Hi! My Dad thinks that it doesn’t matter how many loans I take if I go to a top school since higher salaries would make up for it. He says that engineering jobs pay well and I can pay it off easily in the future. I suspect that this is not the case, and I was wondering how I could convince my Dad that sometimes the less famous but cheaper schools are better?
However, if you do agree with him, can you tell me why?
Does your dad understand that HE will need to cosogn those BIG loans? You won’t be able to take them without a cosigner. So really HE is taking the loans!
My husband is an engineer and does hiring. He does NOT hire engineers based on the college from which they got their degree. He hires them based on the experiences they bring to the job…and on their willingness to learn…because there is PLENTY of on the job training done in engineering jobs.
My husband does work which requires a PE. He hires only hires grads of ABET accredited schools…who are willing to pursue getting the PE.
Oh…and for the record…if you are hired by my husband’s firm…you get paid the same salary whether you graduate from University of No where…as if you graduate from Expensive Elite University.
You are smart to want minimal debt.
Sure…you might have a great job…but if you have $200,000 in debt…you will have minimally a $2000 a month loan payment for ten years. What would you rather do? Pay off college loans…or maybe buy a house, or go on vacations, or get a new car?
And if you can’t pay them back he will have to pay them back.
The max you can borrow per year is about $5,500. (It goes up in each subsequent year of college, but not by much).
So if your elite school costs $70,000 a year, where is the other ~$65,000 gonna come from?
Scholarships? Well, if you’re the best kid at your school, know that there are hundreds of thousands of “best kids” across the country, and every one of them likely thinks they’re getting into an elite school too. But there are only 10,000 spots available at the elite schools. (I’m guessing here, but I do hope you see the ratio.)
There are ways to cut costs, and graduate with the skills you need for a great career, with minimal debt, from a good school. That should be your aim.
Engineering fields tend to be somewhat less college rank sensitive than some others like consulting and finance (and law with respect to law school rank).
Also, some if the schools with the best engineering reputations are state universities, so they may include the less expensive ones in your state of residency.
That’s not necessarily the case. You will still be applying to the same jobs where the starting salaries will not vary greatly between jobs. It’s not like they are going to pay people that have gone to different schools one more than the other. What will count is intangible things like work ethic, what you did while you were there, etc. It may give you a second look and some more opportunities, but in the short term it won’t make that much of a difference to justify taking a lot out in loans.
One more thing…of your dad thinks taking loans out is such a wonderful idea…HE should take them.
^ This times 1000.
Your dad’s thinking about taking on big student loans is very old-fashioned and simplistic. It is also the reason that student loans are a very serious national problem. It is your future life and having a ton of debt from the get-go is a major liability and hold you back to do other things like saving for a house downpayment.
One thing you can help your dad research…your parents will have to QUALIFY for loans EVERY YEAR. So, maybe you get the first year’s $65,000 loan, and maybe even the second year’s $65,000 loan. What about year 3 and year 4 loans? If you can not qualify for loans all four years, and actually graduate and have a degree to use, you are still going to have to start paying back your loans.
Maybe you have a parent lose a job along the way, or there is serious physical/mental issue in your family. If you stop your schooling at prestigious college U, you have accrued great amount of debt with no degree to show for it.
If you have younger siblings that still need to attend college, but you have tied up all the possible student loans, that leaves your siblings stuck.
Your big picture is to confirm available funds for all four years of schooling (and do your best to graduate in 8 semesters). And if you are a kind older sibling, watching out for your younger siblings’ ability to attend college is a kind thing to do.
Suggestion:
Check the actual job/income records of graduating seniors BY MAJOR with a listing by companies they went to work for and judge for yourselves. They are not the same for all schools, but they may not differ as much as one might guess. Salaries are largely influenced by the cost of living in areas so NYC and silicon valley salaries reflect the high cost of living in their areas. There are also big salary differentials by major.
The most complete records I have found are from WPI. Go to the website @ https://www.wpi.edu/student-experience/career-development/outcomes and click on “2016 Post-Graduation Report(PDF)” for a download of the latest data. On page three of the PDF download the majors are indexed. All you need to do is select an indexed major to find your data. If the number of majors graduating is too small, some data is not given for privacy protection. You can also find job and graduate school placement. The highest department average that year was $85,456 with a BS in CS. The lowest BS in engineering average in 2016 was CE at $58,289. Note that ME ($65,150) and RE (Robotics Engineering at $73,276) also differed widely even though a good deal of ME is often involved in their work.
