09.27.12
University penis measuring
Magazines and news organs are obsessed with rating schools. Today’s example, CNN Money’s list of universities that produce the “highest paid grads.”
They all cluster around computer science, engineering and hard science degrees.
Lehigh, my alma mater, is number six in the list.
As far as LU went, the benefits of the school reputation, when it came to immediate hiring, went exclusively to the civil, mech and chemical engineers. Those were the only students corporate America deigned to send recruiting scouts to the school for.
During this time the student body and athletes were “the Engineers.”
Today, the school is the home of the much less inspiring “Mountain Hawks,” changed because it now has more non-engineers enrolled than the real thing.
Also in the list, the obvious — CalTech, here in Pasadena, MIT, the Ivy League schools … (Harvard’s there, where you must go and learn to be a lawyer to have any chance of being among America’s nobility, or at least one of its immediate shoeshiners.)
Surprisingly, the service academies at Annapolis and West Point are included, again for their undergraduate engineering degrees. (The inclusion of Stevens Tech in Hoboken, and a couple other old but small relative unknowns made me laugh, names that show the editors were pooching their list to add a few surprises.)
So if the only measuring stick is bucks on hiring and at mid-career, perhaps all the schools are a good bet, if you’ve the right degree and can survive the four years with a reasonable record.
Otherwise, I’m jaundiced. Monetarily, Lehigh has never been of even the slightest value. And of the majority of the peers I recall in my classes, not so much, initially, for them, either.
However, I was able to make a difference at the school. Unlike the vast majority of engineers who there at the same time.
I discovered the basic science of one of the species in the category of flesh-eating bacteria, when very few others were interested. Lehigh gave me the time and resources to do that.
That was as a doctoral student which, most people will recognize, doesn’t come with a salary.