ivy league edu for engineering worth $200K?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>I think that’s the point which I haven’t been seeing eye to eye with some people on this thread. Others want to get an expensive education while maintaining the same style of living, while I’ve been assuming the families would make sacrifices and wouldn’t maintain the same extravagant lifestyle.</p>

<p>$40k for a family of 5 is plenty. That was my family’s pretax income before I started working part-time during the school year (keep in mind we do live in a fairly high cost-of-living area) If you manage your money well, you can live comfortably on $40k.</p>

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<p>Most people don’t have the cashflow to pay all college expenses out of hand. They take out a loan and pay off in several years. Med students take out loans of their own and don’t pay cash each year. I don’t see where there should be any problem with your going to your choice of schools.</p>

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<p>I agree with most of you. This is what I’ve been telling my parents: let my brother and I take loans out for med-school. But they refuse. They refuse to let us be hindered by loans in such an early state of our career. This is of course, their prerogative (not that I’m not very grateful for their desire to be involved) </p>

<p>I’ve also asked them, isn’t 40k a lot to live on? But they say, if they were to live on 40k/yr, they’d have to lower their standard of living. I’m not really sure how much money goes into maintaining this “standard of living,” but from the way they talk, it seems like it costs more than 40k /year. </p>

<p>And, even if it doesn’t, my dad really wants to save for retirement. He’s almost 60, and is probably going to retire in the next decade or so. </p>

<p>I suppose if we all took out loans (me and my brother, that is), I’m sure my dad could save money for my younger brother’s education and for his retirement, and still maintain our status quo. </p>

<p>But he doesn’t want us to take out loans…he truly wants to avoid this. </p>

<p>So the option is - and this is the only option for him - that I don’t go to a 50k/yr school.</p>

<p>I’m really trying to convince him otherwise, but he always starts talking about money-issues in a way that always makes me feel like I’ll be placing a huge strain on them If I do in fact attend Cornell.</p>

<p>Sakky - about the car issue: my parents bought two, brand new Toyotas last year. After nearly two decades without owning a car or a house (we lived in a different country), I think they’re entitled to something a bit luxurious. So the car payment is making a dent. </p>

<p>Again, I know this is a bit stupid. If they want me to go to a 50k school and send my bro to med-school without loans, we should minimize the “luxuriousness” of our lifestyle. </p>

<p>But I know that they don’t want to do this (well, its only been a 2 years that we’ve been living this way) - they really feel that they’ve worked hard to reach this point and deserve it. </p>

<p>It’s stupid, because I feel that right now it’s either me or them.</p>

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<p>You might want to have them sit down with your school’s guidance counselor or a teacher you trust and have a discussion with them about how it’s not really that huge of a deal for you to pick up some debt if you’re going to become a doctor.</p>

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<p>college expenses are ridicolous Im lucky where Im wealthy enough not to need to worry about it, but the costs for all students in college after the scholarships given by schools, is far less than the amount it takes to keep troops in Germany, Japan, and Italy. Those populations don’t want us there, and it doesnt matter towards our security…the nazis have been gone since WW2. If we took our troops out of those areas we could easily pay for every person’s college education. It costs $80 billion a year to keep our troops in those 3 countries.</p>

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<p>Is an Ivy, or generally good engineering school worth it? I’m starting to reconsider schools like Duke, Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia because they would cost probably something like 150k for us.</p>

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<li><p>Aren’t harder engineering schools (like Cornell) awful for graduate school admissions because of grade deflation?</p></li>
<li><p>Are Princeton and Columbia good engineering schools if you want to do graduate engineering (and get a stipend and stuff)?</p></li>
<li><p>I’ve heard Duke is good, but how can I convince my parents to pay 150k for it? Also, they have neither ChemE or MatSE, but do you think it really matters, since MechE is similar and I can do my major of choice in graduate school?</p></li>
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<p>If you’re considering grad school, then why bother with Duke? Duke is #33 in US News currently, behind fellow North Carolina school NCSU. Grad schools evaluate applicants based on their program’s actual strength. General prestige counts for jack squat. And no one will care where you went for undergrad after you get a graduate degree so there goes all that money.</p>

<p>In any case, grade deflation or lack of it is known by grad schools. Professional schools (law, medicine, business) barely compensate for it when evaluating applicants but graduate schools will, unless a program is just unknown to them.</p>

<p>Princeton and Columbia are “good” in that they are top 20 and there are 200 or so engineering schools. But you won’t impress any engineers or engineering admission committees more with a Princeton or Columbia degree than a Michigan degree. Cornell isn’t as hard as its students like to pretend it is (possibly due to their insecurity being compared to other Ivies). Here’s the median grade report put out by Cornell:
[Cornell</a> University Registrar: Median Grades](<a href=“http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html]Cornell”>http://registrar.sas.cornell.edu/Student/mediangradesA.html)</p>

<p>Nothing remarkable and probably easier than top publics.</p>

<p>Unless you have a particular specialization in mind, it’s silly to think that MechE is “similar” to ChemE and MatSE. Fields aren’t divided up because we have nothing better to do.</p>