NOTE: An outstanding CE will do better than an average CS major in the long run. You might want to consider what you really enjoy doing. I like to wear boots and be outdoors! Also, we don’t know with certainty what the job market will be in five years for each of these majors.
Have fun and good luck! :bz
Just remember—there is a reason people finance the mortgage on their homes over a 30 year period. $200-300.00
is a LOT of money. A monthly payment of $800-1500 is a very big deal and even more of a big deal on a salary of just $60-80,000 (your average estimated starting salary).
Your dad is being foolish. Please don’t believe him. Sounds like he just wants bragging rights.
Also, if your job requires security clearances, and you are tied to large loans, you are considered a risk.
Engineering firms that contract with government agencies will not secure someone with outstanding debt. You wont be able to move up, and that includes salary.
Thank you everyone for the responses! They are really helpful, and I hope I can change my dad’s mind on this. I don’t think he wants me to go just for prestige, but he really believes it’ll help me in the long run.
I was also wondering what’s the absolute maximum that I should borrow for loans?
There is no wrong or right for you or your dad’s thinking. But both of you need to factor in risks in taking big loan. For example, you might find it difficult to get your degree in four years in a very competitive school with difficult major, the economic might be in a downturn when you graduate, the tech/IT fields might saturated by engineering workers by the time you graduate… They all affect your rightful employment with the good salary your dad expects. History has stories in early 90s, early 2000s, and mid 2000s, that even the brightest engineers/IT professionals had a difficulty time finding jobs when the entire economy was in a down turn. If this happens, your thinking will be a payoff than your dad’s for both of you.
Yes, great jobs right off the bat are not guaranteed. My husband and I got our master’s degrees in engineering, and we made top grades. But when we got out of school, the economy was in a slump. We sent out 271 resumes (“We are a newly married couple looking for work as structural engineers in the [blank] area…”). We received only a handful of responses. A company in Maine finally responded and ended up hiring both of us. Our starting salaries were certainly not as high as we expected them to be! It was a humbling experience, for sure. We thought we would be fairly well off, and we weren’t! We had very little college debt. If we’d had a big monthly payment, we wouldn’t have been able to buy a house for quite awhile.
I have met people who got half way through their undergrad years and then were no longer able to qualify for new loans, and therefore had to drop out. Fortunately they were able to attend a far less expensive state school and graduate from there, but they could have just gone to their state school in the first place and would have ended up with the same degree a year earlier with much less debt.
When I was a graduate student at a very selective top ranked university, there were students who had done their undergrad all over the place. There were many students, possibly a majority, who had done their undergrad at their in-state public flagship. Two things they had in common: They had done very well where ever they were as undergrads; and they had not run up a large debt for undergrad and therefore could afford to go on to graduate school.
We hire graduates from our in-state public flagship university all the time. They work next to MIT graduates on a day to day basis and no one cares who went to which school.
I am also an engineer (and hire engineers) and I would hire an MIT/Cornell/Cal grad over ANY mid tier school. They just get better offers, so I totally disagree with @thumper1. Sounds like her husband is in the civil engineering world where ABET and PE are much more important, but that is not the question. An education at a top private school approaches 300K, that is a lot of money to “make up” in salary, even if you get a 30K bump from graduating from MIT (it will take more than 10 years to make it up plus interest). The other issue is that the more time that passes between your graduation from a top tier school the less it matters, at that point experience becomes more important. The best route IMO for engineering specifically is to go to a top public school (CAL/GT/etc.) with IN STATE tuition. Of course if you live in a state without a top school your out of luck. At the end of the day most top private schools meet FN so you shouldn’t have to take out 300K in loans to attend, so if you only have to take out 50K in loans to attend a school like MIT I would definitely go for it, you’ll make that up in just a couple of years.
Thanks for the replies!
@MaineLonghorn Wow, thanks for the information. I did not think about that. Would you mind telling me around when this was? I hope you’re doing well now!
@CU123 Thanks for the new perspective! I will probably major in Mechanical Engineering. Unfortunately, I will be out of state everywhere since I’m an american citizen living abroad. 
So after reading all this I was just wondering, are top colleges actually worth it if you want to study engineering since job prospects are going to be the same anyways?
It was a long time ago, 1986, but the economy can tank at any point.