<p>We (at home) are currently debating as to whether our son must undergraduate from UT Austin (low tution fee as we are Texas residents) or go to an IVY college for undergraduation(fee of $35K per year). Our final goal is to have him do graduation from IVY college in engineering.
Can someone provide a simple answer?
What gives you a good change to do graduation in an IVY college if,
a. you are an undergraduate from an IVY college
b. if you are an undergraduate from UT Austin
c. it doesnt make a difefrence.
Please also provvide more insight based on your experience.</p>
<p>I’m assuming that what you meant to say was that you’re trying to decide if going to UT undergraduate will affect your son’s chances of going to graduate school at an ivy. Is that correct?
It really depends on the individual student. Going to an ivy undergrad is NO guarantee of getting into an ivy grad school-- keep that in mind. That said, if your son has the stats to get into an ivy AND you can afford to undertake that financial burden-- well then it really comes down to the school that he prefers, I think. If he’s not totally enamored of an ivy, it might make more sense to choose the less expensive, in state option-- UT is still a quite good school. Keep in mind that graduate school is pretty expensive as well, depending on the program. If your son really plans to go to a private graduate school, it may not be financially viable for him to go to private undergrad as well.
Basically, if he goes to UT Austin and does extremely well there, he’ll have just as much chance as anyone else to get into an excellent grad school.</p>
<p>I agree with mathmom. The best engineering schools are MIT, Stanford, Cal Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan, etc. Only Cornell has highly ranked engineering among Ivies. UT Austin is an excellent engineering school.</p>
<p>From my personal experience at MIT, I found that a large percentage of the PhD students in mech eng at MIT were from a wide range of state undergrad schools (e.g. Iowa State, Florida, Illinois, SUNY, etc.). If your son does well in engineering at Texas, there is absolutely no limit to the grad school he can attend. And if he can have a strong GPA, test scores, etc., grad school in engineering can be free (research assistantship, fellowship, …).</p>
<p>watching Sunday TV with wife and S, who is home this weekend for an interview. S was declined at all 5 of his undergrad IVY’s. He got into CMU (mechanical eng) and became student assistant, gofer (3 years) to this robotics professor who was his unofficial advisor:
[url=<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/0304/03.html]NOVA”>NOVA | scienceNOW | Profile: Yoky Matsuoka | PBS]NOVA</a> | scienceNOW | Profile: Yoky Matsuoka | PBS<a href=“S%20not%20enamored%20with%20robotics”>/url</a></p>
<p>S was later declined at 2 of HYPS schools for his master’s (computer sci) but be got into Toronto, which got him, 2 Microscoft Research internships, one in Bangaloru, and the current one in Redmond. </p>
<p>We thank his lucky stars that he did not fit the HYPS/Ivy profile.</p>