Best Ivy League University for Computer Science Major?

Most USAMO students do not go into CS. @3scoutsmom you have to get by the screening process at a large tech company to even get an interview. It is therefore invaluable to go to a prestigious college to at least get your foot in the door

No, this is not the case according to my DH, his multinational tech company (you’d know them by name) has recently hired several people from schools like UTD, UT, Cal State and some international school that I’ve never heard of. Large tech companies are begging for well qualified applicants and you don’t need a prestigious college degree to get your foot in the door. I’ve personally spoken to new hires from UTD that are making the same (close to 3 figures) as grads from more prestigious universities. It’s not where you go, it’s what you do well you are there.

The University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign is a top tier Computer Science school that is widely respected in the industry.

There are far more students outside the top ten schools than within the top ten schools who are majoring in computer science who wants to work in those following companies.
Hence I rather like the approach of % of CS students in each school who gets accepted to these companies, not the #'s approach which almost all surveys do.
For instance, if your “prestigious” university churns up 30 CS students a year and like 24 of them end up working in Facebook, Google, JaneStreet, Two Sigma, Uber, Snap, Airbnb, Apple, Lyft, Salesforce, Dropbox, Linkedin, then that school is probably a school that would a phenomenal school to attend if you want to work in the industry over a university that sends ~50 a year to those companies above but has several hundreds of CS majors.
So even if at the end of the day, this “prestigious” university does not send much to these top firms, it is still probabilistic-ally a far better place to attend than the non-prestigious universities.

Yes
 if given the opportunity for an interview.
Many of my friends who did not get into these “top” tech companies did not get in because “they couldn’t do it” but because they never got the chance to even have an interview.
Getting an interview at these top firms are honestly to some degree pure luck because I seen USAMO students not even get one all four years despite referrals and all (and passing these interviews are also mostly random luck outside one’s control after a certain threshold of interview skills).
And of the friends I knew who got interviewed into Google at my school, ALL of them went to onsite. And from those “ALL”, more than half of them received offers. Now what does that mean? It meant that if given the opportunity to interview, the chance to get into these firms are not as difficult as people proclaim to be in the Internet.
And that “opportunity” to interview seems to be rarely given to most students even at top schools. Heck, I felt like if 80 CS students at my school applied for interview at Facebook, only like 14 of them would get the interview in itself. Now are the rest of the candidates not fit or not “good enough”? I would think not considering from my experience, most of the applicants were around the same level of skill and those that got picked all had high results in the process itself.

This. ^
This is the major hurdle. When your resume is read by recruiters who have no idea about software engineering or CS, your university prestige and the prestige of your internship firms are far more critical for the “first job out of college” than most people like to admit.
Now, if you have some connections or know how to get those connections to get into the interview process, then yes, university prestige does not matter as much. However, if that is not the case, then having a brand name school in your resume only helps.

Not necessarily true.
Bloomberg pays more to hires to new grads who graduate from elite schools.
Facebook’s return offer for those who had internships (many of whom are from “prestigious” schools" to start with), have a huge signing bonus compared to other new hires.
Google’s return offer also has a bigger signing bonus for those who had internships there (many of whom are also from “prestigious” schools)
But other than that, yes, I do believe most kids get paid similarly.
Also, do note that students who went to prestigious schools tend to have more offers so they have a higher chance of “competing offers” though from my limited experience, that seemed quite rare since it’s really difficult to even get an offer at these selective firms right out of college.

First of all if you

of Intel as a major CS employer I think you are seriously out of touch
I’d also have to question how much that signing bonus was based on local cost of living.

@3scoutsmom

I see this all the time in the internet but I really don’t understand it.
I felt that large tech companies were begging for non-entry level applicants (senior+), not for new college grads.

For instance, Google loves to tout its acceptance rate to be less than 0.1% now. To claim over 99.9% of applicants (though I do suspect most applicants are definitely not worth considering), these big firms are not “begging” for well qualified applicants. In fact, I feel it’s the other way around with well qualified applicants “begging” for an interview with these companies.
However, I guess exceptions do exist (and your statement holds true) for a big firm like Amazon. It is a large tech company that constantly accepts a lot new grads just to have its retention rate below 8 months. But I do feel that is not the norm for “large tech companies” that many know of.

Now if “large tech companies” also include firms like Lockheed Martin, etc., then yes, your probably right. But for the companies I have listed for examples in the previous messages, that does not seem to be the case.
And yes, you don’t need prestigious college degree to get your foot in the door. Nothing is absolute. But there are certain advantages of going to prestigious colleges (as long as you don’t break your bank) and
 what’s wrong with trying to maximize those advantages in itself from the start?

