@blossom, the exploding offers were made to classmates (whom we have no reason to not believe). DS has not experienced improper offers first-hand; he would report them. I will ask him to suggest it to his classmates.
I think that the open/closed offer gets around the issue because technically the offer doesn’t explode.
It is sometimes implied in other sections of these forums where a college’s SAT or ACT scores are sometimes used by posters to say how intellectually suitable a college is for the student asking about the college.
I know my kids’ school monitored companies’ behavior as well their students’ behavior while they were recruiting/interviewing. There were strict guidelines on how long a company needed to give candidates to respond to an offer. If a company were to violate the guidelines then they would be barred from recruiting on campus. The companies were also prevented from inviting candidates off campus for meet and greet (or wine and dine) until after a certain date. I remember the year D1 was interviewing, she was invited to visit a well known IB over a weekend before The Date. Both she and the company were warned by the career center that they may be in violation of the school’s guidelines.
Both of my kids had to go through an online training given by the career center before they were allowed online to submit resumes. One thing they were not allowed to do was to accept multiple offers.
Test scores weren’t mentioned in this thread, which is not about admissions but about the workplace. Does anyone seriously think high SAT’s or ACT’s are an important predictor of superior performance at work, at least in most cases?
@compmom, I personally think that the effects of one Saturday morning should be limited, but others appear to disagree. Let’s hope that they’re used with some care.
http://time.com/10693/your-sat-scores-will-come-back-to-haunt-you/
I’ve only read the original post and the first few comments. My immediate reaction was that this demonstrates why so many of us with long experience working in high-tech keep saying on CC that where you went to school doesn’t matter that much for CS. We’ve seen how people from Stanford and MIT sit in the same little cubicles, doing the same kind of work, as people from any other college.
ABET accreditation for CS is unnecessary. I got my CS degree in 1983, and didn’t even know that there was an accreditation program for CS until about three years ago when someone mentioned it on CC. A few years ago I did a survey of the top 100 CS programs (I can’t remember where I got the ranking) and less than half were accredited.
Handholding? At the Ivies? Ha ha ha ha ha. There are good kids/grads everywhere. You do not need to try to put down one set of schools in order to build yourself [or your child] up.
As others have said earlier, there is an overlap in quality between the average MIT/Stanford graduate and strong graduates from state flagships. From both places, many of them will end up at solid places to work like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Likewise, a mid-level state grads and a lower level MIT/Stanford grads will end up at many respectable companies throughout the world. And from the limited perspective of looking within one company, it does indeed appear that the people from Stanford and MIT sit the same little cubicles, doing the same kind of work…
What a person working in a normal company doesn’t see are the MIT/Stanford grads that ended up at the most selective companies (companies more selective than those I listed above). And these highly selective companies tend to recruit the most talented graduates from highly selective colleges. It is not because it is impossible to find similar levels of talent in a state flagship, but because the concentration is much higher at a highly selective school which makes recruiting much easier.
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@hebegebe…Absolutely!
The top half at Stanford either start the companies that the Flagship kids will want to work for in 5 years, or will be swallowed up by big money that most people don’t realize exists. The bottom of the class at Stanford is sitting in a cube at Google, et al.
The other thing that helps the MIT/Stanford kids are relationships that have delivered extraordinary kids in the past.
The larger companies listed above like Apple, Google, and Microsoft cast a wide net. They recruit at colleges all over the United States, as well as at some colleges outside of the US. Such companies generally have more career recruiting events at public colleges than “elite” ones. For example, the pulldown at http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/students.html shows a list of the colleges where Apple has had recent career fair events. Stanford and MIT are on the list, but the vast majority are not as “elite” publics, such as 3 events at Cal Polytech, 2 events at Cal State Sacaramento, CUNY Hunter, etc. LinkedIn suggests that Apple tends to have a larger number of hires from closer colleges, which probably partially relates to a larger number of applicants from those colleges. The top 3 on LinkedIn for Apple’s Silicon Valley location are San Jose State, Stanford, and Berkeley. This is true both overall and for engineering specific positions. Similarly Microsoft’s Seattle location has the largest number of hires from the nearby University of Washington, rather than Stanford/MIT.
This fits with my personal experience as well. I have an EE degree from Stanford. In recent surveys, >90% of job offers received by Stanford EE/CS students have been in the SF Bay Area, so most students probably don’t interview at Microsoft in Seattle. However, I was an exception. While I was a student, I attended a large hiring event at Microsoft, with dozens of students interviewing on the same day for what sounded like entry level engineering positions. Among those I spoke with that made it to the interview round, University of Washington was heavily overrepresented. There were students from a variety of other colleges as well. I was the only person I met from Stanford, although there was at least one person in my EE class who ended up working there after graduation.
About the Same said it well.
And from IxnayBob’s link (two separate paragraphs):
But here’s the rub: SAT scores might not even be that good of a barometer for predicting someone’s job performance. In an interview last year, Google HR exec Laszlo Block told the New York Times, “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.”
There are even some academics starting to suggest that these tests don’t even measure how well you’ll do in college, never mind in a cubicle. According to a new study published a couple of weeks ago, researchers found only “trivial differences” in the GPAs and graduation rates between students who submitted their test scores and those who were accepted to college without providing their test results.
"solid places to work like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. "
I find it funny that everyone (including students) uses these companies as the benchmark of greatness/success for a CS major. Are they really that great? There are thousands of companies in varied industries that need technical grads (pharma, insurance, oil industry, manufacturing, government, etc…) That probably have interesting and lucrative positions, but still most CS grads and their families romanticize the companies mentioned above as the “brass ring” of CS. To me, they are more like factory jobs, where you have to work on a very small piece of the “assembly line” since every tech employee at these firms works on production of a handful of products - the work is extremely specific. As opposed to many many opportunities at companies that don’t produce software (they may produce medications, cars, insurance products, etc) where you can learn about a business or product outside of CS while working to solve problems and create automation in their CS department.
Edited to add- I don’t live in California where most of these companies are but it must be an interesting sociological effect to have so many white/Asian males in their 20s/30s in one area… Who have gone to top schools and worked hard to get into these companies. I feel like if you’re working among so many other people that are just like you it must be boring, from a social person, to live in these areas vs diverse (age, sex, personality, socio-econmic status) areas across the United States where many other companies hire CS grads.
The Bay Area and Silicon Valley…and that whole area of CA…very diverse populations. Not everyone there works at Google or Facebook. Not everyone is a 20something or 30 something. Not everyone is white or Asian. Not everyone graduated from a top 20 college.
CC posters need to stop romanticizing working at Google, being in the top of your class at Stanford, etc. These are not the only things to strive for and do not make your life “complete” or make you above the rest of the world. The original post was just pointing out how there are good job candidates in many schools. A good message for all of us - the most successful people didn’t all graduate as the MIT valedictorian and not every top Ivy student has gone on to change the world. Success at school or at taking the SAT doesn’t guarantee success in business, or in life - regardless of how you define success.
MIT does not have valedictorians or graduated with honors.They don’t tell students where they rank relative to one another in their overall class. The highest GPA that one can attain is 5.0 and there are usually several 5.0s in a given year.
Speaking as someone who had a 5.0 at MIT and now works at Google - although reasonable, I disagree with the comment that the top people at the top schools are better than the top people at other schools. For 2 main reasons:
Obviously lots of great entrepreneurs went to non-elites. Off the top of my head / IIRC, Larry Page went to Michigan, Steve Jobs went to Reed, the founder of Under Armor (and Sergey Brin?) went to UMD, etc. Even Illinois Tech on their tour was talking about some graduate who did something impressive (forgot what) and made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Assuming there’s an implied question in this thread title - where should your kids go to school? - I think you want to find somewhere where they’ll thrive. I think it’s better for them to go to a school where they’ll do really well, vs. a better / elite school where they might be average.
I think the elites do give you an advantage in getting the first job out of college. But if you got a great education, gained confidence, and developed a love for you field, IMO 10 years later you’re much more likely to be doing better / happier than if you struggled at a better school.
Keep in mind that UW-Seattle’s engineering/CS programs have long been known for being among the top 10-15 in those fields…and perceived among many hardcore engineering/CS employers for having stronger engineering/CS programs than many private colleges…including most of the Ivies.
When friends/relatives who did/do hiring for their respective hardcore engineering/CS firms, 99/100 they’d take a UW-Seattle, UIUC, Georgia Tech, or UMich grad OVER most* Ivy engineering/CS grads unless the latter is overwhelmingly stronger in demonstrated technical chops and working/internship experience.
This attitude is more pronounced among older employers/technical hiring managers like an uncle who was himself an Ivy engineering graduate(Columbia SEAS late '50s).
Besides the rhetoric, career statistics for graduates of each college is a good place to compare.
I believe there is a difference between UCLA job placement rate and Cal State Long Beach job placement rate.
But one has to be careful to distinguish between jobs making use of CS knowledge and where the results of the work are considered valuable intellectual property, as opposed to IT jobs that are more vulnerable to outsourcing. (This is true even in the computer industry.)
Lots of other places in the US are more homogeneous.