And special circumstances are considered, including number of children, family illness etc. For those with pretty good incomes, as MYO said, the Ivies are cheaper than publics. How big is that gap really? I mean, once you make over a certain amount, is it really hard to pay? I have no idea.
Blossom makes a really good point. And the differential housing costs sound horrible!
droppedit, glad you figured it out because I couldn’t : ) Good luck to your daughter!
@JHS nails it with the second quote above.
Some of the elite private U grads the CCers have observed who performed below par with counterparts from public flagships or less prominent colleges may have been due to self-selection as the best/above-average performers from the elite private Us likely never considered applying or applied and opted to go elsewhere because they had better offers from higher profile companies with possibly higher starting salaries.
Another thing to keep in mind is that what’s considered tippy/top(top 10) programs for engineering/CS may not necessarily be synonymous with Ivies. Many public colleges like Georgia Tech, UMich, UW-Seattle, UIUC, etc have long had far stronger CS/engineering programs than up until very recently were only matched by a few Ivies Princeton, Cornell, and Columbia.
I think this is playing a role here.
So I have to give a counter-example from my experience. I’ve done technical interviews with grads from some of the Stanford/Caltech/MIT schools and not only were they on top of the material but they could answer questions that asked them to apply what they learned. Grads from top UCs could answer just as well when asked about mastery of the material but did far less well when asked a question where they needed to recognize the approach they needed and apply it.
And as a grad of a large public I attribute this to the way the material is taught (well, the way I was taught, anyway). The homework, lab, and midterm questions are graded by TAs. Open-ended questions are harder to grade than one that strongly implies or actually asks for a specific approach to be used in solving the problem. So the tests focus on specific and prompted knowledge. Many labs were like following recipes: “do this, measure that, what did you see?” But on the job few problems come so neatly labeled. At top privates with smaller classes and more generous funding to support extra TAs the questions and assignments can be less restrictive.
@JHS nailed it with this statement:
And don’t forget the finance industry, particularly hedge funds, which has been another lure for top CS grads, although that is abating due to poor performance in the industry.
The lesson is also applicable to other industries and majors as well. When someone in a respectable mid-tier company says “We are not impressed with ”, that is usually because you are not getting the best the college has to offer. They are already picked off.
Google’s HR director found out they were overlooking many potentially excellent employees
by focusing recruiting only on top schools.
When the company was small, Google cared a lot about getting kids from
Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. But Bock said it was the “wrong” hiring strategy.
Experience has taught him there are exceptional kids at many other places,
from state schools in California to New York.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/09/technology/google-people-laszlo-bock/
^^^ That Google article nailed what has been my experience. Yes, kids from Ivies are high-achievers. But there are high-achievers to be found in other places as well. And your ability to be a team player, inquisitiveness, persistence, ability to inspire others - are all critical elements of success. I would never denigrate an Ivy grad - but just because someone didn’t attend an Ivy doesn’t mean they are inherently inferior in some way.
Note - I have never hired for an investment bank. Or a top research institute. Or a think tank. Your university may carry much more weight in those circles. But I’ve been involved in the hiring process for tech folks in many companies, from a 4-person startup to international companies with 10s of thousands of employees. A resume from an Ivy might get commented on, maybe get read a little more deeply, might not. A CS resume from NC State definitely gets attention in RTP. For the most part though, if there are comments on schools they’re because it’s the alma mater of the interviewer, or might be an athletic rival. In my sphere I have never heard people comparing applicants based off the rankings of their universities. Top performers learn what they need to on the job (OK, not doctors or engineers, but many others).
I agree. Focusing on hiring from elite schools is more the exception than the rule. In surveys companies as a whole say that school name is one of the least influential factors in hiring decisions for new grads. For example, the survey at http://www.chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf included HR, managers, and executives at hundreds of companies. It found that among all the surveyed criteria, “college reputation” was the least influential factor when evaluating resumes of new grads overall, and the least influential factor in all industries except for education and media/communications. Criteria involving experience in a work environment were ranked as most influential. The survey also found the following mean rating for different types of universities among tech employers. There was little difference between elites and “nationally known”, and flagships were rated best of all. Of course there are some specific companies and specific hiring managers that are exceptions.
