<p>I agree with RacinReaver. It seems like we’re beating a dead horse here, but oh well. I prefer my job to yours, and you probably prefer your job to mine. Why can’t we just agree that we have different favorite colors?</p>
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<p>I strongly suspect the average reader on CC is closer to that of a top-10-caliber school than of the average engineering student at an average school. After all, let’s be frank, the latter isn’t that strong. </p>
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<p>Yet it’s not a simple matter of opinion. As I’ve said before, the inescapable fact is that many of the engineering students at the best engineering programs prefer to work not as engineers but rather in finance. However, few if any finance employees - including those with degrees in engineering - apparently prefer to work as engineers. The migration therefore is highly assymetric. The unanswered two-part question then is, why is that, and can (or should) anything be done to mitigate it?</p>
<p>Many engineering students in top schools choose to go into finance instead of engineering. Some do not. The overwhelming majority of people in my area are liberals. Does that mean being liberal is better than being a conservative? Those look like opinions to me.</p>
<p>Before the 2nd part of the question is answered, another question should be asked first:
Do companies have any incentive of trying to lure the top students from the top engineering schools? For whatever reason, they don’t feel it’s worth the money to obtain the services of these graduates.</p>
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<p>the more senior investment bankers</p>
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<p>Uh, no, when many of the best engineering students choose to leave engineering for finance, but when practically nobody from finance - including those with engineering degrees - chooses to leave finance for engineering, then if seems that we’re no longer talking about a matter of opinion. People are clearly voting with their feet. </p>
<p>By the same rationale, it is not an opinion that the United States, at least economically, offers more job opportunities for poor people than does Mexico, which is why many poor Mexicans choose to illegally immigrate to the US for work, but few if any poor Americans choose to illegally immigrate to Mexico to look for work. Those Mexicans are voting with their feet. Fortuitous indeed that we live in a desirable country where people from around the world perennially want to enter as opposed to being in a country where people are perennially looking to leave. </p>
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<p>And yet ironically, those very same companies seem to be perfectly content to pay mountainous fees for finance and consulting services provided by those firms that are often times staffed by the very same top engineering graduates that they felt were not worth the money to hire as engineers. In other words, those companies are going to pay them high wages one way or another, the only question being whether they choose to do so directly or resold through a third party. Some have said that the basic business model of the top consulting firms is nothing more than repackaging and reselling the talents of top college graduates at nosebleed markups. They may not be wrong.</p>
<p>Similar to my earlier answer on ROI, I don’t think the engineering students from are rewarded enough after graduating. Although I have a lot of posts that counter the school name/prestige topic, I think the top grads should start WAY ahead of others regardless of need or supply/demand…but they do not. The schools SAY that will always be selective but in the “sell out” their admission policies for corporate agreements and tuition payments from experienced engineers employers.</p>
<p>The real issue is that we’re actually over-producing engineering grads in this country. Clearly, people who love engineering stick with engineering, everybody else who decided to work with a bunch of rent-seeking ivy league snobs didn’t care for engineering enough to stick with its non-pecuniary rewards.</p>
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Then those that don’t choose to leave engineering (whatever percentage that may be) are actually choosing to work a job they desire less?</p>
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They’re paying for the reputation that comes along with the said consulting firm as well as the more senior employees with a proven track record of results. I know of a quasi- government agency that hired a traffic engineering firm when they already have a traffic engineering division with their own organization. While I don’t know the real reasoning for sure, I’m sure the fact that the consultant had a very good reputation in the industry for the work they do was probably a significant factor in the decision process. Another benefit to hiring a consultant is that you get an outsider involved, who wouldn’t be “tainted” by the hiring company’s “thinking process” and “culture.”</p>
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<p>Many of them can’t get a finance (or consulting) job. I never said that attending a top school guaranteed that you would obtain such a job. </p>
