<p>I don’t normally comment on this board, but in this case I feel like I might actually be able to provide you with some useful input. I attended Cornell for undergrad, and CMU for grad school (both for mechanical engineering). Then some years later I returned to CMU for my MBA. I’ve also worked as an engineer and am now working on Wall Street.</p>
<p>The first thing I will say is that, assuming cost of attendance not an issue, you can’t really go wrong with any of these schools. Cornell and Columbia are both world class universities and are both heavily recruited for both technical and financial careers. Among lay people both are more “prestigious” than CMU. However, both the CS and robotics programs at CMU are arguably the best of their kind in the world. The people who need to know (aka the recruiters who will hire your son) do know this. Having been through on campus recruiting at CMU twice, I can tell you that both programs are frequently singled out by recruiters for the best opportunities.</p>
<p>That said there will be some differences between where the majority of your sons classmates will end up post-graduation at each school. This doesn’t have to effect you son’s career choice, but since it can be hard to resist following the crowd its worth knowing these differences.</p>
<p>At Cornell the majority of engineering school grads go into traditional engineering fields. My classmates ended up working for the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Schlumberger, Honda, the DoD, Microsoft, Intel, etc… A smaller group head to Wall Street. Those that went to Wall Street generally went into traditional investment banking at places like Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers (when it existed), etc… The bulge bracket banks were well represented during on campus recruiting.</p>
<p>At Carnegie Mellon the focus is much more on Silicon Valley. Younger, faster moving companies. When I was there companies like Google, Amazon, and Ebay hired literally armies of CMU grads. Many more went to other smaller, but still hot start-ups. There is a real culture of entrepreneurship at CMU and I imagine that todays grads are swarming to companies Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon. A small minority went into finance. Those that did generally went into trading rather than investment banking. Top prop shops like Jane Street, Optiver, and SIG recruited on campus. Bulge bracket banks like Goldman and Morgan generally did not.</p>
<p>Not having attended Columbia, I can’t really comment. However, Columbia is one of the best represented schools on Wall Street.</p>
<p>Hope that you find this information useful.</p>