Does it matter where you go to college?

Well I flat out just don’t see that and it simply doesn’t fall in line with the way colleges recruit campuses, so I’ll simply decline to believe these numbers without the full information behind how the surveys were taken.

Polls are just polls. Surveys are just surveys. /:slight_smile:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/5-best-ways-to-get-survey-data/

Do you mean the way employers recruit campuses? It’s a common perception on this forum that msot employers primarily recruit at elite colleges, but this isn’t the case. Even the most desired tech employers, like like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook attend career fair day at Missouri S&T, just as they do at certain elite colleges. Over 20,000 recruiters are registered at San Jose State’s Career Center, which probably rivals the number of registered SV recruiters at nearly any other college.

No I know they can’t just recruit elite campuses not enough grads there and they need someone to do the monotonous work. But if your telling me they take a top SJSU grad over a top MIT grad that is just not reality.

Check out the news story at https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/08/25/san-jose-state-university-sjsu-silicon-valley-tech-jobs-apple-cisco-hewlett-packard/ .

Suppose a Silicon Valley employer wants to hire for a software engineering position that primarily involves developing apps using Java and Android Framework. You have a San Jose State grad who interned over the summer. He has experience using Java and Android Framework developing apps at the company, and is known to be a good worker who gets along with the group. And you have an MIT grad who has a GPA of 4.9, which the employer believes is near the top of his class, but his resume does not mention apps, Java, or Android framework… . Who do you think is going to get the job?

Jeff Bezos had a 3-question test to hire employees:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/jeff-bezos-questions-amazon-used-to-hire-employees.html

Suppose something different. Suppose you’re a SV employer looking for a machine learning expert. You then have an MIT (or Stanford, or Cal, or CMU) grad at the top of his class, extensive experience with TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Cafe, 3 summers internship experience at (say) Apple, Google, and Baidu, and 4 years research experience at the MIT Media Lab. Then you have the SJSU grad you mentioned. A little different outcome I’d expect.

The point is the focus on internships and experience rather than school name. If a SV employer is a looking for a machine learning expert, ideally they’d want to hire someone with both skills and experience related to machine learning. Whether that machine learning expert lists a bachelor’s in CS form SJSU or MIT on his resume is usually far less important.

My point is that students at some schools simply have more (and better) internship opportunities, and research opportunities. So along with the degree from (say) MIT, that student will have (on average) better experience.

Some schools do better support relevant work and internship experience, but the best colleges for relevant experience deviate from general measures of rankings or selectivity For example, I’d expect GeorgiaTech grads to typically have a greater degree of related work opportunities and experiences than MIT grads due GT’s strong emphasis on co-ops and to a lesser extent internships

I don’t know the details of MIT and SJSU’s related opportunities well enough to evaluate them well. I do know Stanford better, as I attended as an engineering major. Stanford is a prestigious college, highly rated in almost all tech fields, and located in SV; yet it was not my experience that employers were fighting over each other to get students for internships; nor did I see a large number of special opportunities beyond the usual career fair type events, which can be found at a variety of other college. One special opportunity that is not available at most colleges is the large number of tech employers located a short distance from campus, with Stanford being located in the heart of Silicon Valley. With the many tech companies within biking distance, I was able to get a part time job in tech while a student, in spite of not owning a car. This was my primary tech work experience as a student, rather than internships. Stanford’s SV location also made it easier to interview, and the short distance made it less expensive and easier for smaller SV companies to recruit at career events, including for internships. I’m sure there are also many tech employers in the Cambridge/Boston area by MIT, but it’s not the same as being located in Silicon Valley like Stanford, Berkeley, and SJSU.

@Rivet2000

Elite students and elite school = elite options
Elite students and top tier school = elite options
Uber elite students and middle of the pack uni = elite options

Solid student and elite school = potential elite options
Solid student and top tier = solid options
Solid student and middle of the pack = 100% student dependent

Lousy student and elite school = better options than deserved but not elite
Lousy student and top tier = solid options student and connections dependent
Lousy student and middle of the pack = student dependent

So where you go matters. But more importantly is how you do while you are there imho

Not only “how” one does (GPA), but also “what” one does (internships & research, for example).

