Quote:
|
From what I've seen, Columbia's curriculum requirements is weighted towards non-engineering courses. That would still prevent one from taking the classes one wants to take, regardless of the type of requirements. If you're advocating that schools take a more flexible approach to graduation requirements, then I completely agree.
|
As a case in point, I just took a gander at the requirements for ChemE at Columbia and compared them to Berkeley. They are basically the same with one notable difference:
no quantum chemistry required at Columbia.
[quote]Yeah, a lot of MIT people go into consulting or finance these days, but there are still quite a lot going into science and engineering as well. [/quote[
I would suspect that
even more MIT engineering grads
want to go to consulting or banking, but just didn't get an offer. Not too many people who get an offer from McKinsey will turn it down for some engineering job instead.
But more importantly, I would surmise that the percentage of MIT engineering students who actually go into engineering as a career is almost certainly
lower than the percentage from lower-ranked schools. In other words, the #200 ranked engineering school probably sends only a tiny fraction of its graduates to consulting or banking. The simple explanation for this is that it is a matter of opportunity: those students at the #200 ranked eng school just aren't given the opportunity to get consulting or banking offers. They still want them if they could get them, they just can't get them.
What this all boils down to is the simple question of why are consulting/banking careers so (relatively) more desirable, or, conversely, why can't engineering careers be made to be more desirable? To be fair, there are some engineering firms (like aibarr's current employer) who offer strong opportunities, but then there are plenty of others (like apparently aibarr's former employer) who don't. I'm sure those engineering firms will proffer the excuse that they can't afford to offer better salaries, they can't offer better training, can't offer this, can't offer that, but that just begs the question of why consulting/banking firms can do it.
But in any case, that was a digression. Returning to the main point, the major advantage that the Ivies offer over many engineering-oriented schools is career flexibility, and in this day and age when you just don't know what career path you will take, that sort of flexibility is priceless. This is particularly important when you're young: you don't want to get locked into a particular field before you even have a chance to find out what else is available.