In a pickle.... Does graduate school matter for Chem E, & should I apply to prestigious schools?

Applying to College
23

What do you want to do after college? For traditional process engineering roles, a master’s degree is basically worthless (and treated as such) for most employers. If I remember correctly, the oil supermajor I started at paid an extra 6 - 8K/yr for an MS grad as opposed to a BS grad. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to a mediocre raise after the first year of work. In some cases, there can be significant disadvantages to getting an MS.

A PhD is completely different and will put you in the running for completely separate roles – the career paths eventually converge when you get high enough in the company. The bump in pay isn’t significant enough to justify the extra 4-5 years in school.

The common theme is:

  1. Continued higher education in chemical engineering in general will not reward you with significantly higher pay to justify the years in school
  2. Just a master’s degree will not be enough to qualify you for roles (in general) that a bachelor’s degree would not qualify you for
  3. A PhD may be worth the time-investment if it’s what you want to do. A master’s degree isn’t worth the time or money if you can get your target job immediately after undergrad

As far as the prestige of the school:
The prestige of the school doesn’t matter, AS LONG AS THE SCHOOL HAS CLOUT IN THE INDUSTRY THAT YOU WANT TO WORK IN. Higher ranked schools will give you OPTIONALITY in career choices that lower ranked schools will not. My chemical engineering cohort @ Michigan has people in every industry: management consulting, investment banking, oil & gas, software, private equity, venture capital, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, etc etc. I went into a fairly traditional career path in O&G and work alongside extremely capable & bright engineers/managers from “lower-tier” schools like Texas Tech/Texas A&M/LSU/Washington State/etc. At this point, school doesn’t matter. Both LSU and Michigan will get you into O&G in the Gulf Coast, but the LSU kid will have a tougher time breaking into management consulting in New York than the Michigan kid.

As a last piece of advice - don’t study Chemical Engineering. Do CS instead.