It doesn’t matter which exact words you used. The sum of all your statements amounted to saying that elite educations get you good jobs and advancement, while mundane educations get you mindless, repetitive tasks with little advancement opportunity largely due to manager bias and irrespective of your actual experience, performance, or skills.
This is the the OP’s question. Not Podunk U, but UCLA and Cal Poly, two well regarded, difficult to get into state schools, both with reputations for high rigor and producing good engineers that are highly sought after.
I think the rest of the discussion is equally valid, but the top CA state engineering programs elevate the conundrum to a level where the justification for a $100,000 plus premium might be even less.
so @kepakemapa where did you decide to attend?
Obviously any smart ambitious state school grad would just quit that company if their manager would really give them repetitive work.
Yes, companies need a lot of people to chug and plug out whatever product, from designs, to reports, to presentations … and if you become famous for doing simple tasks quick, you can find yourself a niche, which will pay less, maybe substantially less, and will make your brain turn into a bit of mush.
Or you can really start taking some personal initiative. Your boss doesn’t give you interesting work, but you can plug out 10 hours of work in 7 hours. Go spend that hour or at least a few minutes a day figuring out the interesting work in your company and go volunteer to do it. Maybe work a few hours for free. Maybe do some research on line to see or take an online class at say MIT … free.
Only really ignorant stupid managers would ignore that shining light of genius in the back cubicle because they are wearing a Utah sweatshirt instead of MIT when they go jogging at lunchtime.
And a entitled mediocre employee from a prestigious school is not going to keep getting top assignments …
Maybe take advantage of your company’s free grad school tuition and start working on your masters from a higher tier school.
I think maybe the benefit of going to a state school is that for ambitious people they find ways to get what they want at that school without a lot of special treatment or gift plum assignments. So when they show up at work … they show up and find ways to shine … real ways, innovative ways …
or they find a new job with an employer who is looking for new stars
if you only hire top school grads, you are also being very elitist and likely not being very diverse, which is not good in many fields …
Value of extra 100 Gs is also related to how much that 100 Gs will cost you. Paying loans for 10 years is different than having daddy write a bigger check from his really big bank account.