<p>I hire engineers and for me, the school is an important factor especially for new grads. I tend to find that students who have done well at a very competitive school where their peer group has tended toward a higher standard of excellence often have more to offer coming out of school just because more has been expected of them. I am able to pay them more too. It’s not an absolute by any means, but a student from Cornell or Harvey Mudd is more likely to be on the top of my pile than say a student from someplace not commonly known as an engineering or academic powerhouse. </p>
<p>Personally, when I graduated, I had to find a job near my wife’s graduate school in an area that was not necessarily a booming technology area. I submitted my resume and cover letter to many companies that didn’t necessarily even have job openings, but in most cases, I at least got a phone call because of MIT on my resume.</p>
<p>I will add that with me as a hiring manager, the school won’t get you the job, or even the benefit of the doubt. When you come in for the interview, the school has already done all that it’s going to do for you. At that point you have to show us something that really impresses us to get the job. The default condition is no offer and many candidates don’t grasp that.</p>
<p>These kind of questions always crack me up. And of course, they only come up on here. Of course, if you can get into one of these schools, and you can afford it, and it seems like a place you’d like, it will likely catch people’s eyes. It catches my eye, but we follow a pretty strict hiring process where I work, which includes an actual written exam, and this is not one of the things we’re supposed to consider.</p>
<p>But there are only a tiny number of spots available at these schools. I participate in a few other engineering boards where the vast number of people are employed and making decent salaries. As you would expect based on overall statsitcs, very few of them went to an Ivy League school, or one of the best known tech schools.</p>
<p>So merely whether it will help you get employed is a silly reason to want to go to one of these places.</p>
<p>Mostly I’ve been involved in collective hiring processes for both entry-level and lateral university faculty, and for deans, though at an earlier stage of my life I did some hiring for not-for-profit organizations and government offices. In general my observation would be that the higher you go up the experience chain, the less relevant one’s undergrad degree becomes. For a dean, or a senior academic, or a senior manager at a non-profit, the question is not, “Where did you go to school as an undergrad?” but “What have you accomplished in your professional life?” And the correlation between undergrad alma mater and life accomplishments, while not trivial, is rather small, in my experience. Even at the entry level in academia and in other professions where it’s normal to have an advanced degree, it’s the strength of your graduate or professional school, and how you did there and what you did there, that matters; the undergrad degree is going to get only the slightest blip of attention, and basically be overwhelmed by the weight of more recent, and more relevant, information. That said, I do have to admit that in entry-level faculty hiring, an undergrad degree from Harvard or Yale will probably get a slightly bigger blip of favorable attention than an undergrad degree from Podunk State—but basically only as additional confirmation of a graduate school record and written work and grad school professor recommendations that say, “This is a really smart person and one of the top emerging scholars in the field.” If the subsequent record isn’t there, the Harvard undergrad degree won’t mean squat. And frankly, a strong undergrad record at a Williams or Swarthmore or Wellesley will serve just as well as the HYP degree.</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s question more directly, though: in circles I travel in, a 3.5 from Cornell wouldn’t be seen as terribly impressive. That’s a fine GPA, right on the cusp between a B+ and A- average and slightly above the average GPA for Cornell, an excellent school. But it doesn’t signal this is one of the smartest people on the planet. I’d take the 3.9 or 4.0 from AWS over the 3.5 from Cornell any day. Or even the 3.9 or 4.0 from UC Berkeley or Michigan. It may be different in some fields, e.g., engineering where grades tend to be lower and a 3.5 is a major accomplishment. But in the fields I’m most familiar with, a 3.5 from Cornell is probably not going to get you in the door at the top graduate and professional schools.</p>
<p>In the circle I travel in, a 3.5 from Cornell is quite impressive (first hand experience because of D1). I compare her with her friends from HS who went to top 20 schools, most of them have close to 4.0 GPA, while D1 just barely managed to graduate above 3.5, and she managed to get a job upon graduation. All of her friends from Cornell all have jobs soon after graduation, and some graduated with less than 3.0 GPA.</p>
<p>Of course you shouldn’t go to such a school “merely” because you think it will help you land your first job, but it’s certainly a reasonable and IMO not silly at all reason to want to go to such a school. </p>
<p>I think it weighed in S’s decision (Cornell engineering) to the point that he was willing to take out more loans to pay for Cornell versus less “prestigious” schools. Of course he also really liked it and feels he will be very happy there, but his belief that he will be employable (and yes, possibly more so than if he graduated from some of his other choices) when he gets out helped make the loans feel like a reasonable investment in his future.</p>
<p>Around here, really the only school with extra special hiring panache is BYU, because of the huge strength of the alumni and religious networking. </p>
<p>As I noted, the last three hirings I sat in on had applicants from Princeton and Dartmouth, and the schools never came up in conversation.</p>
So you agree with me. In that case I’m not exactly sure why you decided to comment on my post. I used the word “merely” for a reason. </p>
<p>Of course finding a job is one of many considerations. But there are about 15-20K Ivy League grads in each class, and probably a couple million grads. If you have to have an Ivy League diploma to find a job, this country is really in big trouble, and that degree probably won’t help you much when the economy collapses because the other 2 million or so grads can’t find work.</p>
<p>We just hired several engineers from UC Davis (seems to be my orgs favorite spot), Cal, and UCLA last year. Maybe the brainiacs are going to classier jobs. But these kids found work.</p>
<p>No. We have extensive business with the state governments where we have offices. So our target schools are the flagship Us. Our state legislators would care less about a Harvard hire but they would be impressed with those state/local U summa cumlaude kids!</p>