<p>But to your point, obviously there are some people at the elite engineering programs who truly love engineering. Many of those students will obviously choose to never take an industry job at all, but instead will choose to attend graduate school to embark upon a career in engineering academia. There are indeed plenty of “MIT-cubed” people (that is, those who earn BS, MS and PhD all at MIT) who then choose to take faculty positions…often times back at MIT itself, in the ultimate self-perpetuating system. I can think of a number of old MIT faculty members who arrived since graduating from high school and who have never left. </p>
<p>But that doesn’t take away from the fact that, at least at the bachelor’s degree level (and probably also at the master’s level), graduates from the top engineering programs do not really seem to have a significant salary advantage over those from merely average engineering programs if they choose to work as engineers. </p>
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<p>Actually, I don’t think that’s true. Like I always said, low-end engineering graduates are receiving a fantastic deal. Let’s face it, if you were a mediocre high school student who could only get into a low-tier college, then obtaining an engineering degree and a $50-60k starting salary is a fantastic deal. Honestly, what else were you going to do? That’s why I’ve always said that students from low-end schools who are pursuing unmarketable liberal arts majors - which comprise the vast majority of students at those schools - would almost surely be better off as engineers. </p>
<p>The problem stems from what happens to the top engineering students. If you believe in the information content of price signals, then that indicates that we may have a glut of top engineering students*. In other words, engineering firms seem to be perfectly content with hiring average talent, but are not willing to pay much of a premium for top talent. </p>
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<p>Yet that only elicits the question of said consulting firm obtained that reputation when it is (or should be) well understood that much (almost certainly most) of the work is actually being performed by recent college graduates. After all, consulting firms make no secret of their hiring strategies. Consulting clients should know that they are largely being resold the services of some recent college graduates. </p>
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<p>That’s not entirely clear either, as given by the, frankly, highly mixed record of success of even the (supposedly) best consulting firms. McKinsey, for example, was intimately involved in the shenanigans of Enron, was almost certainly primarily responsible for the failed strategy of SwissAir that resulted in its bankruptcy, advised GE to recommend its strategy of expanding its Finance division right before the crash that necessitated a government bailout, and stands at the heart of the Galleon insider trading scandal. The same could be said for the other ‘top’ consulting firms. It’s actually not clear whether consulting actually produces a net ROI. </p>
<p>But even if you do believe that the senior consultants do indeed provide value, the question then is why does they have to be bundled with recent college graduates in a package deal. Why not just engage (and pay for) only those senior consultants? Large clients could surely demand this if they wanted. They could easily say: “Since we’re not going to pay $100k for new engineering graduate direct hires, we’re not going to pay $500k (pro-rated) for new engineering graduates who are being resold through a consulting channel either.” But they do. (To be clear, the new college graduate doesn’t receive that $500k, but the consulting firm does.} </p>
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<p>Then if that’s truly the case, then that’s a core problem with that firms’ “thinking process” or “culture” and should be cured at its very root, not by using an expensive consulting band-aid. </p>
<p>The fundamental issue is that if these companies are going to be effectively paying high wages to these top college graduates anyway through the indirect channel of consulting and financial services fees, why can’t they simply pay them directly? They could simply say that half of the (titanic) mark-up that consulting/finance firms charge will instead be paid in the form of increased salary to those new hires, and the other half will be kept by the firm. Everybody wins (except for the consulting and finance firms).</p>
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<p>So you’re saying that given the choice between a finance job and an industry engineering job, everyone will take the finance job?</p>
<p>These companies spending all this money aren’t dumb. I’m sure there are real reason why they choose not to spend extra money on graduates from top engineering schools. Instead of trying to figure out how graduates can get higher salaries, we should be trying to figure out WHY companies CHOOSE not to chase after graduates from top schools. I think it’s fair to at least assume for now companies know what they’re doing instead of thinking they’re making poor business decisions.</p>
