Are there true advantages in degrees from prestigious universities? 18

[OHIOMatt]

I have a daughter that is a senior in high school. She has done very well academically and with standardized testing. She has applied to a wide range of universities, from small, prestigious schools to large state schools. She plans to major in engineering (of some sort) and has a desire to pursue advanced degrees in the future. Does a degree from a more prestigious school help? Is it an advantage to acceptance to graduate school? Does it open doors when looking for your first job? The real trade off is the upfront cost. I am willing to make this investment if it provides a true advantage. I know that once you get into your career, that performance is what matters. I have done quite a bit of research on the topic, but the conclusions seem highly subjective. I know there is a wide range of professionals on this site, and am interested in your opinions.

Thanks!

For the record, I graduated from a state university and have never seen it as a hinderance to my engineering career, but I may be oblivious to opportunities that others had.

 

[JohnRBaker]

I paid off my school loan. We also paid for son #2's BS degree (son #1 joined the Army and #3 learned on-the-job with his employers paying for his outside classes). Now we're paying for one of our granddaughter's college, at least the first couple of years.

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[cvg]

universities reward those that bring in the most grant money for resarch or endowment money. they dont get rewarded for their ability to teach. the research is conducted by masters or PhD candidates along with undergrad assistants and they all get some direct benefit from the experience. but for the Joe Average student, no benefit at all. some PhD's go into industry, most stay at the university. by and large, very few practicing engineers quit their industry jobs and decide to teach. over the last 35 years, I know of only one engineer that went back to a university to teach after working in industry. that lasted for about two years and he is right back again working in industry.

 

[LiftDivergence]

universities reward those that bring in the most grant money for research or endowment money. they dont get rewarded for their ability to teach.

Unfortunately this is true and it is part of a trend away from professors with real-world industry experience I'm afraid.

During my time at my alma-mater, the ME program had a solid core of about 5-6 professors who had been there for at least 20 years. Many were in industry at some point, and several still working actively as industry consultants.

One of our professors specialized in solar energy and thermal efficiency and was a major industry consultant. Another (my thermo and heat transfer prof.) had several papers published onthe NASA NTRS written for industry. My dynamics and thermo 1 professor excitedly told us about his time in industry, mainly at Lycoming.

Sadly, in the years after I graduated, many of these profs retired. Today the faculty has almost no full Professors. Instead the staff is filled with "lecturers", assistant profs, and "associate professors" who started in graduate program. They are merely an extension (and still part of) graduate research, lecturing on the side. This is just a tactic by the university to pack the department with "researchers" to bring in money.

The process started when I was there, and those lecturers always had awful reviews. I strategically avoided them and stuck with the old-timers when I had a choice. But I think that is no longer an option.

Keep em' Flying
//Fight Corrosion!

 

[CWB1]

I never understood why U's reward research. As someone who ran a Fortune 50's grant program I can say with confidence that the same schools would've received grants every year had they put a Phd or the school's janitor in front of us. Ultimately, the purpose of the program wasn't that we were hoping a school with a tiny lab, little funding, and a few engineers & students with rudimentary knowledge could create amazing new technology in a few months that we couldn't in years given our dedicated $1B+ research campus and plethora of expertise, we just wanted tax write-offs. Usually the report-outs on university "research" were poorly attended as the conclusions drawn were already common knowledge. I would actually wager that U's would get more grant money if they requested it as rewarding good teachers and directly improving the quality of students' graduating as the argument could then be made that is directly benefitting the company.

I'm just not going to go into crybaby tantrum mode when examining whether it is beneficial to the country to pursue student loan forgiveness.

The problem with that statement is that its difficult to take any argument for loan forgiveness seriously. Aside from the mentioned an unmentioned ways of earning loan forgiveness and/or free education stateside, the entire argument is based upon a rather ridiculous premise - that a college education is necessary and beyond the financial means of most. Last I checked ~70% of folks stateside had attended college, ~30% had graduated college, and of those who graduated only ~50% actually used their degree. That would imply that its NOT beyond the means of most and most do NOT find it necessary.

 

[IRstuff]

Seems to me that depends A LOT on both the university and its research faculty. CRISPR was invented at UC Berkeley. The Moderna vaccine, and Pfizer's, has its roots in mRNA research done at Harvard.

One reason many of the companies I've worded for have given up basic research is that probability of success is 10%, if you are really, really lucky.

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[cvg]

so at 10% success rate, it really makes sense to let somebody else do the research and get a nice tax write-off at the same time

 

[IRstuff]

I think that's been the trend for many companies; they concentrate on medium-term payoff projects, where the success rate is more like 30% to 50%. Moreover, since grad students are "cheap" labor, they gat a better cost/hr of potentially useful work, if it comes to fruition, and if they fail, the cost invested might only be about 50% of what they might have spent internally.

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[geotechguy1]

>4. On average smarter, harder working kids tend to get into better Universities. So, on average, those kids end up becoming smarter, harder working college students. They, in turn, become smarter harder working engineers, on average.

