Interesting article, but there’s a wide range of jobs at all these companies. Not all positions, even accounting for experience levels, are going to be particularly well compensated or interesting.
I believe that elite colleges are certainly overrated.
However, they do provide better opportunities - stronger peer group, more challenging classes, name recognition (while not a major factor, it still counts) - that’s why people are trying to get there (I hope! Excepting the people who are just chasing prestige).
What each student makes of these opportunities, is up to the student. One can manage to graduate from, say, Berkeley with zero useful knowledge and the other can make SJState work just fine.
And yes, in the end it’s each person’s achievement that counts, not the way he got it.
Actually I really think people try to “get” to prestige colleges because they believe that the prestige will enable something in the future and it might…but not in all fields and not in all regions and not at all prestige colleges, those colleges still have their niche majors where they really do excel but they also have majors that are far better at other colleges/unis. I’m not convinced that high tech is one of them.
But isnt “status/prestige” something? Isnt prestige also associated with pay (mostly)? Authors want to win Pulitzer, actors want to turn out blockbusters, I dont know of ONE CEO that wants the title “mail room clerk” but will work 100 hours a week.
Even in charitable organizations nobody wants to be called a “worker” Everyone wants to be a “Director” or “Program Manager” or a “Event coordinator”
I dont know of anyone that makes 200k a year that lives in a homeless shelter because all humans need is two meals a day and a bed.
Why is prestige suddenly such a bad thing when it comes to elite education?
Still confused…
Personally, I do not find the results surprising in any way. There must be a strong regional preference because search costs (time, money, and opportunity costs involved) are nontrivial for both employers and employees. In a labor market equilibrium, it is mutually beneficial to see more matching between silicon valley employers and nearby schools.
By the same token, one would expect more matching between wall street and those colleges not too far away from NYC as well. If one finds it interesting that SJ State does surprisingly well in silicon valley, it is probably equally interesting to note that CUNY is doing well for wall street jobs.
Location matters!
Prestige is connected to money in some fields, not in others. One can imagine that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could be working as a senior partner at a top law firm earning 20 times what she makes as a Supreme Court Justice.
This is a great thread. We learned that Ivy League students are dumb and cannot think outside of the box.
I can assure you that most Ivy graduates who want to work in SV usually get a job there.
The fact is that majority of them want to go to graduate or professional school, work for the government or Wall Street and are not at all interested in SV. They do have choices and may prefer to spend their 20ties in NYC, DC or Boston.
OR Ruth Ginsberg could be doing pro bono work defending homeless people or some such social justice cause like hundreds of lawyers do everyday. Then we wouldn’t be talking about her or quoting her 
Then she wouldnt be famous
Back to my original point
There IS prestige associated with title, where you work, which college you went to, what you studied. Mostly such prestige also comes with lots of money.
Sometimes it doesnt
But it is still prestige
Yes and no, college name is important or some fields and not others. WSJ has a pretty good article about this and it’s been discussed ad nauseum on this forum. The point of the thread is if you want to work in Silicon Valley it might not be worth debt to attend an Ivy League school and better to keep one’s eye on the ball from the onset. That said, if it’s infinitely important to a person to say “Harvard” the rest of their life when asked where they went to undergrad then maybe for that person, should they land a career in the Silicon Valley, it’s important. Plus I don’t happen to think “prestige” is always associated with “making lotsa money”…a tad to gauche and limiting world view in my opinion.
@BoiDel – LOL, I know. I guess I worked at the place where all the smart Ivy grads went. Several from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, CMU, Caltech, etc. I think the big boss was from Brown. All of them were top notch in CS. Most of them moved up to managing programmers and writing code. Some started/started at small companies that were bought out – yet they weren’t sipping champagne on their yachts, they were getting their hands dirty with the rest of us dweebs.
The other private schools listed are just about as costlynas the Ivies.
If you are OOS for some of those publics, they can get pretty costly as well.
You can accumulate debt at almost any of the colleges listed…unless you are an instate student who is able to commute from home.
What I see…the colleges,that are in the vicinity of these businesses recruit there. What a surprise!
And they recruit at places with well regarded programs in the fields they are in bipusiness with, CMU, for example, is quite well known for having a tippy top and excellent CS program…so it’s no surprise that too firms would recruit their.
“I don’t know anyone who thinks they need an Ivy league degree to get a job in silicon Valley. Does that line of thought really exist?”
Yes, it does. It can be seen on some CC posts. It is of course very sad.
Agree with @ClaremontMom about % of students being important. My Harvey Mudd kid said 5 of her friends came back for alumni weekend last week, and all are at Silicon Valley or similar well known tech companies. Even some who weren’t CS majors.
@droppedit “yet they weren’t sipping champagne on their yachts, they were getting their hands dirty with the rest of us dweebs.”
That is one thing that I know about students at hands-on CS programs like MIT, Caltech, Penn, Carnegie, Cornell, Berkeley, etc. is that these students know how to do things themselves. They don’t just train students to be bosses. These kids know how to do things themselves or they will not graduate.
D spent a summer at the WTP program at MIT. One of the first comments she made was how impressed she was that the MIT staff was quick to get on the computer themselves and show you something when you were having trouble.
All I am expressing is:
IF a grad from a community college or East Mountain State University starts to work for Wall Street or a “Silicon Valley” company then that is seen as an accomplishment or is prestigious.
In the same tone, Why cant some kids choose a prestigious college and then choose a SV company?
I am confused as to why are SV employers considered prestigious but a kid’s choice of prestigious college knocked
I don’t find this explanation persuasive. You can submit a resume from anywhere in the world. Initial interviews can be done anywhere in the world via phone/Skype. The top tech companies pay their CS college interns as much as a lot of employers pay their full time employees. Apple is sitting on $175 billion in net cash. I’m sure they could easily pay the hotel/flight costs to bring in people for later interviews.
Yes, but you can get a great job in the valley from any school! My son just got hired there and his cs degree is from UNC Charlotte, you just need to study a lot for the interviews and be smart, they care about how you do at the interview not what school you are from. Our friend also got her degree from UNCC and she has an amazing job in the valley too.
Indeed… I used to know a recruiter for Goldman Sachs who had the west coast region. She said GS would love to have top grads from Cal, Stanford, UCLA, Caltech and the like, but her yield just wasn’t that high. GS made plenty of offers, but many local grads preferred to start a business, head to a VC, or other some such than heading to NYC.
Odds are extremely high that such would be improbable, if not impossible. Unless juco grad wanted to work in the mail room, The Street is one industry where prestige matters, big time.
East Mountain State University and Juco graduates can work on Wall Street in Technology. Prestige is much less important there.
I agree @bluebayou
Differentiation and selectivity clearly exist
But I keep reading on CC that ALL college education is the same, hence all outcome will be the same, thats why I said what I said
For some a “big name employer” is important for others an amazing college education is.
Why cant a kid aspire for the latter? or both?
An amazing college experience, even if the long term advantage of such an education is less than 10% (of the overall skills package,) why cant it still be an aspiration or goal?