Oregon State University Rankings by Salary Score™

Attended the online CS (yeah it's not business) program while working (I can reiterate what other people have said but I won't; this is about the on-campus grad program) and then near the end of the pandemic decided to pursue a graduate degree. After arriving on campus I found it to be refreshing to be in person at a university, but once I began attending classes found that the in person material is about as slapdash as the online material with a lot more ego attached. Maybe I'm just expecting too much of... Read More the professors here but I've had various problems with professors making a stink about asking for visual lecture assistance through DAS and most of them don't seem like they care or want to be teaching. I suppose that is what you get when you hire researchers to be teachers, you get a lukewarm attempt at teaching while they try to make a name for themselves in academia.

Online CS student, repeating what other 3-or-lower reviews have said here. Instruction is very inconsistent, relies heavily on underpaid foreign adjuncts, and I have had several run-ins with characters that would be canceled immediately if their opinions were only public. The usual department politics are present, and an extremely helpful professor of 20-30 years in one department (say, biochemistry) will be paid a pittance while truly worthless professors from another (say, electrical engineering/computer... Read More science) will be paid six figures. The result is that some people are not paid enough to care, the actually helpful people had better just retire or get an industry job and many very annoying people are rewarded for their failure. Financially, it's the same scheme you see at pretty much any state school: everything is priced like they expect people to be paying from loans, scholarships, the GI bill or trust fund and most of this bloated figure goes toward administration and sports programs rather than quality instruction or support. I shudder to imagine doing military service to afford this standard of education, much less being wounded in the process. In many cases, classes are nearly unpassable only to be revamped to something much easier a couple of years later, as they are desperate for tuition dollars. In other cases, classes are laughably trivial busy work. In most cases, you don't know what you're going to get until it's too late to get a refund. I am currently, right now, in an upper-level engineering class where it's already been decided who will and won't get above a B+, but no one actually knows their grade nor has anyone actually received direct feedback on how to correct any mistakes in a way that could have afforded them higher than a B+. The deadline to get a single dollar of tuition back from dropping the class is in four days, so hopefully some human somewhere grades at least one assignment before then, because it's starting to look really suspicious! I started out on-campus, where I was forced to stay in a dorm for my first year. I chose West Hall, which happened to have a mouse infestation. I actually caught one and showed it to the Housing & Dining Services and their response was basically, "oh well." I was paying $1000 a month for one shared room. Later on, I worked for the Student Union, where many students go to eat - big surprise, it had a rat infestation. As for careers, these are mainly done via job listings and mailing lists, plus the occasional job fair. Attending these fairs, you will quickly realize that your diploma that you paid for like it was a Corvette is only the minimum you could have possibly done, so already the "favor" the institution has done for you by putting you in the same race as the rich, able-bodied or untraumatized is out the window. You discover that you were actually supposed to select more well-connected or wealthier parents at birth, that you were supposed to be doing extracurriculars planned by someone else since you were 14, and that you need dozens of other feathers in your cap as well as being superficial clones of the people the companies bring in. Truly, whether you were in a traumatic combat situation, grew up a subject of prejudice or injustice, or can only pay for school with generational wealth, you will be sure to find your tuition dollars utterly wasted here at Oregon State. The only thing that makes it anywhere near worthwhile is credential inflation which now dictates a certain amount of collateral psychological torture (via your peers you've displaced) by throwing yourself through this gauntlet so that you can get... $49,000 per year 6 years after graduation, according to this page. Less than national median wage. Stay tuned for the sequel: Oregon State University 2026 - Where Are All the Kids Born During the Great Recession?