At the university I went to, they liked to show a scatter plot chart that showed that their zero correlation between high school grades and university grades - it was a scatter plot, and hard work in high school seemed to have no relevance to university success. Likewise, they shared that university GPA seemed to have little correlation to career success, and the engineers that went on to become CEO's that donated money that paid for large portions of the engineering buildings and research graduated with atrocious GPA's like 2.0.

I'm not sure it's even true on average and other than at small companies with less than ten engineers it appears that networking, social skills, and the ability to maintain the facade of working hard via chargeability metrics (regardless of whether you actually do so) is more important for success than GPA or going to Harvard.

 

[CWB1]

Not a lawyer and prefer Hampton to the Holiday Inn, but there's a ton of legal-sleaze...err...legal-eze that precludes corporate funded academic research from benefitting donating companies. IP typically becomes property of either the school or goes into the public domain, at least to get a write-off and avoid accusations of govt impropriety. IOW the old "no free lunch" from which only the academics benefit.

JMO but I couldn't imagine working for, much less investing in any OEM without a dedicated research dept. Even many contract design firms have their own nowadays to develop IP to sell. The statistics around academic research today are abysmal and any company depending on them for future growth is well-deserving of any resulting bankruptcy IMHO. Exceptions obviously apply for the occasional novel idea, but academia only accounts for ~1% of patents annually, hence the common Bayh-Dole defense that academia has little impact on industry. Also not sure how anyone defines success, but the corporate research teams I've been on have all been narrowly focused on technology development for near-term use and consistently had massive ROI. We're working engineers with corporate funds and a ton of oversight, not unsupervised academics blowing donated money chasing endless rabbit holes. Our job was to thoroughly benchmark the capability and cost of technology, and get it to ~70% maturity for future use. If the product development folks weren't likely to have it in production in 5-8 years then we quickly moved on to something they would. Several former colleagues actually went over to academia specifically to chase a rabbit hole we had given up on, be able to freely publish work which was rarely allowed, and work a relaxed schedule.

 

[IRstuff]

I think that's a slightly dubious comparison. The CRISPR patent started a chain of inventions that other companies made from using CRISPR. Likewise is true of some bleeding edge quantum mechanical properties discovered by a potential Nobel Prize winner that we are exploiting; he gets the Prize, and we, using his invention, have invented 3 or 4 things of our own.

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[MacGyverS2000]

Some movement in the CRISPR war:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...nt-battle-has-apparent-victor-fight-continues

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[CWB1]

The same thing happens in private industry with a small percentage of new patents/technologies spawning new businesses and industries. Personally I’d much rather have 1% of a large number than 1% of a small number.

 

[ashtree]

What you know is the most important in the long run.
Who you know is important if you dont know as much as you should or the company expects.
What you say you know or who you say you know is important if you don't know anything or anyone.
If you dont know anything or anyone and you can't talk the talk, then going to the "best" school can't hurt.



Regards
Ashtree
"Any water can be made potable if you filter it through enough money"

 

[Alex07]

Personally, I don't think there's a difference when it comes to getting a high-paying job. Maybe with a "non" prestigious degree you won't get a job at a highly-coveted company, but you can still land a very high-paying position. As long as your degree says "engineering" in anything, you are pretty much guaranteed a career right after graduation.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

Personally, I don't think there's a difference when it comes to getting a high-paying job. Maybe with a "non" prestigious degree you won't get a job at a highly-coveted company, but you can still land a very high-paying position.

Two people, same company, the one with the "better" degree generally gets more money right off of the bat... on-the-job performance may alter that as raise time comes up, but that initial offer typically favors the "better" degree guy. As I mentioned earlier, I feel my degree from UF offered me a better education (from a butt-in-the-seat standpoint), but I have always made a higher salary based upon my degree from Purdue (employers tend to concentrate more on that one as a "prestigious" education).

As long as your degree says "engineering" in anything, you are pretty much guaranteed a career right after graduation.

I definitely disagree with that statement. This is highly dependent upon field of engineering, as well as how that particular field is doing at the moment. During the comm-bust (not dot-com-but) of the early 2000's, finding a job in the EE field was a challenge, at best. Plenty of guys here in the petroleum industry can regale you with their thick/thin time stories. That piece of paper in no way guarantees you a job (at least in engineering... you may get one slinging burgers), particularly during rough times.

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http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

 

[IRstuff]

As long as your degree says "engineering" in anything, you are pretty much guaranteed a career right after graduation.

"Cees get degrees," so lots of C students out there. There have been a number of posts on this site from people still searching a job a year after graduation; don't know what their GPAs were, though, but that's something to consider.


Another aspect is how well your resume "grabs" someone's attention, and assuming you get an interview, how well you interview. Some people suck at that; one EE graduated with pretty decent GPA from a tolerably okay school failed to solve an EE101 problem, even after it had been explained to him a couple times during the course of the day. Knew a couple of PhDs that had trouble getting jobs because they were "overqualified," but that might have been an excuse for some other issue

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