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.

 

[TheTick]

I graduated from Marquette (ME plus minor in naval science).

I worked at Apple computer 1998-1999 (iMac debut era). I was surrounded by MEs from MIT and Stanford. I believe I was competitive in the raw IQ department, but it was clear that my cohorts really did get a better, more thorough education at their schools.

 

[GregLocock]

The rule of thumb I saw is that if your school is in the top 20% then ranking matters, but outside of that nobody cares. And of course, by your third job your degree is pretty much of academic interest only (sorry).


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[EnergyProfessional]

The question is probably more if the school provides a better education. This likely is hard to answer. But I would trust a school that has hard academic requirements more than one that admits based on ability to pay, or based on some sort of social-engineering scheme.

Unfortunately the prestigious degrees get diluted by students who gain entrance not through academics, but because rich parents "find a way" to get their children in.

 

[GregLocock]

OK, I'll fess up I went to one of the top one engineering universities globally, according to some surveys. Usually in the top 3.

While other kids were messing about with bits and bobs in their labs, we had full sized engines, and a steam turbine/generator set, in the basement. We didn't do experiments on video.




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[IRstuff]

I graduated from a highly rated school, and the surveys all claim that there is a lifetime advantage in earnings for going to that school; I, however, went when tuition was 1/5th of the expected starting salary, it's currently more like 1/2 of the starting salary.

The other advantage of going to such a school is some cachet of credibility/reputation that comes with it; I don't get called out as often as someone from a lower-rated school might.

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[Ron247]

I think your job offers improve with a BA from a prestigious school regardless of how well you actually did. I think your BA education may be a little better at a prestigious school for some degrees but not all. The more specialized degrees such as electrical, mechanical, aerospace are probably better but civil may not be. Civil is so diverse, I doubt a BA can be that much better. Just too much unrelated ground to cover in 4 years. I do not know if the cost/benefit is there for a BA in any curriculum. It took 10 years to pay off my student loan. I know some schools were 2-4 times the cost of mine and I know I would have never been able to pay those loans off.

Masters and above is probably really worth more. I would imagine between the more advanced facilities and more interesting research projects, it would almost have to be a plus provided the student applies themselves.

 

[IRstuff]

The biggest difference, education-wise, across all schools, is really how the curriculum doles out theory and practice, and how much. There are definitely highly ranked state schools that produce degrees that will get great jobs at a fraction of cost of a private school.

On the other hand, going to a top high-school didn't seem to do much for my kids, although they did get into a fairly highly rated school. Oddly, they got rejected by their "safety schools," possibly because those schools considered it unlikely that they would actually matriculate there.

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[OHIOMatt]

Thanks for all of the replies! I really appreciate you all sharing your perspectives and experience. A few comments to responses:

Ron247: I could not agree more about a degree in Civil Engineering. Both my wife and I have civil degrees. We have had that discussion already. My daughter does not plan to major in civil. She wants to get a degree in something more "high tech". It stings a little, but I will not hold it against her.

IRstuff: My daughter goes to a public high school. From what I have read, admittance to a university does not take into account the quality off the high school. It seems that the folks that run higher education want to level the playing field. I am sure that top tier private high schools do a better job of preparing kids for a more rigorous curriculum.

EnergyProfessional: I agree for the most part. In our tours of schools, the exposure to cutting edge research and the general facilities seem better. In addition, some of the most impressive professors that we have met with were at the top tier schools. My thought process is more along the lines of helping her build a resume coming out of under grad for applications for her first job or grad school. I am sure that you are familiar with the phrase "perception is reality". So, when a firm is looking through a couple dozen resumes and they see one from StateU vs TopEngineeringU, does TopEngineeingU get you the interview? Obviously once the job or graduate position is landed, performance is what counts.

This has been a tough process in these times. Our plan was to make a tour of prospective universities in the spring and summer of this year. With few exceptions, these have all been cancelled or done virtually. In the next few months, she will have to put her signature on the line and commit.

 

[TheTick]

If I was to reboot my career after 25 years, I would go into biomedical engineering.

 

[TheTick]

It's not just overall quality of the school or their ME program. Some schools have specialties that attract attention from certain industries and employers.

 

[OHIOMatt]

TheTick - That is her first option. To me, most of this stuff seems like science fiction.

 

[IRstuff]

From what I have read, admittance to a university does not take into account the quality off the high school

The high school I was referring to is public; but like many such places, it's a college-prep school, entrance exams and all, with a full load of AP/IB; there typically 40-50 IB diplomates every year. Nevertheless, while what's promised is a level playing field, it's not clear that really true; the acceptance rate to one specific state university is over 90%, compared to a more typical 6% for the top-tier schools in the same system. While college entrance is supposedly a meritocracy; it's difficult to distinguish oneself based solely on grades, which is why extra-curricular activities/awards and the personal essay is such a big deal. As a example, UCLA reported receiving more than 110,000 applications for about 6,000 slots about 5 years ago., so anyone entering essentially had to distinguish themselves from 17,000 other people looking for that same slot.

