College Rankings-Money Wise

Parents Forum
101

UIUC’s engineering career survey is at https://ecs.engineering.illinois.edu/outcomes/ .

Michigan’s engineering career survey is at https://career.engin.umich.edu/about/salary-info/ .

Virginia’s career survey is at https://career.virginia.edu/uva-first-destination-reports/university-virginia-class-2016 for 2016 (versus 2017).

GT’s career survey is at https://webapps.gatech.edu/cfcampus/adors/commencement/salary_report.cfm , but it reports median instead of mean.


Major           Stevens UCB     Alabama UIUC    UM-AA   UVA     GT
                                                        (2016)  (medians)
Aerospace Eng                   61987   69180   65832   66027   70000
Agricult Eng                            60875
Biomedical Eng  67200   76126           71000   65710   62293   65000
Chemical Eng    69150   68818   65178   68887   70290   65629   72500
Civil Eng       62000   80071   55173   61063   59663   59666   58000
Const Eng                       60000
Computer Eng    75600                   88369   87353   84083   75000
Electrical Eng  68300           63511   71166   76832   80211   70000
El Eng Comp Sci        109078
Eng Science             79941                           58622
Eng Mgmt        65800
Industrial Eng          78000           61540   68253           68000
Mat Sci Eng             77317           68225   66993   76500   65000
Mechanical Eng  66700   74364   63379   65570   70237   64651   68000
Naval Arch                                      63377
Nuclear Eng                             61750   72175
Systems Eng                             63927           70306
Business & Tech 62600
Mgmt Info Sys                   64744
Finance         73800           56503
Business                77028 
Computer Sci    78200  107433   69000   96518   93845   94960   85000
102

Seems like the kind of things that people might say about Stevens relative to schools like MIT (basically like USNWR rankings which heavily correlate to admission selectivity). But do you find engineering graduates from those schools any less capable overall than those from Stevens or MIT?

103

Thanks @ucbalumnus I knew you would come through. Still we can see a SV effect on salaries as I doubt anyone is going to say (including profs at UCB) that a UCB engineering degree is worth more than its peers.

Frankly these charts give you a much better idea of which locales have more demand in a particular field then anything else.

104

@Engineer80 “I discount academic rankings. If you believe in them, that is your choice.”

I think this quote says it all. Carry on…

105

However, we also do not see Stevens (which seems to be the center of this discussion regarding graduates’ pay levels) as being particularly advantageous pay-wise either.

106

@socaldad2002 - Most of the popular academic rankings are based upon subjective opinions of college administrators and others. They are strongly correlated with selectivity which is not in itself a measure of quality. They are not quantitative to any great extent. They are opinions, that’s it. MIT can be as selective as it is because everybody - naively - thinks they are going to be the next Bill Gates/Zuckerberg/insert filthy rich entrepreneur of your choice here (and the former didn’t even graduate from college at all) by going there hence they have 20 times as many applicants as they can accept. Selectivity by itself is a measure of popularity not quality. At least salary surveys have some degree of quantitative measurement which the academic surveys do not. Stevens by the way is the most selective school in New Jersey with the exception of Princeton University (same logic as MIT with regard to popularity).

@ucb - I’ve worked with some capable Rutgers and TCNJ graduates. I worked with a very capable MIT graduate and another one who was next to useless. One of my former colleagues was a graduate of both Stevens and UCB and was a PE in three states (including California which has very stringent requirements for the PE due to earthquake resistance needs). I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a Stevens graduate who was not capable.

107

So here are the most recent numbers from MIT(the BIG dog in engineering). As you can see MIT likes to provide a very transparent picture with much more data then others. Significantly, the salary range is what is most important, and as you can see the top end for CS is $260K, but that is not realistic for most maybe just a few who are the 4.0 MIT students. I will point out that the salary range is quite wide and I imagine is due to the locale, GPA and other factors that we still cannot discern.

Major/# of respondents/Salary Mean/Salary Median/Salary Range/Sign-on Bonus Mean/Sign-on Bonus Median

Civil & Environmental Eng. (1) 3 87,667 80,000 - 10,000 10,000

Mechanical Engineering (2) 54 74,054 73,250 30,000-120,000 9,654 6,500

Materials Science & Eng. (3) 10 72,300 79,000 36,000-85,000 8,200 10,000

EECS Overall (6) 72 105,984 107,000 47,000-260,000 24,639 15,000

Electrical Science and Eng. (6-1) 6 78,567 86,000- 47,000100,000- 8,667 10,000

Electrical Eng. and Computer Science (6-2) 27 103,426 103,000 74,000-200,000 24,222 15,000

Computer Science and Eng. (6-3) 62 110,247 107,000 70,000-260,000 24,309 15,000

Computer Science and Molecular Biology (6-7) 5 89,800 95,000 - 25.000 25,000

Biology (7) 9 59,643 65,000 35,000-77,500 6,250 6,250

Physics (8) 10 76,093 85,000 10,000-160,000 23,000 10,000

Chemical Engineering (10) 21 71,138 72,500 30,000-99,000 7,700 7,500

Economics (14) 7 76,714 76,000 40,000-160,000 9,250 10,0000

Management (15) 16 88,438 85,000 40,000-260,000 11,154 10,000

Aeronautics & Astronautics (16) 16 79,313 79,500 60,000-98,000 8,813 8,750

Mathematics (18) 28 108,768 111,500 22,000-200,000 16,591 12,500

Biological Engineering (20) 10 61,850 63,750 24,000-110,000 6,667 5,000

108

Not really, selectivity allows a college to assemble the best quality class it can. If I have 30,000 applicants I can select a much better cohort then if I only have 3000.

