Mechanical Engineering at The College of New Jersey

The College of New Jersey's mechanical engineering program graduates earn about $5,000 less than the typical mechanical engineer in both New Jersey and nationally, placing it in the 40th percentile among the six engineering schools in the state. Your graduate will start at $65,761—behind Rutgers ($71,569) and NJIT ($68,675), the state's flagship engineering institutions. That $22,875 in debt is manageable with a debt-to-earnings ratio of 0.35, but you're paying for outcomes that trail most alternatives.

The 15% earnings growth to $75,660 by year four is solid, and the program does what it needs to do: it produces employed engineers with reasonable debt. But if your child is choosing between TCNJ and Rutgers or NJIT, the earnings gap matters. Over a decade, that $5,000-$6,000 annual difference compounds to real money. TCNJ's 62% admission rate and lower selectivity compared to these alternatives helps explain the outcome difference.

This works if your child prefers TCNJ's campus culture or finds the smaller program appealing, and they're not giving up significant scholarship money at a higher-performing school. But purely as an economic decision for mechanical engineering, stronger options exist in-state at similar or lower cost.