Public Flagship – 4.03
Elite College – 3.89
Private, Not For Profit – 3.86
Public, Not-Flagship – 3.85
Nationally Known College – 3.83
…
Online College – 2.64
Unknown College – 2.63
A manager told me he would love to interview UCB EECS graduates but they don’t apply to his positions. If one applies to because he wasn’t hired by any of the exception companies, it might be that the manager will be disappointed.
I wish we would drop the idea that test scores = intelligence. They don’t. There are a lot of reasons why a very intelligent student may not score very highly on a standardized test. We already know that race and income are correlated with standardized test scores. So is gender.
Besides, test scores are simply inputs. They only reflect the student’s preparation for a very specific test anywhere from 6 months to 18 months before they start college. It says nothing about the work that the university or college has done to turn them into a capable scholar.
I’ve worked with students from Ivies and students from state schools and lesser-known privates. The kids from Ivies had more resources and were better prepared for college, on average - for obvious reasons - but they weren’t smarter. I’ve also done volunteer college counseling and test prep for over 10 years now, and the kids who end up at Ivies aren’t necessarily smarter than the kids who don’t. They tended to have more money, though.
That said, I’m not surprised. I’m a researcher at a big/top tech company (Microsoft) and most of my coworkers have graduate degrees, so it’s hard to separate that influence. But I do have some entry-level coworkers who have only BAs/BSs and you can’t tell the differences between where they went to college. (Many of them went to UW, but a lot went to WSU and CWU as well.) They’re all smart, capable, talented young folks. And a lot of my higher-level coworkers who have only BAs went to actually little-known private schools - one went to Pacific Lutheran and another went to Seattle Pacific, for example.
Of course not " = ", but certainly “are highly correlated to”.
You’re actually supporting my point (that you quoted in your post). It’s no wonder that you find that your coworkers are smart. MSFT filtered those who applied to the company and selected the smartest/best people. That’s exactly what elite colleges do with high school students.
'The kids from Ivies had more resources and were better prepared for college, on average - for obvious reasons - but they weren’t smarter. "
It depends on the students you are comparing to from which schools. I would say that any ivy student is, On Average, smarter than the bottom 50% of any other college.
Bingo!
DS is a junior CS major at Yale (which IMO deserves more respect than it gets, but that’s a topic for another thread).
He is only at the internship interview stage, but completely agree with the quote. He has had a number of interviews that have lasted from 4 to 9 hours, with teams of PhDs doing the grilling, and he obviously hasn’t had that many hours of “answers” in him. They were watching him think out loud, challenging him, being tough. We have found that he’s batting 100% when he’s done a rigorous interview of > 1 hour. His results at the big-name tech companies are mostly random when the interviews are shorter. In general, props to the hedge funds (surprise!) for first-rate screening and shame on some well-known firms for their cavalier attitude.
I have recruited for both IB and tech startups. Based on my experience, we’ve had great success with students from Cornell, UPenn, CMU, NU…and students from top public flagships, not so much with HYPS. Without painting a big wide brush, I think students from some of those tippy top schools lack EQ (with high IQ) and they feel certain process at work is mundane and sometimes do not follow them. The retention rate for not tippy top graduates is also higher. Every Princeton graduates I hired at the tech startup have all left (after 2 years), whereas other schools’ retention rate is 60-70%.
D2 is interning at an US attorneys office. She and another intern from a top 20 school could prepare binders for trials in matter of days, whereas another intern from HYPS (with 179 LSAT) would be completely confused. This week when they had to quickly put something together and he was asked to print out materials to put in a binder, he didn’t come back for a long time because he couldn’t find a printer (ID to add to his computer). This intern is also not aware of corporate protocol, or maybe he doesn’t think it is important, when it comes to emails or when dealing with visitors.
As a hiring manager, if I am looking for a very special unicorn to help us find that gold nugget then I may not care as much if he/she doesn’t have a lot of EQ, but in general I find what we do at work day to day is fairly repetitive. I prefer employees who could just get the work done, which may mean thinking outside of the box, without a lot of complaints or hand holding. Instead of expecting me to make the job interesting to him/her, try to figure out how he/she could make my job easier.