I don't envy you the process; I'm glad my youngest is past that wicket. Best of luck, and don't forget that some schools will wait until the very last day of the acceptance season to announce their results.

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[dauwerda]

My experience has been that the biggest impact for the transition from graduating to landing a job is that smaller to medium size firms' hiring managers tend to hire from their own alma maters. So, it has less to do with the prestige of a specific school in the national sense and much more to do with the specific hiring manager and where they went to school. So, if interested in engineering I would pick a school that is known for turning out engineers, simply for the reason that you are more likely to have more "connections" that are past graduates in hiring positions now. The education itself may not be that different, but the built in connections can make a difference when it comes to landing a first job (I believe there are plenty of well known engineering schools out there that are much more affordable than the typical "prestigious" schools however).

 

[Guest0527211403]

OHIOMatt,
If your daughter is interested in a more "tech" focused career, something to look at is the commercialization activity out of the various universities, such as startups that originated in labs and incubators affiliated with the achool. I find this to be a more holistic indicator of the type of environment nurtured by the school and their overall attitude towards translating research into entrepreneurial success.
My alma mater (U Toronto) is highly ranked globally, but from my experiences it was not as supportive to startups as other Canadian schools like Waterloo when it came to commercialization support and IP ownership. That has changed recently, but it takes time to change the culture at an old institution like UofT, whereas newer schools like Waterloo had an entrepreneurial environment baked in from the start.

 

[JNieman]

If you aren't plastering your Alma Mater on your office walls, how would anyone really know/care where you came from, beyond such conversations during interviews or the hiring process?

Do people sit around in their 30s and 40s and still banter about what school they went to?


Anyway, I think school reputation is most important, in my experience in/with hiring teams. History of recent-grads that have been hired before, or interns/co-ops from that school also affects the reputation of that school. Hiring from "known quantity" schools seems safer than hiring from schools no one has first-hand experience with. I expect that bias is more influential than people expect.

 

[MacGyverS2000]

After a decade or two of looking at resumes, you'll will tend to see a (relatively) strong correlation between a quality school and the quality of the applicant sitting in front of you... not perfect, but a strong one. There will always be the student who rocks it no matter how poor the educational system, and always the moron who can't be spoon fed info to save their lives.

My BSEE was from UF, a school that is a good mix of theory and practicality. My MS was from Purdue, which leans very heavily on the theory side. I feel like the better education came from UF, but hiring managers zero in on the Purdue thing. This has been a relatively consistent pattern across my interviewing years. that said, after the first decade or so of experience, the schooling became less and less of an overall interest compared to my on-the-job experience.

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[Guest0527211403]

Also +1 for biomedical engineering.

I'm a mechie who found myself in the med tech world even though the last biology class I took was in the 11th grade. It was certainly a wild ride but it changed my career outlook for the better.

I'm now working in software product management building a tool to improve design reviews across all industries, but I wouldn't be here were it not for the highly multidisciplinary team experiences I gained in medtech.

 

[JohnRBaker]

For my first job, my school didn't really matter. I had co-oped for three summers and besides half the engineers, including the chief engineer, had graduated from the same school (maybe it did matter).

However, when I changed jobs 11 years alter, and I had my interview at McDonnell Douglas in 1980, they used a very formal procedure where they had a sort of point system. Not really a total point scheme but rather a plus/minus system. During the review of my application and resume, the person whom I was talking to noted that my university warranted a 'plus' and my field of study, another 'plus'. I know this was real as a few years later I was responsible for moving an application, for a guy we really wanted to hire, through the same process and I had to work with the corporate personnel people. Now this guy had over 20 years of experience in exactly the area we were looking for and he had great references and he was even known by one of our employees so we thought it would be a breeze to get him through the system and hired, but when I was was running the 'numbers' he got two 'minuses' one for his university and one for his field of study, which in all honestly had nothing to do with the job we were hiring him for, he had only worked in that field a couple of years and then changed jobs and learned his new one 'on-the-job'. Anyway, we finally managed to convince personnel that this was the guy we wanted and got him approved. Later, talking to my boss, we basically decided that it would been easier to hire him if he had just not listed his school and degree since it became a distraction for our corporate personnel people who were taught to 'go by the book'.

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[271828]

I think one needs to look more closely than "the school." Some state universities have reputations for great individual programs. If you're in one of those programs, I think there's no disadvantage compared to going to a school with huge overall name.

The quality of the student is much more influential than where he or she goes to school. I went to a high ranking school (taught there shortly also) and I teach at an average state school. The best and worst students are about the same in each. The difference is in the quantity. At my alma mater, we would have 4-5 superstars in a class of 40 students. At my current school, we'll have about two or three superstars in a class of 15-20. Our good students don't seem to have any trouble landing excellent positions, even at top firms.