<p>All my life I have been indoctrinated into thinking that my life won't worth a penny if I don't go to a good college like the UC's, Hardvard, MIT etc... </p>
<p>But now I wonder does it really matter which college I go to? If I get perfect grades in college would it really matter if I go to an "ok" college or an elite college? Would it matter that much if I got my degree from an average school vs Harvard?</p>
<p>Do employer care?</p>
<p>i hope ur joking?</p>
<p>it’s a valid question</p>
<p>Yes, employers care if you go to an average school versus harvard. Im glad i could…be a help…</p>
<p>Why would I be joking? Haven’t you ever questioned why people keep telling you to devote the first 17 years of your life into getting into an elite college?</p>
<p>Just asking if employer actually care more about the college that you went to, or do they care more about how much effort you put into college once you get there.</p>
<p>college you attend is more important</p>
<p>The college you attend matters but your grades and what you do matter more</p>
<p>just go to the best college possible. plain and simple</p>
<p>It kind of depends on what field/location you plan on working in/at.</p>
<p>I plan to major in computer science. Would it matter where I go for college?</p>
<p>Hello, The Journey,</p>
<p>Something that is completely overlooked here on College Confidential is the following: Brand X medical school has multiple/countless/infinite (take your pick) applicants from a uniformly-perceived “prestigious” school and a singular (or few) applicant from a state school, not the “calibre” of a UC Berkeley or Univ. of Michigan, who has done superlatively–high GPA, high MCAT scores, excellent recs. </p>
<p>Will med. school applicant get in to a top-notch medical school?? Absolutely. Such a person stands out more readily than an applicant from an Ivy, for example, where a plethora of students are applying to the same coveted medical school.</p>
<p>How do I know this? I went to a top-notch, hard-to-get-into, medical school and had fellow classmates who came from State University of wherever and Cal State whatever.</p>
<p>The reality is, despite the hyper-obsession (insecurity, really) with highly-ranked, globally-renown, bragging rights, “prestigious,” colleges, the top students at Florida State are really no different than the top students at Brown, Penn, Tufts, Oberlin, Arizona state, Texas A & M, University of Tennessee, etc. And graduate schools know it. I’ve seen it for myself.</p>
<p>I realize that I didn’t speak to your employer question, which is a more subjective issue. I can only tell you what I know about graduate schools’ perspectives on their undergraduate applicants.</p>
<p>Yes, very much so considering the field (Comp. Sci.) has only been around for about fifty years.</p>
<p>Plus, the importance of attending a “good” college for what you want to do is usually different for different courses of study in general.</p>
<p>It matters if you allow it to matter.
If at the end of the day you just seek to get by in life or live an “average” life, it really doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>I’m not sure how much it matters for comp sci, because I’m pretty sure there are plenty of comp sci majors getting hired out of decent state schools(like cal poly), who have jobs in the industry and who are probably satisfied with their jobs and education. If the industry was full of “good” college students, I doubt non-good schools would offer the major as the jobs would all go to the “good” college students(regardless if the student was a poor student at a “good” college) But the hypothetical situation in the previous sentence is not the case. When you enter most industries you’ll have people who will have attended a wide array of schools. It might not be the case for top companies at least for entry level positions, but there are other companies hiring that are not “top” companies.</p>
<p>People often forget that when you attend top schools(i’m pretty sure it also happens at decent or “ok” schools) for “technical/practical” majors that generally leadto a job out of school, or are one of the departments that gets recruited by specific employers, you have to compete against classmates to stand out. There’s a difference if you just want a degree in history(or any non technical major)and only seek to become educated, and maybe have it qualify you for entry level positions in jobs/positions that are open to any major.</p>
<p>All my life I have been indoctrinated into thinking that my life won’t worth a penny if I don’t go to a good college like the UC’s, Hardvard, MIT etc…</p>
<p>Are you saying that you have believed that everyone around you who DIDN’T go to one of these schools has a worthless life? </p>
<p>Didn’t common sense tell you that was false whenever you met some awesome person who didn’t go to one of those schools?</p>
<p>Do you think America’s astronauts’ lives aren’t worth a penny? Here’s their bios. Many went to good schools, but not elite schools. <a href=“Johnson Space Center - NASA”>Johnson Space Center - NASA;
<p>Also, if you visited a large doctors’ building, you would find many very successful physicians who did not go to elite undergrads (or med schools).</p>
<p>In my opinion, the amount of money you make depends more on the type of person you are than where you got your degree from. Plenty of very successful people come out of small unknown colleges and state schools. People do not make more money SIMPLY because they got a degree from an elite school; they make more money because they are successful people and would probably be successful no matter where they attended college. The reason people get into elite schools is that they were high-achieving and driven before they got to the school.</p>
<p>trust me…$$$$ does not equal happiness. So, the college you go to will have very little, if any impact on your future happiness.</p>
<p>It’s all about the college peer group which when all is said and done, has a greater influence on a student’s goals and aspirations than any other factor.</p>
<p>If you’re intellectually gifted you may have opportunities to join college communities in which there are many similarly-gifted students or some in which there are (for the most part, but not entirely) less-gifted peers. Imagine if your gift was not in academics but in tennis, and you were deciding to go to a live-in tennis academy to develop that talent. You could go to the Bollettieri Tennis Academy where you’d play with and against the top emerging talent, who would in the coming years be the stars of the pro tennis world. Or perhaps you could go to another tennis academy where the students weren’t so motivated by tennis, but had attended primarily because others told them they should. At the lesser academy, you might play against your fellow classmates and find that no one could return your serves. You’d hit average ground strokes and your opponents would whiff instead of returning competent shots. You might find that you were underchallenged, and accordingly, weren’t getting any better. You might show up for practice and find that your opponent was a no-show, having blown off class for the day. You might be thrilled to learn that Roger Federer or Serena Williams was coming to campus to speak to students and then find that other students weren’t interested in seeing them and weren’t interested in talking with you about the visit that you attended. A really talented tennis player either wouldn’t be satisfied in that kind of environment or may eventually dull down his or her passion and goals to match those of the classmates.</p>
<p>The same dynamic works with academically-talented students. And it’s not just about compiling a resume in order to land a job. It’s about developing yourself to the fullest in order to enjoy your life to the maximum. That’s the main benefit of a top-level college.</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s question simply: yes, it does matter. But only if it matters to you.</p>
<p>It depends on what you want to do. What are your goals AFTER college? Do you want to be a highly-paid lawyer? Do you want to be a stay-at-home mom? An accountant? A grocer? A football coach? It doesn’t matter where you attended college if you are aiming for jobs that don’t really care.</p>
<p>A study done by researchers found that, in most cases, the students who were accepted to both the University of Pennsylvania (an Ivy) and Pennsylvania State (a state school) had no difference in their future earnings, regardless of which college they chose to attend.
[Ivy</a> League or State School: Which one’s worth it? CareerNumbers Company Blog](<a href=“http://blog.careernumbers.com/2009/importance-of-salary-information/ivy-league-or-state-school-which-ones-worth-it/]Ivy”>http://blog.careernumbers.com/2009/importance-of-salary-information/ivy-league-or-state-school-which-ones-worth-it/)</p>
<p>No one cares if you’ve attended Hardvard. </p>
<p>People might notice if you go to Harvard however.</p>