will be quite high. This could certainly skew the average salaries of MIT grads higher than that of Purdue grads without actually saying anything about standard of living or the quality of the program. PayScale does not capture things like that. Further, said Purdue grad will likely pay off his or her student loans faster than said MIT grad in this situation, so whose ROI was really better? It’s not as easy as just looking at average salaries.

PayScale is useful when you are entering into job negotiations and want to know what the going rate for your profession is with your level of experience (in certain fields). Knowing that helps you know what ballpark to shoot for during negotiations. PayScale is not useful for ranking colleges.

An often overlooked consideration when looking at Payscale data is geographic bias. MIT and Stanford grads are likely to work in big metropolitan areas where cost of living is high, therefore salaries will reflect this. In contrast, New Mexico Tech grads are likely to work in rural areas, or other lower cost of living areas in the southwest, therefore salaries will be lower.

Consider that the median middle class income in San Francisco is $100,000 /year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/23/middle-class-varies-from-30000-in-detroit-to-100000-in-san-francisco/

“The OP has been informed that, according to most of us in here, for engineering employment, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.”

@boneh3ad Based on my own experience working in a traditional engineering career at a large company for 30 years, I disagree. The smartest two engineers that I have ever worked with, hands down, have degrees from MIT and Caltech, respectively. Anecdotal, sure, I concede that. Engineering management also routinely sizes up new hires based on where they went to college. For example, UCB > UCLA > UCSD and so on. Finally, your bio follows you throughout your career. Promotion announcements always state where you received your degrees, even if you got them decades ago. People take notice in a big corporation, IME. Perhaps it is not relevant in small engineering firms.