I am currently at Clemson, and I can tell you that both BMW and Michelin have pumped a pretty fair amount of money into the school. Our career center is named after Michelin and Clemson's ICAR facility was very strongly influenced by BMW. In fact, BMW's influence is why we don't have a wind tunnel at ICAR, BMW didn't want one there because there is one at the plant in Greer.

I'm sure there are other companies in this area that pull from Clemson students that I don't know about. I'm a Mechanical Engineering student, so I really only hear about jobs on in engineering.

When I decided to go back to school for this engineering degree, I only applied to schools that I knew had a pretty decent academic reputation.