I don’t think having a student from a socioeconomic status who receives the opportunity to attend an Ivy, HYPSM or other highly desired university necessarily precludes them from having, and displaying, a self-important, snobbish, elitist attitude.
While the attitude may be seen to be out of sync with such a student’s household circumstances or family history as it relates to the attainment of higher education, there are many instances of such persons “acquiring” an air-up-there disposition, and unapologetically making it known.
Do I think this is the trend among such students? Not as I can tell by what is happening with student advocacy groups, and the open discussions of being poor among the wealthy at institutions of higher learning, no
I didn’t think @droppedit was so far off in some of his/her observations. It’s using a broad brush for sure, and the sense of endearment I hold for one of the groups cannot be understood here as you cannot be intimately familiar with who my oldest son is and how I have experienced him, but I was nodding my head ‘yes,’ at “The MIT and Stanford guys were the least pretentious and the most focused on getting things done. One CalTech guy was just plain weird…”
The internet has been making on-campus recruiting a thing of the past. All jobs are posted online and easily searchable by anyone. All applications are done on employer websites, even for campus recruits. Initial interviews are by phone and skype. It’s very easy, and cheap, for a company to find great hires from anywhere.
@Chardo, sometimes the long-standing employer preference and limited reach out may be what places constraints of who is even looked at for a position. Changing that aspect of hiring is another component of the dynamic.
I don’t disagree with the basic premise of people’s comments on this thread, that you can find great CS job candidates at strong public universities that are not the tippy-top CS schools, and that companies can find that this group of employees outperform their co-workers who graduated from the universities with more prestige. I just want to identify part of the dynamic that runs counter to the main flow of this satisfying narrative.
Most companies – unless they are Google, or Apple, or Facebook, or McKinsey, or Kleiner Perkins – don’t necessarily get a look at the top CS students from Stanford, MIT, or CMU. There simply aren’t enough of them to go around. Some are pursuing academic careers, many (at Stanford, especially) are busy meeting with first-round venture capital firms to fund their startups, some are joining friends at what is thought to be the next “unicorn” that pays in stock options, and the rest tend to get snatched up pretty quickly by a small coterie of usual suspects. A “normal” successful national or multinational company, if it hires students from those programs, is probably hiring from the middle or bottom of their cohorts.
It’s not surprising at all that top students from slightly less prestigious programs outperform them. The faculty-quality differences between first-rank and second-rank universities are pretty slight, and likely make little or no difference to undergraduate education, and there’s no sharp distinction at all between student quality at the two types of institutions. They each have a range of students, and there’s a lot of overlap between the ranges, except at the very top of one and the bottom part of the other.
A close twentysomething friend turned down CMU’s CS school for a small midwestern LAC a number of years ago. Her choice worked out perfectly for her: she got to do things like double major in linguistics and spend a semester abroad focusing on culture, not coding. Her college gave her tons of support, including funding to join a research team at a prestigious university. She got exactly the job she had dreamed of getting when she was in high school, where she works side by side with colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and CMU. But she knows perfectly well that her coworkers were not the stars of their college departments. The job is her dream job, but not everybody’s, and there’s no way she’s going to have her retirement funded before her 30th birthday. Her ability to perform just as well as the graduates of top institutions doesn’t mean her LAC’s CS program is just as good as MIT’s, or that her skills are as good as any of the best students there. It isn’t, and they aren’t. But that didn’t determine whether she could study CS successfully and get a CS job she wanted.
@compmom – I guess I’m trying to understand how, if the stats haven’t come down, you would get less-qualified people in a technical field like programming coming out of the Ivy schools. Regardless of their origins, they should be just as smart and capable. BTW, D18 won’t go to an Ivy school. I’ve been looking at stats for various schools to see where her stats meet the bar (her weakness for the elite schools will be her ECs).
@zobroward – I don’t know if your comment was directed at me but if I pluck a random student out of an Ivy vs. a random student from an ACT 20-25 school, it’s highly likely that the Ivy student will be smarter. The school didn’t make them smarter, it’s that they had to be smart to get into the elite school in the first place.
Of course you are finding this. I’m not surprised in the least. With the cost of higher education top students are finding value at public institutions and are able to get high merit offers from lesser-known schools.
@EyeVeee Not necessarily smarter-- I am sure there are plenty of students who cannot afford those schools for one – and there are many reasons they may not want to attend. Also adding that the ‘smartest’ students don’t necessarily make the best or most motivated employees.
It is easy for companies to post jobs on their website and get applicants from all colleges. However, since many colleges have job databases that are exclusive to their students and alum, a company that has a relationship with that school can opt to post their jobs on these databases, With all of the computer weeding that happens with job applicants on websites - applicants to these college databases have a leg up on the general public. This may not be your traditional on-site campus recruiting but it is still targeted campus recruiting.
@toomanyteens I agree they may not be great workers, but they are statistically smarter as a group.
Not attending because you don’t want to be there is a more and more common position, but there is no way to discuss that group of kids…so for this discussion they have to go ignored. They will help their classmates at other schools, but they will still be in a statistically weaker pool.