109

You don’t need 30,000 applicants to assemble a good cohort. Selectivity is still almost 100% correlated to popularity.

110

@Engineer80 You should probably review the factors that they use for the rankings, it’s pretty extensive and meaninful (e.g. faculty awards, selectivity, graduation rates, facilities, money spent on each student).

Some factors may be more subjective like reputation in the industry or students satisfaction with the college but even so there is reason why say MIT is always ranked at or near top of the list. It’s a world-class institution that attracts the top students from around the world, attracts top faculty, have the best facilities and a $14 billion endowment (compared to $184 million for Stevens) to keep churning out the best.

There is a reason that companies heavily recruit from these top colleges…I don’t think you can discount it…

111

And there is also a reason why 3,000+ employers have attended Stevens’ career fairs and the graduates as pointed put earlier are the tenth highest paid college graduates in America. Money spent per student is a misleading statistic. It is the ratio of the school’s total annual expenditures to the number of students. Not all of a school’s annual budget goes towards providing education. Larger schools will likely have more non-academic overhead than smaller ones you know, so the “money spent per student” likely is not spent on the student in toto. I know many folks who attended MIT, UCB, and other world class institutions for their graduate work after they graduated from Stevens. All of them said that their preparation at Stevens allowed them to succeed at those institutions. Like I said, my former employer, the world leader in the communications and electronics industry heavily recruited from Stevens as well as MIT. I know of at least a half dozen MIT (and a couple of UCB) professors who are or were graduates of Stevens for example. I don’t think you can discount that either. If you really believe MIT is the be all and end all of everything (did you go there?) you are very shortsighted, honestly. Most of the engineers in the world did not attend MIT - and yet - wonder of wonders and miracle of miracles, technological progress still moves on.

112

Just for fun for the colleges I’m following. Data is from College Hunch.

ROI for Colleges along with Average Cost (Total Cost - Average Aid)

12 Stevens Institute of Technology $40,639
15 Princeton $16,865
16 Stanford $18,840
29 Carnegie Mellon $28,546
31 Rensselaer $31,362
32 Penn $25,977
37 Dartmouth $21,847
38 Lehigh $23,444
43 Duke $22,624
45 Yale $16,940
46 Cornell $24,974
48 Rice $22,647
50 Clarkson $25,085
52 University of Virginia $34,745
59 Virginia Tech $27,831
62 Brown $27,029
70 Georgetown $27,692
77 Villanova $31,468
79 University of Maryland $39,678
80 Johns Hopkins $29,493
88 Case Western Reserve $28,229
110 Lafayette $21,539
118 William and Mary $38,852
130 Vanderbilt $20,538
145 Tufts $28,191
158 Northeastern $31,900
176 Swarthmore $19,394
179 Washington University $26,267
184 Penn St $25,689
187 George Washington $25,267
202 University of Cincinatti $34,381
202 University of Oklahoma $28,624
268 Fordham $38,198
288 University of Rochester $27,148
290 University of Pittsburgh $21,819
350 Bowdoin $24,050
427 Ohio University $28,828
463 Temple $13,619
463 University of Kentucky $34,352
502 University of Alabama $30,808
711 Virginia Commonwealth $39,838
737 Carleton $23,489

113

^^ No one is saying engineers that don’t go to MIT can’t be successful. Heck my research engineer step dad went to San Jose State University (because of low cost), got a coveted job at the Stanford Research Institute and then worked a 30+ year career at Hewlett Packard. He ended up fine but who knows the possibilities he may have had if he graduated from MIT, Stanford, UCB, or other top engineering colleges? We will never know…

114

@tpike12 - Payscale and College Hunch (not familiar with it though) agree.

115

Most of them did not attend Stevens either. Stevens graduates fewer engineering majors per year than either Rutgers or NJIT (the school you apparently disdain as a “last resort safety” in reply #97).

116

And neither did they attend any particular school. So what?

NJIT is (emphasis added) a last resort safety. Look up their admissions statistics. That is well known to anyone who works in engineering and who hires engineers in NJ and the metro area (and likely most elsewhere as well). Stevens is a small university in size compared to Rutgers (and a little less so, compared to NJIT), so of course it has a smaller cohort of graduates but arguably their accomplishments are equal to or greater in many cases. For the fun of it, look up the accomplishments of notable Stevens alumni. You might be surprised.

117

This discussion has gotten absurd. The truth is that entry level engineers across a broad spectrum of schools all work side by side in the same corporations doing the same jobs for the same pay. The differentiation begins when they are promoted and through bonuses based on performance evaluations which are completely removed from “school pedigree” and have everything to do with job performance.

118

But if “selectivity by itself is a measure of popularity not quality” (reply #105) and you “discount academic rankings” (reply #97), then why should that matter in terms of assessing the quality of NJIT’s ABET-accredited engineering programs and their graduates?

119

CC loves there rankings very much!!

Ive worked with engineers from MIT at P&G and Nestle and they were in the same band pay wise as engineers from “regular” colleges.

Same goes for MDs I know 1 from Stanford everyone else normal.“regular” med schools and all make about the same specialty dependent.

I just dont think it matters much the student matters the school not so much.

120

Once again posters keep reversing this:

Its not “I’m smart/talented because I have an education from Stanford.”

It is: “Because I’m smart/talented I have an education from Stanford.”