@AccCreate my DS is class of 2022 at UTD - Comp Sci on a full ride, how about we agree to compare starting slary offers and actual COA upon graduation?

@3scoutsmom
Intel is not known to be part of the “super selective” tech firms in the software industry right out of undergrad.
At least from what I evidenced studying at a ‘prestigious’ university in CS.

I think it’s an amazing company but I feel it gets clouded by the fact that most students associate Intel with Hardware hence the applicant pool for Intel for CS majors are geared towards more of firmware engineering than traditional software engineering.

The “hype” companies for most kids during college seem to be honestly Drop-box, Quora, Uber, Lyft, Snap, Airbnb, PinInterest, Yelp, Slack, Stripe, Jane Street, Two Sigma, Facebook, Google, etc. cause it is seen as “cool” in the CS community. And those companies I tell you are ridiculously difficult to interview (especially firms like Quora, Drop-box, Jane Street, Two Sigma, HRT).

@3scoutsmom
I also hope that you don’t associate college degree with “starting salary offers”. I hope you encourage your kid to make friends, challenge himself/herself, and take risks during the four years in college.
Also, I am posting the above to be as informative as possible to the OP making the thread. I personally hate the whole “prestige” thing and don’t really care in my day to day basis. However, I feel I would be lying to OP if I was to claim prestige didn’t matter in CS when after having been told that for four years, such was not the case to my friends and me especially for firms in Silicon Valley or New York City right out of undergrad.
And congratulations on your kid for getting in full ride to UTD.

I mentioned the companies you mentioned to DH and his response was “what are you talking about?, hiring 'code monkeys?” He said yes, they get a good starting salary but they don’t really advance to positions like principle engineer or get patents, they just kind of stay where they are at with no real advancement potential.

Truth be said, there is no such thing as a single salary for a new hire CS undergrad because not all new hires will be performing the same function within any given company. In the end the employer will make offers based on market demand. They will use grade level, signing bonuses, and stock to get the results they are looking for.

@3scoutsmom - Even at Intel, a CS major with skills that are desirable by Intel’s autonomous driving division (used to be Mobileye) will get a far different offer than a general CS major being courted to validate firmware for SSG.

While all new hires at most large companies may come in at the same grade level, there is a considerable range of salary within that grade. Then there is signing bonus that can range from 0 to $$$. Then stock RSU’s come into play (some companies still do options). Again, this as all driven by market demand.

Lots dicsssed here so far. Some thoughts:

Honestly, I read this as sarcasm and was amazed when it wasn’t. While getting the first interview can help with a school name, experience is far more important and the name of your school will mean zilch after your first real job. Even a few internships will offset school name.

UMichigan is a great school for CS, easily in the top 25. I think you’re highlighting exactly how prestige driven the finance industry is if Michigan isn’t a CS hiring target for a major company. I’ve never even heard of USAMO mentioned in the CS industry to give an idea of its importance.

As mentioned, UIUC is a top CS school and isn’t a good example of random school X for CS. UT and UTD are also both very known and decently known for CS respectivly.

Cal State is a good example, as it gets hires based off proximity and not prestige.

[quoute]the approach of % of CS students in each school who gets accepted to these companies, not the #'s approach which almost all surveys do.

[/quote]

This is a very good highlight. However, if we are really going to fully adjust, we have to consider the incoming stats of students as well. In an industry that is (relatively) so merit-based, big tech companies (especially those with large recruiting budgets) will hire anywhere they can find smart people. A top student will have a similar outcome in most cases whether coming from Harvard or SUNY Binghamton. Very few CS programs actually add value from an industry perspective.

These are not based on COL, but they do have asterisks, often coming as stock that vests over time to keep employees from leaving given how good the market is. It’s known as golden handcuffs. You’ll find these in and out of SV, though just about every top tech firm these days is in a high COL area.

This list is pretty representative of new tech. You can really tell the difference between the new and the old based on a few companies being mentioned. Everyone gets the big ones, but the new young companies that get a lot of hype like Stripe, Slack, Snap, Github, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, etc are big signifiers. The “old” companies that signify are places like IBM, Oracle, Comcal (I actually had to look them up and I have friends who have worked at about 75% of the companies listed here) and others of that age.

