I’d like to get some opinions on this sentiment. From Christopher Welsh, Attorney, Registered Investment Advisor, Hedge Fund Manager, Computer Programmer:
“A large engineering university and its not even close. A computer science and/or computer engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines, MIT, Stanford, your state engineering school, are worth infinitely more than a BA in computer science from Amherst, St. Johns, or wherever.
That does not mean that the education you would receive at the liberal arts school is worth (probably is but not necessarily), but it signals to employers and other people in your life that you have an inferior degree. Just like my degree from Texas A&M is inferior to one from Stanford, a degree from a liberal arts school in a science, engineering, or math school is worth less.
Degrees do not signal skill, training, or potential for success. All they do is tell an employer that you graduated from one of the best colleges in field X. When comparing someone that has a BS in Computer Science from the Colorado School of Mines to someone that got a BA in Computer Science from Emory the first person will ALWAYS get the interview and preferences firms (well unless the HR director is an Emory graduate).”
I completely disagree. Outside the college-obsessed world of CC, I’d venture a large percentage of hiring managers have never heard of Colorado School of Mines. MIT, CMU, yes, they carry weight. But once you have your first job, I think the school name loses it’s pull. (Coming from someone who graduated from Glassboro State College and shared my first training class at a Fortune 100 company with graduates from Dartmouth, Hamilton, UVA, etc…)
Realistically, it may be easier for the tech school CS grad to get a first job.
However, it may also be easier for the liberal arts grad CS to get promoted.
Suppose the company has hired both. Now they need to fill a technical leadership position to manage the entry-level CS staff. This role is less technically demanding, but requires a broad range of people skills, writing skills, marketing skills, and financial skills. The liberal arts CS grad may be well positioned in this situation.
If you want to work on Wall Street, you need to go to a school that they recruit from. The investment world is insular and tends to want certain schools only.
Liberal arts schools will have the foundation CS classes plus maybe one or two specialization tracks. When you look at the course options at a big engineering school, there is no comparison. But, if the liberal arts environment is where you would be happiest learning, and the offerings meet your interests and needs, go to the school that is right for you.
It is not surprising that someone in professions which are highly school ranking conscious (Wall Street, law with respect to law school) will have an opinion of school ranking that exaggerates the importance of one’s school even in other fields.
@Luska19 it’s interesting to me that in the place he wrote that sentiment, he was downvoted to second-from-last “good” answer.
I agree with the top answer for sure, and the second one as well, not Christopher’s. Those are (I clipped them for brevity, go to the link to read the full answers):
I think he sees things very differently than I do, and his other responses on quora would confirm that. Like this little nugget that has a student avoid writing any way he can, 'cause that’s what he did (but somehow made it through law school?):
[quote]
I am in my third year of college in computer science. I like my study but I God AWFULY HATE writing reports, essays. Im getting depressed. What to do?
See if you can go test out of subjects. I tested out of as many English, social studies, and other BA type programs as my school would let me. I knocked off almost half of my requirements that way;
In your third year, it’s probably too late to take AP tests for credits, but I would look into it;
Suck it up. You only have 1–2 years left. Quite a bit of the college courses you are required to take (at least a third) are nothing but mindless filler and a waste of time. It’s the system and in the scheme of things, not that big of a deal.
[/quote]
His advice to a question about becoming a data scientist makes much more sense to me than the answer you quote in that first post:
This is nonsense and I hope kids reading this don’t take it seriously. My kid goes to a school that is not known for its computer science but which is certainly well regarded and which provides a full offering of computer science classes along with an integrated liberal arts curriculum. She chose the school for that reason; she did not want the narrower education that a tech-focused school would bring. Not only has she had no problem finding internships, she’s done quite well in them, showing herself to be more than equal to her peers coming from the “superior” schools. Her classmates have also fared well as have her high school friends who chose schools other than the MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkeley/Colorado School of Mines group. They’re well represented at the big tech firms and at the smaller startups.
This guy is utterly full of baloney. He says: “That does not mean that the education you would receive at the liberal arts school is worth (probably is but not necessarily), but it signals to employers and other people in your life that you have an inferior degree. Just like my degree from Texas A&M is inferior to one from Stanford, a degree from a liberal arts school in a science, engineering, or math school is worth less”
Engineering kind of its own animal, but for science and math, the schools that send the highest percentage of students into top PhD programs, top medical schools etc. are nearly all liberal arts colleges. A math degree from Williams or a neuroscience degree from Amherst or a chemistry degree from Swarthmore is top tier, Ivy level valuable, and the typical career paths of students who earn those degrees prove it.
If this “signals” to people like Walsh that the student has an “inferior degree” it is solely because Walsh is kind of ignorant. Which may explain why he needs to be an Attorney, Registered Investment Advisor, Hedge Fund Manager, and Computer Programmer all at the same time in order to make a living.
Ok, I’m done with the snark. lol but he’s wrong as can be
According to NSF data for PhD completions on the WebCASPAR site, from 2006-2015, alumni from tiny Amherst College earned more than 2X as many doctorates in CS as alumni from Colorado School of Mines. Alumni from several other LACs I checked (Carleton, Swarthmore, Williams) earned even more doctorates in CS than Amherst alumni did.
Granted, those NSF numbers don’t tell us anything about hiring preferences. But where would one even look for comparable interview and hiring data to check the strong claims cited in the original post?
I don’t think PhD route is the goal for many who choose CS and engineering as a major and as such cannot be used as a measurement of success in the field.
@bogeyorpar considering that list “analyzed 7 million applications and 40,000 hires to determine the schools that had the most students hired by top companies in and around Silicon Valley.” it’s not surprising that only large schools made the list because, well, they are large, with lots of graduates. Usually 10X more graduates than any single LAC. The only Ivy that is there is…the largest one with the most students.
Adjust for the fact that Michigan or UCLA have about 7000 grads a year and Harvey Mudd has less than 200 (or Caltech, also missing from the list, has about 550) and then things look a little different.
This is utter baloney. People don’t care where your degree is from in CS (of course, some of the big schools like MIT and CMU carry some weight). They care about how well you did and what skills you learned.
Proof: I’m a BS Computer Science (also majoring in Math w/two performing arts minors) graduating from an LAC in May (i.e. I still have another year left) and I already have a full-time job offer in CS for when I graduate (I’ve also gotten interviews for 3 other positions; should hear back in the next month). My current competitive internship (<25 chosen from over 300 applicants), is also filled with students from LACs (as well as some of the big schools).
@OHMomof2 Here’s a study with percentage rather than absolute number of graduates:
The top 10 colleges that fuel the Silicon Valley
17-Dec-13
Stanford University: 0.193
Harvey Mudd College: 0.191
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): 0.133
Yale University: 0.112
Duke University: 0.083
Dartmouth College: 0.072
Princeton University: 0.066
Harvard University: 0.053
Brown University: 0.047
University of California, Berkeley: 0.035
Now Harvey Mudd gets into the picture as well as many Ivies. Still no other LACs.
@bogeyorpar that’s interesting, because the west coast schools largely vanished, compared to the first list. Stanford and Cal (and Mudd) and all the rest on the east coast.
Hard to get any info about their methodology though:
