Since most of you guys aren't from either Michigan or Cali, I figure this would be the best place to ask this question. I am likely to get accepted to both Universities for their Master's program in Bioenginering/Biomedical Engineering.

In your opinion, which college is better and why?

I don't know enough about American colleges to say either way, but congrats on the (likely) acceptance Jet!

strictly on the basis of name recognitino, berkeleys better. Its spoken of/heard of more. Ive heard of both but I hear more about berkeley than ann arbor

I would visit and try to talk to the professors you'd be dealing with. Masters programs are pretty different than the actual school.

Then you should look at the amount of aid each would give you. We can't tell you what school to go to... but you need to look into which school is doing more classes that interest you.

UCB.

F*CK Michigan, it's weather, lack of things to do, etc.

Berkeley you will never be without pretty good pot, bang hippie/environmental chicks during the week, then head to SF to bang uptown girls on the weekends.

As to academics, we all know it's about banging chicks.

But Hooker's right-- which one will leave you in less debt? Both UCB and UMich are fine, prestige-wise.

I've been to Ann Arbor many times and regreted it every time, go to Berkeley and risk dieing in a earthquake.

Getting women in bed is easy. Finding a girl you like to actually spend time with... not so easy.

But Dirk has a good point. One of my major reasons for hating cmu is weather. During the winter we get anywhere from 3 to 8 days of sun. It's F*CKING miserable. Also, check out the housing situations. That could dig a hole into your cash too.

Well hur hur hur, didn't know we had Mr. Casanova himself gracing us with his company.

If it were me, I'd go the cheaper route, Jet... whatever school that might be. One thing I've found out in college is that its utterly wallet-slaying.

Berkley is the way to go man my cousin went there for his masters their and loved it. Actually I think it might have been for the same degree. I'd have to ask him

Personally I think college is a monumental waste of time and money for most people. At least in your case you have chosen a field that is worth the investment...most people get there and choose the easy path which nets them a dumbass degree in History, English, Business or some other soft degree which will prove useless when they try to find a real job.

Bottom line is if you bypass college and go straight to work after high school you will have 4 years of real work experience under your belt by the time you would have gotten that useless piece of paper. Most people do not realize this, but you can do almost anything without having a degree. It is possible to become a licensed lawyer or even an engineer in any field without going to college. Almost all professional occupations that require a license allow anyone to take the exam, and the degree is not going to get you anything there. You have to pass the BAR to be a lawyer, and graduating from law school does not do that for you.

Let's take a look at the law field for one example. The traditional route would be to go through undergrad and then law school. After that you can become a lawyer IF you can pass the BAR exam. That requires 6 years of full time school at approximately $80K/year including all expenses, so plan on burning $500K or so just to be able to take the test.

On the other hand a reasonably intelligent individual who chose to get a low level job as a clerk in a law firm out of high school and do a little bit of studying on his own could easily pass the CLEP in a year or so and take a First Year Law Student's Exam. After they pass that they would be eligible to take the BAR exam in three years...no college degree required. Going this route a dedicated individual could be BAR eligible in 3-4 years out of high school through self study, going the other route will take you a minimum of 5-6 years.

Now let's take a look at earnings. The college bound individual will have to bust ass in order to graduate from law school in 5 years, so whatever earnings they have during that time are no doubt negligible. The individual who chose to go to work is going to start out low, but after 5 years of work experience will likely be making significantly more. For arguments sake lets say starting salary is $24K and ending salary is $50K after 5 years in the field with a 10-15% annual increase in salary. So now the kid who went to college has burned $500K while the kid who went to work has made $160K. That means the true cost of that college education is really $660K when you account for lost earnings.

OK, now the kid who went to college is maybe starting out as a law clerk while he waits to pass the bar. His starting salary is probably going to be lower than the kid with 5 years of real world experience under his belt. For arguments sake lets say he gets $45K. Both kids go and pass the bar within a year...now the kid with 5 years of work experience is going to be worth a lot more than the wet behind the ears college grad. The college kid would probably start out as a junior lawyer in some firm making $60K or so, while the other kid is going to be able to move into a mid level position getting paid $80K. It is likely that the college kid could work for the next decade before he finally catchs up with the other kid, which would drive the true cost of that college degree close to $1M.

College kid has massive student loans to repay, other kid has none of that. College kid earns nothing while in school, then less than other kid for 10 years after school. After that they earn the same amount of money for the rest of their lives. In the end the college kid will never in his lifetime catch up to the other kid from an net worth perspective so basically he wasted 5-6 years of his life and one hell of a chunk of change getting a pretty piece of paper to hang on his wall.

There are those who might disagree with all of this, but the facts are the facts. The Wall Street Journal published a similar breakdown on the true cost of a college education using a similar breakdown and came to the same conclusion. If the degree you are trying to get is not hard science or medical related don't waste your time.

All that being said, I would choose Berkeley over Michigan. Both schools are solid for what you are trying to do, but the likelihood of having to slug through sleet and snow to get to class in Berkeley is zero.

Dear shredder,

My suitemate has a job making 105k/yr coming out of cmu with a 4 years masters. But that's beside the point. I agree with you for most kids, in most degrees. Lawyers are a huge waste of time. Most of them don't make that much money, however engineering (what jet is doing) is a different story at high level schools (also what jet is doing), and neglecting the possibility of research opportunities I will try to refute your point, at least for engineers - everyone else sucks :3

So let's take my specific field, because I know that better and I won't have to make assumptions. So I'm at Carnegie Mellon U, on a similar level to what Jet is talking about with those two schools. I currently pay 50k/yr room and board included. I will be staying in school for 4 years. That's 200k, now I also work during the summer. Last summer I made ~12k working in a restaurant in a tourist town, but for sake of argument I'll lower that to internship rates. Between 5k and 10k, depending. So that's a minimum of 20k back, so now I'm at 180k (around 150k in my case, same with my suitemate.) And mind you, my school is on the expensive end of schools.

Anyway, let's take a look at postgraduate numbers, the average salary coming out of my school for mechanical engineer single majors is 61k/yr, 75k for masters, with 95% of the people getting a job. Now here's where the little piece of paper called worthless comes into play. Let's say a person with high school level experience tries to apply for an engineering job at a respectable company, Lockheed, Motorola, Northrop, ge, Boeing, etc. That person will have to compete with people coming out of my school before me, and other schools. They aren't even likely to get a job, and if they do get one it will be low paying and likely remain low paying. You're assuming a best case and worst case scenario, where the high school grad is lucky and the law student isn't so lucky. That's not really how I view the job market right now.

Now when an engineer graduates from my school, he has a 95% probability of getting a job with an average salary of 61k. If the other person sans diploma even got a job, it won't be anywhere near this pay level after 4 years, maybe 40k/yr? Regardless, the engineer will quickly catch up, surpass and stay well past the person without the diploma. Job security vs. Playing with luck.

We could also look at how my brother did things, which is less common, but as we're looking at all cases I might as well get at it, he had an internship during his schoolwork that he made 25k/yr doing for four years, going to a school that cost 20k/yr. He came out positive 20k, and was immediately hired on as a manager at said job with a starting salary of 50k/yr. Three years later he is at 75k/yr and works from home.

The point I am trying to make is law school is useless, and it lends to sensationalism about college. In most fields you definitely need an education to even be considered for a job. Hence why the unemployment rate for people with a diploma is somewhere around 3% and the overall unemployment rate is like 10%? Idk. There's a big difference.

Tl;Dr on my post, school increases job security for engineers.

On a sidenote: would you rather have a Cs student from my school with a 3.0 or 4.0 or someone who passed a few certification exams?

Addendum: you neglected cost of living for the student not in college. That salary would get trucked, and he would probably end up with somewhere around 30k per year.

I say U of M because i am a Wolverine fan!!

I wanted to go to college.

But I don't want to owe that much money for a piece of paper.

That situation is almost exactly how it works in the nuke industry. They could care less about a college degree here. Of course there are some positions that really do require an engineering degree. But I have seen a laborer become a site manager. They want people who can take information and apply it in the field with common sense not just regurgitate it back onto a piece of paper. The whole book smarts vs. street smarts argument.

Um.. you are a gamer, why would the cold matter? Not like you're going to be studying outdoors. I hate berkely. Bunch of cry baby, tree huggin faggots. But if you are into that sort of thing have at it brah. Cost should be the real deciding factor.

lol.... and this turns into epic word block crit fest on my eyes.

The wonderful thing about grad school that I didn't mention before, is that in fields such as mine (psych) yours (biomedical engineering) and hookers, theres a lot more than with most degrees.. For me, when choosing my grad school, I don't choose what's closest to me, I don't choose what's convenient or even which school I like more, I choose the school that has the professor I wanna work with, who I find most interesting, and who shares common interest with me.

Engineering especially biomedical is probably the same way, look at both schools and find the teachers you want to be with, you don't need to visit campus, just shoot them an e-mail and find out what htey're specializing in, what they're like and go from there.

What you may find is that either none of the schools work, in which case you will probably go to one anyway, or you may find that while everyone says berkeley (myself included), U of M is actually the better choice.

