@ Mastadon I’ve taken AP Physics without any calculus courses and I got a 4. I am currently taking AP Calc BC and I scored a 36 on the Math section of the ACT. So I kinda think I am stem-oriented. @TooOld4School this why it’s so frustrating. You never know can fully predict the job market. A good college degree could be worth nothing at some point while it also could be worth a lot at another point of time.
I personally divide schools into tiers using star ratings (5 stars, 4.5, 4, 3.5, etc). So, using my metric, a third tier school is quite good to very good, and a fourth tier school is decent to good.
This site is very ranking obsessed and not representative of the majority of employment situations. My husband and oldest son are both engineers. Nobody cares where they went to school. When our son was applying for jobs, having an solid GPA, co-op experience, and an ABET degree were the key to great offers.
He went to a small public tech university that is only ranked regionally. Based on posted salaries on different websites, his salary is not much different from the starting chemE salaries at powerhouse schools. That lines up with the fact that he works right alongside those schools’ graduates and their pay is not based on their schools but on their job level. They are all hired in at the same level. Promotions are based on job performance, not name of school.
Fwiw, our kids have to apply to schools that offer large merit scholarships. They are bright kids, graduating from high school with advanced course work completed. (Some of my kids have taken multiple college courses post cal BC and both physics C equivalents.) They have gone to non-tippy top schools and have received great educations and had wonderful peer groups. My current college jr took a 300 level electromagnetic wave EE class his first semester. And guess what, he loves being a student at Alabama. He has had great professors; he is actively involved in research; he received 3 REU offers this past summer.
Don’t worry about tiers. Find a school that meets your criteria: your major, ABET (if engineering), your budget, opportunities you want (like co-oping or UG research.) See what their career center offers. Check to see if they have on-campus recruiting, etc.
Please keep in mind, Reach/Match/Safety designation is not just a function of your GPA and test scores compared to the mean or 25-75% stats; you must also take into account the admissions rate.
For instance:
If you are at the 75th percentile stats for GPA and SAT, but the admit rate is only 10%, you cannot call that school a Match; if you are unhooked and applying RD, it’s a reach or, at best, a low reach. (ED improves chances pretty much everywhere, of course…)
If you are at the 75th percentile and the admissions rate is 35%, now i think you’re moving into Match territory.
Of course, we need to define the chance categories. I define chances like this:
High reach: <5% chance of getting in
Reach: 5-15%
Low reach: 15-25%
High match: 25-40%
Match: 40-60%
Low match: 60-90%
Safety: >90% chance
You should also factor in your ability to pay, because if it isn’t affordable, it doesn’t matter if you get in; which type of app you’ll be doing (ED, EA, RD…); different admit rates for different schools/programs (like Engineering, Business, etc.); etc.
Part of the ranking the student experience is separating the teaching quality of undergrads vs grads, and the quality of your peer group. A number of rankings list teaching quality as a separate factor. Peer quality can be inferred from the CDS (look at GPA distribution), if you are a bright student you’ll want to be around a similar set of students. This is where schools like Alabama can be quite surprising ; a very large percentage of students are on merit scholarships, many are in their engineering school, and Alabama is known for very good undergraduate teaching (look at the undergrad/grad ratio). So as @Mom2aphysicsgeek says, her kid(s) have had a great experience there. You might even say that the kids on merit scholarships are more serious students - because they need to maintain their scholarship.
Likewise, an elite school with ACT of 31/35 with a class of 1000 freshman is mostly indistinguishable from a slightly less elite school of 4000 with ACT of 29/33. In the first case you have 500 kids with ACT>33, the second 1000.
These name distinctions start to matter a lot more in grad school. That is where you will network the most.
Great responses guys! I’ve always felt that a student shouldn’t run after a school to make a name for him/herself, but rather make the name on their own. Thanks for making the difference in salaries idea clear. I will look for a college that has on-campus recruiting.