@privatebanker I think what you posted is a reasonable way to map options.

@data10 Not sure about your MIT - GT comparison, but it may be a jump-ball following the @privatebanker hierarchy. Regards Stanford, not sure when you were there of exact major, but the there seems to a considerable demand from many sectors especially for CS (and even more for some specialized CS areas) . I know several students there and as far as internships go the options are many. For instance, one student I know had 7 offers in-hand for this summer. All the positions where tightly aligned with the students interests, they were geographically disperse (Boston, Dallas, Seattle, NYC, and several in SV), and they came from several business sectors (finance, robotics, business analytics, etc). That example is not uncommon, at lest with the students I know.

“No I know they can’t just recruit elite campuses not enough grads there and they need someone to do the monotonous work.”

lol on this one, there are a lot of people from elite (even ivies!) colleges doing monotonous work for their manager, who did not attend an elite or ivy college.

“But if your telling me they take a top SJSU grad over a top MIT grad that is just not reality.”

It happens and it’s a reality, maybe not yours, but it’s not as uncommon as you think. As data10 points out, the internships the candidates have done can be similar, their technical knowledge similar, so it comes down to who the hiring manager and his or her team thinks is a better fit, based mainly on how they interview. Some ivy league grads come off as, I don’t know, elitist, which generally is not how you get a job in silicon valley high tech. I concede that is not how other industries work, elitism is valued in consulting, i-banking etc…

"Least Influential Factors When Evaluating Resume of New Grads (<7)

Tech/Science: College Reputation"

@Data10 - I wonder if we know whether the hiring manager or recruiting/HR filled this one out. For hiring managers, no doubt, college reputation does not matter, as when they’re filling the survey out, they’ll look at their organization and see people from all over, and also know they did 't care about college reputation when making hiring decisions.

However I wonder if new college grad (NCG) recruiters or HR personnel at these companies care a little about college reputation, where they look at say the USNWR top-10 for engineering/comp sci and place candidates from these schools at the top of the stack for the hiring mgr to review - Stanford, UCB, MIT, CMU, Michigan, Illinois, Cornell, Purdue, Texas, GA Tech?

Re: #116

Seems like the big difference in that survey is whether the college is known at all, rather than whether it is elite or not.

To the extent it may matter (beyond the school-elitist industries like finance and consulting), it may affect where travel recruiting may target.

Now, a big company with lots of recruiting resources and needs may travel to dozens or hundreds of schools to recruit new college graduates, so the recruited schools go far beyond elite ones.

A small company may not have the resources or needs to recruit beyond the local schools. I.e. it may not travel at all.

A somewhat larger than small company may have a limited travel recruiting budget and may visit a few schools. It is possible that if the one making the selection favors elite schools, travel recruiting may target those schools over others. However, if the one making the selection has other preferences (e.g. larger size, or not willing to compete against finance and consulting, or preference for a non-elite alma mater, etc.), s/he may target other schools.

I concur. From the moment I learned that elites re-interpret merit to their own liking, I was searching for a method to separate the “new” merit from the “old” merit. The best approach I can find is still that of Bain or BSG. By screening for SAT, major, GPA before interview, the system is just about foolproof. By easing up on each of the data points, the procedure can be modified to suit any job that requires a college degree. If all employers adopt such an approach, attending an elite may not be such an obsession any more.

It matters. But you can be just as successful, if not more. If I am paying $70k per year for a college that does not matter for my kid, I am an idiot. But I tend to be a very practical person. The day it doesn’t matter will be the day no one cites ranking sources in articles. But I must say it doesn’t matter as much for some kids who choose merit money over prestige. It comes down to finance and fit.