I’d say Intel skates the line of old and new tech and does also suffer the mentioned hardware effect. Intel also has a very bad rep right now from new tech as they have stagnated in their innovation frustrating many close to the hardware world, they are being caught to by AMD, and also have had to to deal with a massive CPU bug the past year where their PR department sort of fumbled by trying to play the blame game. Long story short, Intel is not going in a good direction in the immediate future as far as the tech community is concerned.

This is pretty true for the “hype” tech companies who have the recruiting pipeline set up from intern programs. On the flip side, I think if you aren’t seeing the begging for college grads from anywhere, you’re too focused on that group of young new prestigious tech companies. There is a huge unfilled market for run of the mill CRUD software jobs. Those are also the firms that consider outsourcing, and usually then go back on it. They suffer from a combination of lack of prestige and paying just under market rate with an unwillingness to pay more usually. That or older tech that no one out of college wants to touch, like PHP.

I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Tons of people are working as those “code monkeys” and are retiring at 35-40 based on those salaries, some conservative saving, and aggressive investing. They are some of the best jobs for anyone of any skill on the job market today. And that group of people typically hops from job to job every 2 years or so to keep it interesting because they are that wanted. I’ve been told multiple times that if you’re at a company for longer than 2-4 years (depends on who you ask), it’s time to leave. That’s actually the exact reason for the golden handcuff model. Many of these people also easily advance up when they change companies.

As to patents, those are pretty meaningless these days. The big companies file anything and everything, even though nothing is unique. It’s all defensive, a cold war of sorts so that any suit against them can be countersued. Companies will tell you this much themselves. Few to none of these patents would hold up in a court of law if challenged, but no one wants to spend the millions on lawyers, so they pay for patent filings and incentivize employees with bonuses to file for them.


The Short Version

Prestige matters to a degree for getting your foot in the door, and especially for the hot new tech companies, but really once you’re in, you’re good to go and it’s mostly based on merit, ignoring other unrelated social factors that I’ll leave out of this already chalk full conversation. You can go to a random state school, work for a few years at run of the mill companies, and then go work anywhere (big or small, new or old) if you’re good at what you do. The prestige will really only help for so many of the first few years.

Prestige in CS is also very different than prestige of colleges generally. If a company actually cares about prestige and is a true tech company, they will prefer CMU, UIUC or UT all day compared to say Dartmouth. Finance firms and as mentioned Facebook will be more classically prestige-driven. Still, beyond the “new tech” companies, very few will care much, if at all.

While there is truth that getting the interview (especially with non-technical recruiters) will use some prestige, the conversation here so far has ignored a huge section of tech jobs that pay well and are solid CS work, even if not the most in-demand companies from a worker perspective. I think a lot of people in CS, especially those from those prestigious CS colleges, forget that.


The Shortest Version
In CS, prestige can help but not nearly as much as elsewhere, and CS prestige != college prestige.

First of all, UIUC is a great CS school. It is where the founder of Netscape/Mozilla attended, just one example of many highly successful UIUC grads.

However there is a point that people often miss about the elite schools, and that is the opportunities that they see that equally talented students at lesser schools might not. Suppose two employees are working for a desirable employer, say Google. One is from a non-elite CS school, and the other is from an elite CS school. It is natural for the non-elite CS graduate to think it makes no difference where s/he went.

But this is a bit like blind people feeling one part of an elephant and thinking they know what the elephant looks like. What that employee fails to see are the people at the elite colleges that went to places they consider much more desirable than Google. Many times the non-elite CS student never heard of them in the first place. The main reason is that these super-selective companies are small and need only a tiny fraction of the new employees that Google needs each year. And because their employee needs are small, they recruit at places most likely to have what they need, which are the elite colleges (most Ivys, MIT, Duke, Chicago, Stanford, CMU, etc.).

Some of the super-selective companies are finance companies. My D knows of students making nearly $40K over their summer internship. And these are 19-20 year olds.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, at shops like these, the companies recruit at elite colleges simply because that is where they find the largest concentration of the people with the right skill set. They would be equally happy to take a similarly talented person from UIUC, but it is an uphill battle because they don’t recruit there, and the UIUC student may never have heard of them.

@hebegebe your above post was right on. The only comment I would make is in the CS field I believe UIUC is considered to be an elite school.

@PengsPhils

I heard it is very important in the financial industry. My friend that if you want get an interview from Citadel or Jane Street, you need USAMO, IMO, etc.

I wouldn’t say USAMO is absolutely useless, but it will at best get you the interview (along with everything on your resume). You still need the past the coding process.