As for financials, unless you’re paying full tuition at any of the schools, the net price at HYP is less than many State U’s.
Come to think of it, something like this happened to DS. He got a job interview out of the blue. Never applied or even heard of the company. Turns out his professor tipped off a friend of his at the company, said you have to talk to this student of mine. DS went on the interview mainly for the practice, and ended up being offered his choice of jobs at the company.
@Hanna Almost exactly this happened to my daughter in her freshman year intro CS class at a small LAC. She went in to talk to her professor about her project. He was impressed that an intro student was doing so well and hired her as a lab assistant. I think one of the key things is to make sure the computer science program is ABET accredited and within that qualification you can get a great CS education that makes you highly employable in a very wide range of colleges.
dropped it, I don’t understand this at all: “I guess I’m trying to understand how, if the stats haven’t come down, you would get less-qualified people in a technical field like programming coming out of the Ivy schools.” I never said anything about stats and I didn’t say less qualified people are coming out of Ivies. I just said that the student population at Ivies are now more of a mixed bag in terms of family income and background- than 20 years ago, the time to which you referred. I do not think that attending an Ivy makes kids into elitist snobs either.
I am not sure why there is so much Ivy bashing on a site that also seems to have a lot of parents intent on their kids getting in. It is a strange phenomenon.
Of course many many super bright kids are at state universities, and some get merit aid at LAC’s- both better options than an Ivy if financial aid is not a possibility. All schools have a mix of kids with a mix of talents and skills. Is this news?
To me, it is obvious that a kid from a state U. might excel in the workplace in CS. The state U’s tend to have great CS departments overall, and it is clear that many bright kids who might otherwise go to “elite” schools would be at the state U.
But to make that point, it seems unnecessary to bash others who went to other schools. There just seems to be an awful lot of defensiveness around these things.
Last post for me on this thread. You yourself said things might have changed and I was just basically agreeing.
It happened to me at Harvard. Small department though.
@mom23travelers from everything I’ve heard while ABET accredidation is important for engineering it’s not at all necessary for CS. There is however a curriculum you should expect from a good CS program and ABET accredited ones will probably offer it. There are threads listing the specific courses you should look for in a good CS program. I should have bookmarked them! Some LACs will be fine others not so much.
@compmom – I apologize for the misunderstanding. I just read through my original reply and yours and finally I understand what’s going on. I thought you were taking issue with my “they were all excellent” comment but were instead referring to the other parts (clique-ish, etc). The thread started somewhat dismissive tone to Ivy CS people (“less than inspiring”). I’m definitely not an Ivy basher.
My son got to do research in the biomedical engineering lab at UT-Austin the first semester of his freshman year. One of his professors had mentioned the possibility to him, and he followed up on it. (He fell ill at the end of that semester, so he couldn’t continue with the research.)
We are deep in the throws of this with our junior, who has top statistics and the blessing of significant college funding from her foresighted grandparents early investments. We basically have adopted "Here is the money that you have been blessed with. If you spend more, you get loans. If you spend less, the remainder is yours to spend on grad school, a gap year, a condo, whatever. Initially, she was drawn in by some top tier schools, and will likely still apply. Her list now includes three that would be top tier and cost her 50 - 60K a year, and three that are “second tier” and will cost her 30 - 40 a year because they are happy to give her significant merit aid. We will not be making the decision for her, but it will be interesting to see what she chooses. My perspective is that the top tiers are no longer diverse - they are bi modal. Kids who can pay full price are mixed with kids who qualify for substantial need-based scholarships. Without merit-based scholarships, there is a gap (e.g. could a family of 4 with a 125K income pay full price? Not likely! How about a 200K income? Still not likely that they could carve 25% out of the budget). So… you get kids with families making 75K or less, and families that are making 250K or more. (GROSS generalizations, but you get the point). That’s not diversity - that’s bi-modal, and it must impact the culture.
My own state U (not top tier) is most assuredly not diverse. It has differential housing costs which strikes me as extremely offensive for a public institution (some kids live in a concrete high rise with no amenities- if you can afford it, there are really nice luxury style suite apartments). It has heavy fees so that even once a kid has paid tuition there are loads of extras which a moderate income family just cannot afford. It is in a part of the state with lousy public transportation so that kids without cars have very different social opportunities, internships, etc. than kids who show up on campus with their own vehicle.
Etc. you are looking at a very narrow way to define diversity (of the financial variety). It is very hard for a middle class family in my state to send their kid to the flagship. They stay home after HS and either commute to one of the second tier branches or start at community college.
@shoot4moon : strictly speaking, for people in the 80-180k range, costs won’t be higher than 10% income, and for 180-225 it won’t be more than your star flagship, something like that. Still, 50% are above the 250k mark and the other 50% are rather evenly divided.
That makes Harvard’s population wayyy more privileged than most, but the ‘80-225k’ group is not forgotten at all and gets a better deal than anywhere.