And really, who cares about weather..lol.. I get 3 seasons where I live, summer, Snow, and almost snow. hell, its almost april and we JUST got a break in snow.

I did say that if its not hard science or medical related then its not worth it. I am not at all trying to say that all college degrees are useless, and I did mention in the beginning of my post that Jet appears to have chosen a field that is definitely worth the investment. My problem with college is that most of the degrees are useless and you will never see a return on the investment.


As far as hiring a new grad from CMU versus a seasoned developer with 4 years of real product experience who took a few programming courses and learned on the job I would definitely go with the latter and I would pay them more. Good schools like yours reduce the learning curve, but it can still take some time for recent grads to become productive on their own when they are faced with real product requirements that are not just coding exercises done in a test tube environment.

BTW - PM me your real name man, I wrote the email to that guy you mentioned but I did not send it out saying I was referred to him by "Hooker", lol.

As for how much you can get paid its not about what school you went to or what degree you have, it's about drive and determination. I could easily have parked in a nice job making $100K for the last few decades if that's all I was happy to earn. For me that was just a road sign on the career highway. I have no degree, but I am a recognized expert in virtualized data center technologies with 8 patents to my name, I have been an executive at 3 startup companies which have been profitably acquired, I turned down an executive role at the largest technology company in the world for my current opportunity, and if all goes well I could be in position to retire whenever I want to by the end of the year at 46 years old. Very few if any of my classmates who went on to college could claim the same.

Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, John McCain, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison...the list goes on and on. In fact there are far more self made millionaires and even billionaires in the world today who were high school or college dropouts then there are with college degrees. 10 of the top 12 self made billionaires in the world have no college degree. College admissions folks don't want people to know this, but when you throw out college grads who come from big money families the reality is that the large majority of the mass affluents, millionaires, and mega millionaires never finished college.

We're on the same page with everything, I think, but the point I was making stems from this.

The ratio of self made millionaires/rich people to average joes is low, like almost 0 low. Yes, it is possible to strike it rich by not going to college but your chances of doing this are:

5-digitnumber to integral: world population over the past 200 years.

^ rough calculation ^ guesstimation

:3 ♥

but... why would I double post?

I started a college degree program for American Sign Language which I couldn't do because of this reason and also because I didn't apply my time to seeking out Deaf people to practice with. What I discovered is that the only major advantage that the classes gave to me (you can pass translator exams without going to school), is the opportunity to have a group of people who were learning along with me.


The worst thing about the education system is how expensive it is, and depending on where you live, you may or may not get a job that pays your way a la Hooker's brother. Or the school turns out to have methods of teaching which clash with what your mind's optimal learning method is. Actually, that part is all but inevitable when you break down how many classes you'll be taking and how every teacher's methods will be different.

So, what you might want to do Jet, is do the things people have recommended. That is, look into the schools and decide whether or not you mesh with the faculty and the general student body. Usually school websites are pretty indicative of how a school operates to a certain degree and if you contact people who attend those schools and see perhaps about auditing an online class if they offer those, you can get a good feel as to which one is a good fit.

If you're able to do so, visit the campus. Then decide if the school is right for you on a cost/benefit basis. Also, what Shredder said is true as to the income level of people who went to college and those who didn't or who didn't finish. BUT the people who didn't finish generally had certain ideas and the means or opportunity presented to them which led to the fruition of those ideas, which means they are rare cases, and most people who go to college are not nearly as enterprising. May be that you are, and that you want to go further than just working for someone, but that is essentially what education these days is about. Training you for a job, not to conquer the world.

That being said, berkley is much more renowned for being a 'top' school but that is maybe a result of having so many news articles citing tests and research from that school over others. Also:

http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings

On this list, Berkley is ranked much higher than Ann Arbor, and it costs half as much to attend. Unfortunately, most of the data on this list requires a subscription of some sort to view. The sort of experience you'll have doing the program at which ever school also depends on funding and how that funding is applied, so I'd shoot an email to staff who head the respective programs at each school to learn about this.

Plus corporate businesses won't even look your way without a degree...so that leaves out science, medical, and corporations so what does that leave you with? Entreprenuer and menial jobs...So either you are creating the next Facebook/GroupOn/etc...or you are working a potential dead end job...I just love people who think college is a waste of time! The person you are coming out of high school is 10x different then the person coming out of college in terms of overall academic ability and maturity level...The average entry level position for a college grad is about the same as someone who went straight out of high school and worked four years...I'll take the piece of paper along with 4 years of being supported by parents and partying...

But to each his own