<p>My earlier post should have said…</p>
<p>“The schools SAY that THEY will always be selective but in END the “sell out” their admission policies for corporate agreements and tuition payments from experienced engineers’ employers.”</p>
<p><strong>has not mastered posting via the phone</strong></p>
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<p>because they are afraid that these graduates from top schools might leave them eventually?</p>
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<p>That might make sense, but then why make ANY offer at all? If they’re afraid of them leaving, wouldn’t they be better off paying someone they think will be staying? </p>
<p>Earlier there was a claim that discussions on CC should be geared towards the very upper echelon because that’s where most of the posters on CC are from. I went back 10 pages or so on the Engineering Forum and counted the number of times each school came up in the forum title. The findings do not support such a claim.</p>
<p>Top 10(ish) schools:
CMU x3
UIUC x6
GT x2
UPenn x2
Duke
UMich
Cornell
UT Austin x5</p>
<p>The Rest</p>
<p>BYU
Cal Poly Pomona x2
Cal Poly SLO
University of Central Florida x2
Drexel x3
Florida State
Florida A&M
University of Florida x4
Northeastern
Polytech
Purdue x3
Vanderbilt
Virginia Tech x3
Texas A&M x3
Penn State x6
Oklahoma University
University of Minnesota
Pitt
Northern Illinois University
Temple
UCSD
UC Irvine
UCLA x3
SUNY Fredonia
CUNY Queens College
Washington State
RIT x3
UBC
Illinois Tech
Temple
Rose Hulman
Rutgers
Cooper Union
University of New Mexico
New Mexico Tech
University of Oregon
University of Illinois - Chicago x 3
University of Iowa
Arizona St
Waterloo
Cal State - Los Angeles
SUNYIT
USF
La Tech
University of Arizona x2
U of Houston</p>
<p>I know this is not the most scientific, but it’s the quickest and gets the general idea across.</p>
<p>^
Shouldn’t you be searching all of CC to find trends at CC, and not just the engineering section?</p>
<p>Here are a few samples from “google searching” the entire forum:</p>
<p>Tops</p>
<p>Stanford x 62 700 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Harvard x 75 100 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Columbia x 61 500 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Yale x 57 900 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Berkeley x 276 000 (<a href=“Google”>Google)</p>
<p>non upper-echelon</p>
<p>NYU x 43 000 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
BU x 41 100 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
UCLA <a href=“compare%20to%20UCB”>i</a>* x 170 000 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Purdue x 26 600 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
UNC x 48 200 (<a href=“Google”>Google)
Vanderbilt x 48 400 (<a href=“Google”>Google)</p>
<p>When you take into account the actual number of students attending the different sample Us here, you can see that CC really is slightly upper-echelon oriented.</p>
<p>I intentionally only searched the the engineering section because the claim was about engineering majors going into finance so I wanted to try to limit the population to engineering majors instead of all majors. </p>
<p>Searching all of CC would also take significantly more time to do. If somebody else wants to do it, feel free. I would be curious if the “engineering population” on CC is different than the rest.</p>
<p>I know some purists do not like software engineering mentioned because it may not be “true engineering” but still is a profession that uses a lot of computer science majors…and computer science IS part of many engineering colleges of universities, soooooooo…</p>
<p>I have mentioned the following before about how grads from top schools can have the “career gap” reduced once you factor in experience and new technology. While the Top-10-school CS grad is working on their first job out of college (non high-finance), a state-school CS grad may get an opportunity to learn some hot new network software or database software or operating system and can CASH IN because their are so many hiring mangers who want to be known to hire someone with the latest. That Top-10 grad was loyal and everything but all of that gets lost once those new technology “buzzwords” start popping up. With one employer change, the initial salary gap is now gone. I will be the first to say that I don’t think it is totally fair.</p>
<p>On a side note and different note, I do respect the graduate engineering department of Columbia University. They basically allow experienced engineers to take courses without formal admission to earn a graduate certificate BUT CLEARLY state that just because you earn the certificate (which is like 4 out of the 10 courses for the M.S. degree) you are NOT guaranteed admission into the M.S. program. I myself even asked the admission office “what if a student aces the four courses?” and their answer was still “not guaranteed until after we see your undergrad record and you meet are minimum GPA requirements, GRE scores, etc.”</p>
<p>It was not the answer I wanted to hear and different from U-Wisconsin and U-Maryland, but I respect Columbia’s policy. No “back door way” to their grad programs…basically saying that you must have been an exceptional student for awhile before we allow you into our program and let you leave with OUR NAME on your diploma.</p>
