Of the engineers I’ve worked with whose undergraduate institutions are familiar to me, probably the 4 smartest got their undergraduate engineering degrees from Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Newcastle (I think), Arizona State, and SUNY Binghamton. MIT and Caltech hardly have a monopoly on smarts.
And yes, announcements like promotions often include where you got your degrees, but anyone worth their salt as a manager, engineer, or coworker is judging you by your accomplishments at that point, not your educational pedigree.
But this is just for undergraduate education. Will UCLA graduate be able to get into the top tier grad school? Will the person capable of getting into MIT be able to catch up later in his career?
“And yes, announcements like promotions often include where you got your degrees, but anyone worth their salt as a manager, engineer, or coworker is judging you by your accomplishments at that point, not your educational pedigree.”
If your educational pedigree doesn’t matter to management, why do they put it in promotion announcements? Sure, accomplishments trump educational pedigree, but I’m not surprised that the two most accomplished engineers that I’ve worked with attended MIT and Caltech. Coincidence? I highly doubt it.
I agree though that MIT and Caltech don’t “have a monopoly on smarts.” I never said that.
They put it in there because generally those announcements are biographical in nature, and that is essentially where everyone starts their engineering careers. If it mattered, wouldn’t managers tend to leave out the pedigrees of people who went to, say, Utah State, for fear of being embarrassed that this lowly employee beat out others from “better” schools?
^ That’s just it. No one from “Utah State”, has ever received a promotion at my company. I believe that managers size you up quickly, based on where you attended college. Then, you are given tasks that match their expectations about your abilities – tougher assignments for those with the “best” degrees. If you are accomplished, you are subsequently promoted. Someone attending “Utah State” has a really hard time getting out of the starting blocks, because of this managerial bias but also because of the quality of the education that the best STEM colleges provide.
For us, the cost of MIT is less than what we would be paying at UT. So it cost of us less to have S attend one of the top ranked schools in the world vs. the state flagship school.
@kepakemapa UCLA is a top tier graduate school. Regardless, most top graduate schools are perfectly willing to accept students even from small, fairly unknown schools as long as there is an indication that they can succeed in the form of good grades, good scores, and good references.
A student who could have gone to MIT will likely have just as positive of an outcome if they go to Cal Poly or UCLA or Purdue or wherever else unless they want to get directly into consulting or finance or other nontraditional fields where name brand is very important, in which case schools like MIT have a distinct advantage. Otherwise, their graduate school opportunities will be comparable, and their career options will likely be similar.
The biggest difference is that as the schools go down in renown, the geographic footprint across which they tend to send students to work and from which companies actively recruit will generally tend to get smaller. In other words, basically all schools have a regional bias in where their graduates live, but as the school gets to be less well-known, that region will usually get smaller. For example, MIT is likely to have its graduates going all over the country (and world), though with a higher concentration in the northeast. Meanwhile, a school like Utah is going to have a greater proportion of its graduates still living in the Mountain West region.
@whatisyourquest That seems like a peculiarity of your particular company, then, because that is not a general trend. There are plenty of Utah State grads out there with very successful engineering careers that, much to your surprise, actually have earned themselves promotions. It sounds to me like your company (or at least your slice of it) just has a real problem with biased managers who don’t actually know what is going on outside of a few renowned programs.
@bordertexan At first, I read your post and thought “goodness, another person using UT as if we all know which UT that is.” Then I saw your username and it was pretty obvious in context. Oops.
“The smartest two engineers that I have ever worked with, hands down, have degrees from MIT and Caltech, respectively” - I don’t doubt that. It’s really tough to get admitted to those schools. The debatable question is whether they would have still been the smartest engineers in the crowd with a different college experience.
A lot of companies that just start off and have no good ability to gauge performance, that still acquire enough clout to be able to choose good employees, will favor recruitment from the prestige schools. It’s not the worst strategy, by virtue of the fact that MIT/Stanford/etc will definitely give you a very strong lower bound in performance - you might get just as many 10s from MIT as from State U, but MIT will rarely give you anything less than a 7. Though in the long run, if you only recruit by top schools then you will only get median results because that’s what everybody does. You will get decent workers, for a much higher than average price, and you’ll have competition. Since a 10 can be much more valuable than a 7 in any industry that makes heavy use of creative endeavors (e.g. any sufficiently advanced engineering work), you want better than median results if you want to avoid long-term mediocrity.
Software is a pretty good example. It’s a field with a whole lot of impostors and it has historically been known for being very pedigree obsessed, in no small part because it’s not an easy task to judge whether or not someone is actually skilled with software. And yet research over the years has found that university attended is not particularly predictive of skill in the workplace, so companies have gradually moved away from pedigree-obsessed recruitment. It’s still practiced by a lot of companies though, because it’s the easy way to average-case results.
I’ve known plenty of people from MIT and Caltech who were really nothing special. I’ve also known plenty of people from MIT and Caltech who were very special and impressive. Same deal for State U.
My experience has universally been that if I knew them before they went to college, if they were brilliant before going to school then they remained brilliant after, regardless of where they ended up going.
Don’t pay twice as much for MIT because of the ROI, job prospects, grad school acceptances, prestige etc.
Do pay twice as much for MIT because you will get a fabulous education and have an amazing four years!
If you are the right fit for the unique MIT culture and can reasonably afford it(not too much debt) I hope you don’t pass on this great opportunity.
" 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? "
For many, MIT costs a lot less than their state school would have.
Comparing colleges: It isn’t that MIT has a monopoly on “smarts”. But no student can make it through MIT without being highly capable. The potential obstacles would be insurmountable for a student who was not highly competent. There is no way around the basic core of 2 courses of calculus (not just 2 courses in any math), 2 courses of physics, biology, chemistry. There is no special accommodation courses (no “Math 101 for the Sports Minded” or “Our environment: It’s Biology Time”) for non-science majors. There are no students accepted for legacy status. So the student body is uniformly strong-something employers can count on. That is not true of most schools although there are certainly other schools with similarly competent student bodies. Most schools have much more variability. A Purdue grad can be just as strong as an MIT grad but not all are.
You are correct that that happens with reasonable frequency, but either you missed the larger point or else were just looking for something with which to take issue.
I’ve said this many times before, but an acquaintance who managed one of the most famous NASA programs of all time told me that there was no correlation between where someone got their undergraduate engineering degree and how good they were in his program. He point blankly said “I’ve had lots of engineers from Podunk U that were better than the CalTech guys.” He was a full professor at CalTech and JPL employee at the time he ran that program. His take home message for my son when he was looking at schools, “Be relentlessly curious and don’t spend too much money.”
A valuable take-away from this thread is that the relative value of an engineering education at various universities is ambiguous, at best. The posters here that are engineers have a variety of experiences, leading to different conclusions about the question at hand. Personally, I think that “prestige” often (but not always) matters, while other posters with engineering experience don’t agree.
@eyemgh If we are restricting this thread to “quantification” of specific “state schools”, relative to MIT, then:
MIT < UCB < UCLA < CS SLO
I alluded to this in a previous post. Or course, this is just my experience in a large engineering company. However, I don’t think that any of my management or colleagues would disagree.
That’s an accurate ranking of perceived prestige. I think your mileage may vary depending on who you ask regarding the quality of the product, the newly minted engineer. It is also dependent on department.