Is 200,000k in undergrad loans worth it?

collegemom3717
Tue, 22 May 2018 03:43:12 +0000

The Oxford Engineering degree is indeed a great degree- but, as everybody else has said, it’s not $200,000 (of money you simply don’t have) better.

Engineering is a comparatively ‘flat’ playing field. In the US, the ABET accreditation is the gold standard: graduate with a degree in engineering from any ABET certified university and your degree will be recognized. It’s true that MIT has a bit more prestige than State U, and the % who go on to do superstar stuff may be higher from MIT than State U- but you will find people from State U working alongside people with MIT degrees, in the same company, for the same salary, in great jobs all over the US. There are a small number of fields where the fancy name can be materially helpful in getting started in a career (investment banking is the poster child for that)- but engineering is really not one of them.

Moreover, the school calendar in the UK is enough different than that in the UK, and the density of local contacts will be so much less with your UK engineering profs, that getting the kind of high-quality summer internships that leads to good jobs in the country in which you are legally allowed to work will be harder coming from Oxford than from a US university.

Note that I am a huge fan of Oxford (& have an Oxonian collegekid). But for a US citizen, with no right to work in the UK, in a subject where local connections are plausibly more important than some, and with no obvious way to finance it, it does not look like the path for you.