Yale may not be as heavily recruited for CS specifically due to the relatively small number of CS majors (around 40 for a recent year, which is up from previous years). And then there is competition from Wall Street, consulting, etc. to deal with, so a computer company may feel that the yield would be too low compared to recruiting at a school with hundreds of CS majors.
Who said that test scores = intelligence? When someone posted about kids being “smarter,” test scores did not occur to me as a measure.
There are many kids at Ivies these days who do not come from a privileged background but have shown they can do the work, or contribute to campus in some way. Some struggle their first year, compared to those who did go to excellent private or public high schools, but they also tend to catch up and the fact that they are not jaded helps.
I don’t think we should paint ANY school’s grads with a broad brush. And to me it is obvious that grads from many different schools will demonstrate excellence and work ethic in the workplace. College choices are often driven by finances and some of the best and brightest are at state U’s or schools that give merit. Some of the best workers may also come from Ivies.
This thread is just a set up for negativity.
It could also be CS enrollment is not very high in general. I heard Purdue CS is like 200 kids. Compare that with University of Louisiana @ Lafayette, era 1982 when we had probably 1000 kids in the department :), the golden era of CS enrollments…
In terms of hiring, there’s smart kids everywhere. The list given by the original poster has some pretty good schools in it and I have worked with kids from several of the schools listed. It really depends on what the interviewer wants. If they want technical skills, specific ones, for example some specific framework or what not, it’s luck of the draw. Some schools may teach it, some may not. Some schools do group projects that cover the entire SDLC, some (ULL 
back then for example) mostly the coding part. Some give easier assignments, some, like ULL back then, pretty much give larger assignments.
Ixnay- it’s ludicrous to say “shame on” well known firms for their cavalier attitude.
You simply don’t know what the hiring criteria are at any given company, and you have no idea what templates they use to get to the answer (i.e. the right number of hires around the world to fill both immediate needs and long term development/progression goals).
Recruiting isn’t random. Companies aren’t throwing resumes against a wall and seeing what sticks and what falls down. DE Shaw looks for different things than Morgan Stanley which looks for different things than Bridgewater. A kid may do exceptionally well in a DE Shaw interview and bomb at Bridgewater. That doesn’t mean that Bridgewater is stupid and DE Shaw is smart- it means that they look for different things, and that the people who develop hiring models for each company have tailored the process to fit the end result.
Companies spend millions of dollars recruiting, training, and retaining successful employees. It’s not a random process to assemble your class every year. Do they “miss out” on talented kids by not interviewing more widely? Of course. But my shareholders don’t pay me to be a social worker and “spread the wealth” across an ever-widening pool of colleges- they pay me to get high potential employees with a wide range of skills in the right places around the world in the most efficient way possible while still obeying the law, hitting our diversity targets, and ensuring that the “next big thing” (which we don’t even know about yet) will get covered by hiring enough “out of the box” thinkers who can look around corners and imagine the future.
What you see as a cavalier attitude is a company’s cost-effective way of whittling down the field.
@blossom, I’m not quite as ignorant of hiring criteria as you think.
Do offers that explode in a short time, shorter than agreed with the college, seem cavalier to you?
Do 2 day deadlines to choose between an “open” offer (you’ll take whatever assignment they select) and “closed” offer (you can select projects you’re interested in, but the offer is rescinded if a project doesn’t want you) seem fair, especially for kids whose finances aren’t that comfortable? Fwiw, this was the predicament a friend of DS found himself in.
I guess I wasn’t clear; I wasn’t complaining that Yale didn’t get recruiter interest, I was complaining that the process results seemed random with well-known tech companies . DS has a circle of friends, high achievers, who share their results, and it is comical in its randomness.
Btw, this is not sour grapes or whining. DS has interesting and lucrative offers for this summer. Many of his classmates don’t, and I have to think that’s not entirely their fault. Fwiw, no complaints about the interview process at DE Shaw or Bridgewater, to use two of your examples :). We have been impressed with the caliber of the process there, and other related firms.
The colleges are supposed to monitor exploding offers and rescind recruiting privileges to any company which does not abide by the guidelines. Your son should let the head of career development know ASAP if ANY company violates the rules (which are set out by the college, not the company). This is not a slap on the hand- companies have been barred for an entire season for violating the rules of engagement.