<p>And finally, there’s no reason to bump old topics.</p>

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<p>Suppose your in state public costs 80k and your Ivy League school costs 200k. There’s a huge differencce between the top Ivys and the lesser Ivys, but if we’re talking about HYP, I think that the extra 120k is worth it. Now if your choices are Berkeley and Cornell, I don’t think it’s worth it. </p>

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<p>A straight engineering job will pay a solid middle class salary: starting at 50k and plateauing at 100k. It is more than a teacher will make, but it is not spectacular pay. </p>

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<p>Yes, most engineering grads from top schools go into finance/consulting/research which all pay higher salaries. It is hard to get those jobs from lesser schools. </p>

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<p>Finance/consulting/research. You can also choose to enter an MS/pHD/professional program. For example, engineers with law degrees can become patent lawyers. </p>

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<p>Basically, you cannot dumb engineering down. Any circuits class will need to teach certain content, but an economics class can be taught at different levels of difficulty depending on the class it is taught to. So at weaker schools engineering is the hardest program and it has a high attrition rate. At top schools it is not harder than any other program.</p>

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Well I meant that you can still go from Mechanical Engineering undergrad to Materials Engineering in graduate school.</p>

<p>Also what do you think of Johns Hopkins?</p>

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<p>You won’t plateau at $100k in engineering.</p>

<p>There are SO many good public engineering schools - I would never pay the extra for ivy league.</p>

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<p>al6200, engineers with a BS will likely start out at 60k, not 50k. Add a graduate degree and it is higher than that. I also do not agree that an engineers salary will plateau at 100k. I don’t know why people always emphasize the “salary cap” for engineers. Every profession has a limit to what you can make (excluding starting your own business, etc) and in fact, engineering has a higher upper limit than most professional jobs and certainly among people with bachelors degrees. It is quite possible to make 100k mid career or sooner as an engineer, not to mention the possibility of moving into management. I don’t think a salary of 100k qualifies as “middle class” either.</p>

<p>And I agree with MaineLonghorn. There are many excellent public research institutions for engineering. I don’t know if I could justify paying for an Ivy but it depends on your goals.</p>

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<p>I don’t think you know anyone with $200k in debt.</p>

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<p>Clearly! Our $80K in student loans demand a MINIMUM payment of $800 a month for the next fifteen years… Don’t do it. We live pretty well, but it’d be a heck of a lot easier if we didn’t have to throw a large wad of our monthly net into Sallie Mae’s wallet.</p>

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<p>aibarr, I was just talking to my brother last night. He finished law school in the spring. His loans are just now coming out of deferral, and to give you an idea of how much he’s got in loans, just one of his loans has a minimum payment of yours and your husband’s.</p>

<p>Made me call my parents afterward and tell them not to worry about me since I’ve got X much saved in the bank, and Y in loans, and, thankfully, X > Y already. ;)</p>

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<p>Ugh… At least he’s a lawyer. We’re a civil engineer and a composer. :P</p>

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<p>Okay, a student has a choice between Rutgers and Princeton. Rutgers costs about 20k in state. So the loan difference is 120k more if the student chooses Princeton. </p>

<p>If the student goes to Rutgers, they could probably get a decent engineering job paying 60k. The student going to Princeton might get a banking/hedge fund job starting at 90k (including bonuses). The difference will probably be paid off in about 5 years, and after that the Princeton grad will have substantially higher earning potential. </p>

<p>I’m not saying that this is a good thing. I actually think that it’s pretty stupid that employers use school prestige as much as they do, but when students are looking at colleges they need to be realistic.</p>

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<p>Now you’re comparing two entirely different careers. Most people don’t care for banking jobs. That’s sort of an upper-class east coast fantasy. In any case, you can get a banking job at other places. I know University of Illinois EE students who’ve interviewed with Goldman Sachs on campus and I myself have randomly gotten emails from investment banks offering interviews (they search by GPA in our career center’s database). So going to Princeton just to get a banking job doesn’t make much sense.</p>

<p>Now I can offer you an actual reason to go there – it can actually be cheaper for families with low EFC because Princeton is rich and gives out grants while state schools offer loans. But this just boils down to money and here we seem to be assuming that the Ivy grad is in more debt and whether that’s worth it.</p>

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Empirical evidence suggests that in engineering, if anything, they don’t use it as much as they should. Starting salaries are pretty close across the spectrum of schools even though, in my opinion, the graduates from top engineering schools are more productive. Only Google and a few other firms seem to care and they make up a very tiny portion of employment – so this is irrelevant to the other 99+%.</p>

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<p>What happens if you’re one of the more typical Princeton engineering grads that winds up with either a normal engineering job (likely the same type of one you would have gotten from Rutgers) or go to grad school (very possibly winding up with classmates from Rutgers)?</p>

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<p>^Excellent question. If you didn’t get a lot of FA, you’re not in a good spot. Most kids think that they will be The Exception, but they’re in for a disappointment.</p>

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<p>There are exceptions, but in general it is harder to get a trading job (as opposed to operations) if you don’t go to a top school. This is true for consulting and good research jobs.</p>