<p>Even though UCLA and Berkeley aren’t ranked that far apart, you can clearly see a sort of relationship.</p>
<p>Something like:</p>
<p>a[# of undergrads] x b[% applicants rejected] = c[CC Popularity]</p>
<p>With the appropriate constants a, b and c, this could prove fairly accurate!</p>
<p>johannes, what about the hundreds of other “non-Top 10(ish)” schools mentioned on CC forums? When you take those into consideration, I’m sure the percentage of “Top 10(ish)” students is pretty small.</p>
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<p>Obviously not, just as obviously not every poor Mexican illegally immigrates to the US. </p>
<p>However, the statistical trends are clear, and more importantly, they are assymetric. There are clearly far more Mexicans illegally immigrating to the US for work than there are Americans illegally immigrating to Mexico for work. Similarly, there are clearly far more engineering students migrating to finance than there are financiers (including those with engineering degrees) who are migrating to engineering. Similarly, from a statistical standpoint, smoking increases your chances of early death, but that’s not to say that everybody who smokes will die early. </p>
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<p>Actually, those firms clearly don’t know what they are doing, and they are conceding as much. Given that we all agree that firms continue to pay exceedingly high prices for consulting services, it is clearly true that they are missing, or at least perceive that they do not know what they are doing, and hence require those consulting firms to supply missing crucial sources of human capital. What is consulting after all, if not a source of human capital? But one then wonders why can’t they simply procure those sources of crucial human capital directly, and for a far lower price? If those firms truly knew what they were doing, in the sense that they were employing the expertise that they needed, then they would never need to pay for consultants. </p>
<p>But even if you do assume that firms do know what they are doing when they do choose to pay for high-priced consulting and financial services as a means of accessing repackaged sources of crucial human capital, then that only means that those top engineering students who do have access to positions at consulting and finance firms are well advised to take them. </p>
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<p>Uh, you guys really consider schools such as UCLA, Vanderbilt, NYU, UNC, or, heck, even Purdue or BU to be “non-upper-echelon”? True they aren’t “top 10 schools” specifically, but I never claimed that the readership consisted of only students at top 10 schools. What I said is that the readership is skewed far more highly towards those top 10 schools than to the average school.</p>
<p>Put another way, there are over 2000 4-year colleges in the United States, not to mention the thousands more community colleges. I don’t think it’s a matter of dispute that the readership of CC skews far more highly to the top 10 than to the #1000 ranked school, which would be the median school (even excluding the community colleges). Even BU and Purdue are safely ensconced within the top 100 or therefore within the * top 5%* of the entire population of 2000+ schools. Your mention of the popularity of those schools on CC therefore only (ironically) bolsters my central point that the CC readership skews superlatively highly, relative to the average school. Again, the average school would be one ranked in the 1000’s. </p>
<p>Furthermore, let’s face it, the top schools exert a highly disproportionate influence on the milieu of higher education as a whole. West Texas A&M University would like to emulate Stanford or MIT, but Stanford or MIT would not like to emulate WTAMU. Hence, whatever trends are occurring within the educational culture at the top schools are inevitably going to inform that of the average schools. If the students at even the top schools don’t really want to be engineers, then the students at the average schools will eventually feel likewise. Engineering may eventually therefore (sadly) become seen as a backup profession joined only by those who weren’t good enough to find something better.</p>
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<p>But then that only shifts the terms of debate. If those firms offered an attractive work environment (including pay), then those graduates from the top schools won’t leave them, right? So why not offer such an environment?</p>
<p>Or, put another way, why do the consulting and financial firms seem to be untroubled by the notion of hiring top graduates who are also likely to eventually leave them? It is well understood that the vast majority of new consulting/finance analyst hires won’t stay for more than a few years, and indeed, most such firms actually require most of those analysts to leave after that period of time, with only a small fraction invited to stay. If those firms can construct a profitable organization built around a high turnover, temporary workforce, why can’t engineering firms do the same?</p>