Employability affected by school prestige in top gigs (I use the kind of arbitrary number of about 150k or greater total compensation, and great benefits on top of that, for entry-level jobs in SF/NY, or the equivalent in a lower COL area) is a function of not only the CS ranking, but the general reputation of the school as well. CS/CS-oriented students at Brown and Dartmouth might greater access to these opportunities than students at Maryland or Purdue (even though Maryland and Purdue have better known CS departments).
There is College Scorecard, which uses IRS data for graduates who received federal financial aid as students to show median pay levels by major and degree level for each college (although some have insufficient data to be shown): https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ . Obviously, the main deficiency is that graduates who did not receive federal financial aid are not included, and (for some colleges) they may be fairly numerous and have different characteristics that affect employment outcomes from those who did receive federal financial aid.
For UC campuses only, data from the state EDD for graduates working in California other than in self-employment or national government jobs has been made into this web site of pay levels 2, 5, and 10 years from graduation: UC alumni at work | University of California . Note that there is history going back to graduation years 1999-2000. For computer science majors, note the difference between 1999-2000 during an industry boom and the following two-graduation-year periods that entered during the severe industry downturn.
Did you find this data?
Hard to disentangle prestige from simply high caliber of talent from rigor of the school.
But yes, the top would feature the top-ranked schools + the top CS schools + a few lesser-known gems (generally schools that don’t offer PhDs but do feature project-heavy coursework—or at least one major intensive project that often leads to offers), often located in or close to major tech hubs.
I agree. There are some exceptions (like Brown), that are not known for rigor (using the term rigor here to mean “very difficult to get good grades”), but have solid reputations nonetheless.
Yeah, though in the case of Brown, their CS department is respected.
In the case of Dartmouth, it’s probably just that they bring in high talent (network probably doesn’t hurt).
how do I find that on LinkedIn? just by searching or is this a special feature for gold?
Look up the school. Then select alumni. Select Computer Science or Software Engineering under What They Do and then expand the Where They Work Column. At some schools the major you’re looking for won’t make the top 10 based on volume, so you have to put the term in the search box. Hope that helps!
2 Likes
that is some powerful data! thank you!
1 Like
Like all data, it has flaws. It’s self reported and lists companies without discerning whether they were internships, coops or full time jobs. Still, it’s pretty good stuff.
1 Like
Self-reported but people very rarely lie about the places they’ve been at on LinkedIn as others (including friends and former co-workers) can see. Titles may or may not be inflated (but usually not as others can see them).
A possibly bigger issue is that that search wouldn’t differentiate between undergrad and grad, and some schools have massive grad cohorts. USC graduates nearly 1000 CS masters holders each year, for instance, vs. about 200 undergrad CS majors.
Indeed. I was really referring to the fact that the data isn’t “automatic.” That said, almost everyone uses it now days.
Interestingly, most of the people at the company where my son works don’t use their official titles in their LinkedIn. They can be fairly whimsical titles. 
Fair, though for a search like this, how people list their major matters more and it’s rare for people to put down something that wasn’t their major (like “dragon slaying”) as their major.
I was talking job title 
1 Like
This is not accurate. You would be shocked at how frequently people lie on Linkedin- because people lie (or fudge the truth) on their resumes, and they know that the resume and Linkedin profile need to line up in some way, so the false data gets transported from one medium to the next.
I’ve seen a three day seminar on negotiation at Harvard become an MBA (verifiable with a simple phone call- Harvard keeps great records) and I’ve seen a six month coding bootcamp become a Master’s in Comp Sci. There are a lot of talented fiction writers out there. There are people who were temps at Google for a few months who magically become “Directors” of something or other and even their made up titles are not something which exist in that company’s nomenclature.
Do NOT assume that the information you see on Linkedin is accurate. It is 100% generated by the individual with zero gate-keeping, verification or data hygiene.
1 Like
Good to note!
Seems rather stupid, though. Especially making up degrees.
Especially when that stuff is easily verifiable! 
Harvard Extension is not Harvard College. The program run by a Wharton professor at your company to teach “Managing Change” to mid-level managers is not a degree from Wharton. And you would fall over with laughter at the number of people who claim to be “ABD” with a doctorate from an institution that does not give PhD’s. (that one is used to explain spending 8 years at an institution- Claim you were pursuing a doctorate instead of flunking several classes you needed to pass to get a BA).
Not everyone verifies, but when they do- there is a lot of creativity even for people who are generally honest. And relevant to the discussion at hand- objective rankings- because so many people believe that “it doesn’t matter where you go” for comp sci (I don’t believe that, but I know people do), that encourages a hecka-lotta fantasy in the resume department. Coding Academy/Carnegie Mellon- who cares as long as you can code, right? Self-Taught/MS from Stanford- hey, I’m making lotsa dough, what’s the difference what I put on my resume?
Note, though, that unless there are a greater proportion of liars who claim they are an alum of one school than another (which, granted, may be the case; probably more folks falsely claiming that they hold a Harvard degree than there are folks who lie about graduating from UCSD), the falsehood issue isn’t as big a concern as the issue I mentioned earlier that all alums (grad and undergrad; and maybe certificate holders, people who attended an extension school, or took an online course, depending on how LinkedIn defines an alum) are squished together. Harvard has roughly as many alums who studied CS on LinkedIn as some big state schools do. Pretty certain only a small fraction of them were Harvard College CS majors.