<p>Is engineering easier at lower ranked schools? If a school is top 10 and the other school is ranked in the 40s, is there a difference?</p>
<p>Engineering “easiness” doesn’t correlate with rank. It correlates with average student ability (SATs/GPA being the best metrics). However, lower ranked schools are not easy because they generally fail more people so the average graduating student is quite good.</p>
<p>I think Engineering curriculum are pretty similar for the top schools. In terms of difficulty, you shouldn’t look at the engineering rankings, you should look at the student body gpa and SAT scores. Engineering classes are curved, so the better students others are, the lower your grade will be.</p>
<p>so are you saying that it’s better to go a lower-ranked shcool where you can succeed rather than to shoot for a higher ranked schoolo where you might struggle and your gpa will suffer?</p>
<p>yes, basically. If you really want to be an engineer, where you go for your engineering degree doesn’t really matter for employment or engineering grad school, as long as you do well. </p>
<p>A lot of engineering majors at the best schools don’t want to be engineers, they just want a quantitative degree, so they can go into IBanking, Management Consulting, or some other area. </p>
<p>So, if you are sure you want to be an engineer, it doesn’t really matter, lower ranked schools will be easier and will offer the same opportunities for your engineering needs.</p>
<p>So, if you are sure you want to be an engineer, it doesn’t really matter, lower ranked schools will be easier and will offer the same opportunities for your engineering needs.</p>
<p>I would think that going to a better school will give you better networking opportunities, and thus more job opportunities. After getting your first job though, where you went to school probably doesn’t matter as much.</p>
<p>so i may be going to michigan over OSU, and michigan will cost me 40K a year as opposed to 10K a year at OSU. then also lookin at UIUC for 25K</p>
<p>what would u guys recommend…i think OSU has a good program as well…ranked in top 25 in the nation. Illinois is good and so is MIchigan</p>
<p>Engineering has a comparatively fixed curriculum in all universities. What really differentiates the different universities in the rankings is the student body doing that particular course, research facilities available coupled with the job prospects etc. </p>
<p>But wherever you do your undergraduate degree it is a must to have a good GPA to get into one of the really good schools for your graduate in engineering. </p>
<p>But if you are going for management it is better to have atleast an average GPA with good market skills.</p>
<p>So depending on what facilities that you would like to make use of and depending on the resources available to you - you must select your university.</p>
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<p>While I think it is largely true that the difficulty tends to correlate with GPA and SAT scores, there are important exceptions to the rule. Stanford, for example, is a school with extremely high GPA and SAT scores that is notably easy than others with similar such characteristics. While I can’t prove this, I strongly suspect that some people who flunked out of engineering from places like UIUC or Georgia Tech or Cornell might have passed if they had gone to Stanford. Granted, they wouldn’t have gotten top grades, but at least they would have passed and thus graduated. Of course, the catch is that you have to get admitted to Stanford in the first place. </p>
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<p>The problem with this is that nobody ever really can be ‘sure’. I know a lot of people who thought they were sure they wanted to be engineers, and then they got crushed by their engineering courses and so ended up majoring in something else. That’s why I think it’s important to not put all your eggs in one basket and go to a school that gives you a ‘safety valve’ of being able to choose an easier major. </p>
<p>Again, take the example of Stanford. Like I said above, even if you’re subpar, you will still probably pass your engineering classes at Stanford, although you’ll probably get mediocre grades. But if you want to do better than just mediocre? What if you find out you want to major in the humanities? If you’re a student at Stanford, it’s trivial for you to then switch over to one of the humanities majors, all of which are highly regarded. Contrast that with a school like Caltech, where if you find out that you don’t want to major in a technical subject, you have a problem because Caltech offers very few nontechnical options. Or what if you’re at Berkeley? Berkeley operates as multiple ‘colleges’, with engineering and Letters & Science (where the humanities are located) in discrete colleges. If you are doing poorly in engineering, you may not be able to switch over to humanities because the College of Letters & Science might not want to take you. Hence, you end up being trapped in a major you no longer want and are doing poorly in. </p>
<p>Also, consonant with the notion that rankings don’t matter that much (a notion with which I agree), then one should consider going to places like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton for engineering. True, HYP aren’t the most elite of engineering schools. But hey, since rankings don’t really matter that much anyway, I don’t see much harm in going to these places for engineerig. You will get the huge brand name of HYP. You will get killer networking contacts and obviously a well-trod path if you’re one of those engineers who ends up going to investment banking or management consulting. </p>
<p>Personally, I still think that Stanford is the perfect engineering school. Not only is it highly ranked for engineering, but it also has a cracker-jack general brand name, the engineering coursework is relatively easily graded (as far as engineering courses go) because while you might get mediocre grades, it’s practically impossible to actually flunk out, if you find out you don’t like engineering, there are plenty of other majors to choose from, it has killer networking opportunites, and it has extensive recruting contacts with both engineering and non-engineering firms (i.e. banks, consulting firms). In other words, it’s the best of all worlds - it has all of the positives with none of the negatives. But HYP aren’t bad either - the only things they are missing that Stanford has are the top-ranked engineering programs and extensive contacts with engineering firms. But they have everything else. </p>
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<p>Exactly right. See above. Again, using the example of Stanford, that university is highly famous for producing a lot of highly successful tech startups. If you want to get in on a startup at the ground floor, you basically have to be acquainted with the founders. That’s because startups don’t recruit. They don’t have the resources, the time, or the knowledge necessary to recruit. </p>
<p>For example, when Google was just a tiny startup with just the 2 founders (Pageand Brin), the company didn’t do any true ‘recruiting’. Let’s face it. At that stage of your company, you don’t go around recruiting at various colleges in the country. Instead, you just end up hiring a bunch of your friends and colleagues. And that’s what Brin and Page did - they hired a bunch of their college buddies from Stanford. Now, all of them who stayed with the company are multimillionaires from their Google stock options. Similarly, the reason why Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft (and worth over a billion dollars) is simple - he was Bill Gates’s old dorm-mate and poker-playing buddy back at Harvard. Like it or not, ‘who you know’ rather than ‘what you know’ is more important in terms of finding job opportunities.</p>