It sounds like you are controlling for size of student body. Stanford and Berkeley were the 2 top ranked colleges with the most company founders and most VC startup funding, but Stanford has a much smaller student body; so the average founders/funding per graduating student is higher.
There are some differences in major distribution, which partially relate to Stanford not restricting size of majors. If a large portion of students want to major in CS at Stanford, then Stanford lets the CS major grow as large as required to fit the students. Berkeley instead limits enrollment in the popular major, making admission more selective. Using some specific numbers form CDS:
CS + Eng + Eng Tech Majors â 38% Stanford, 22% Berkeley
However, more importantly ,there are other factors in which startups get funding beyond just brand name of college attended, so one can not assume that if Stanford averaged 90 founders per year and Berkeley averaged 85 founders per year, then that difference must entirely relate to the school name .
For example, maybe Stanfordâs admission process is more likely to favor students who have a successful Internet startup/website and are on their way to receive funding than Berkeleyâs admission process? Maybe Stanfordâs entrepreneurial culture, history, and bordering Sand Hill Road (like Wall Street for VCs) results in kids who are interested in startups being more likely to apply and attend? Maybe the location and culture gets kds thinking about startups and VCs that would not otherwise? Maybe Stanford gets a higher quality of students due to being more selective? Maybe Stanford kids tend to be wealthier, which gives them more flexibility to pursue a financially risky startup over a more stable job at a big company like Google?
I could go on, but the point is there are a lot of additional factors besides VCs being impressed by the brand name of the college, and many kids who donât attend elite privates are forming startups and getting funding, including kids from Berkeley among others.
I found this PDF to be very interesting, even if it is from 2012. Employers look for internships and experience first, then major. At the bottom of the list is college reputation. One could argue that internships come from attending top schools, but personal connections play a heavy role here too.
With a few exceptions (investment banking), I would imagine that this rings pretty true. As someone who has hired a variety of people, I look for experience, industry knowledge and personality fit over school. Sure, I am impressed by big college names on a resume, but not without the other criteria. If someone went to a HYPSM, and they had a bad personality, are disruptive to my team, or lacks knowledge or drive, Iâm not hiring them.
Wouldnât some students be in the position of having to choose between:
A college which is significantly below their admission credentials (an admission safety) because it offered them a large enough merit scholarship to make it affordable, or
A college which is a match or reach for their admission credentials, but is expensive enough to require large debt?
Seems like both of these could be unsatisfying colleges, although the large debt could be unsatisfying for long after the student graduates from college (or has to drop out because they ran out of money and (cosigned) borrowing capacity).
I canât comment on other schools but I can attest to the startup culture and VC exposure at Stanford. Startup discussions/ideas/proposals are always hot topics at Stanford, and our S loved to hang out around the Stanford GSB area to discuss all things startup. Our son met with numerous VCs at each of his industry attended poster sessions while at Stanford. His current position with a SV unicorn actually started with a discussion he had with a VC at one of his poster sessions. The VC brought him in to start discussions with the startup ultimately resulting in a very substantial offer.
Yes, it can get tricky for some, but if they have a 1300+ SAT score and need financial aid there are usually decent options pending what major they are looking for. In our area, true financial need is usually a given. We donât get many parents who make a bit, but donât save a thing for college.
The kids who get 1000-1100 on the SAT will have a tougher time with finances.
What you described sounds like the VC made an introduction to the startup (which the VC may have sponsored) so its offer to your son is better than what he would have received by himself. Am I correct?
I donât know if the offer would have been better or not. My main point was that the large VC presence in SV makes many types of opportunities possible.
Iâm not sure if ROI is even used by the majority of families making financial decisions around college. Itâs just can we afford the school or not, at least for the first year.
âSo, my recommendations are â donât chase âelitesâ, but rather understand your goals and constraints â it will all be OK.â
Interesting, given your list of colleges, Stanford, MIT, CMU, even the public colleges - GT et al would be considered elite for engineering/CS, thatâs a whole lot elite chasing there. What were the non-elite colleges on the application list? Saying it came down to MIT and Stanford but donât chase elites is a little ironic, if not hypocritical.
Not at all. The list was developed by a high school junior based on his criteria knowing that he did not need to consider cost:
Academics. He looked for CS programs that the most depth in AI and Machine learning for undergrad students.
Research. He looked for the number of AI/ML focused research labs at each college.
Startup Orientation. He looked for colleges with a strong startup culture located in areas with vibrant VC activity.
With those as criteria, I think his list was pretty good. Did he leave any off the list? Maybe. Looking back would I encourage him to consider other schools? Nope.
Youâre right that most families donât look at college decisions in terms of ROI. My point is that ROI for a college education canât even be properly estimated by the most sophisticated investors. Thereâre just too many variables and each student is just too distintive to appropriately quantify the return over the span of her/his career.
I donât ski. Never have. It looks like zooming down a mountain in the snow. I have a neighbor who tells me that âthey break the bankâ every year to go to Park City, Aspen, one year a tony place in Switzerland.
I donât try and explain to her that both the experience AND the outcome would be the same by trundling up the interstate to a local mountain which sells day passes for $40 (at least thatâs what the billboard says, Iâm sure you can get it cheaper). For sure the outcome is the same- a day on the mountain going up and down. And the ROI? Wow. No airfare, no hotels. And Iâm certainly not going to insult her by telling her that sheâs delusional thinking that the experience is the same. Experience is somewhat subjective anyway.
So do you see why itâs insulting to be told that the ROI for a prestigious college isnât what I think it is (I never calculated it nor did I care), the outcomes are the same as if my kids had gone to our flagship (which didnât even have a department in the subject one kid studied, but OK), AND the experience is for sure identical, the same, âalmost the sameâ, etc.
What standing do I have telling someone who values skiing- presumably the entire experience- so much so that once a year she spends gobs of money doing it, that she should just ski local and bank the cash? No standing.
Thatâs why it gets insulting to be repeatedly told that itâs a delusion to think that there is something of value going to college X instead of (fill in the blank). If YOU donât value it to the tune of whatever it was going to cost your family- great. Find a less expensive option. But the endless analysis to âproveâ that U Chicago or JHU or Williams is no better than UIUC or Maryland or U Mass⊠jeez. We get it. We know there are other things a family could be spending money on.
Iâm not into cars. I donât ski. I love my job so I donât want to retire. The years of thrift involved to pay for college were âworth itâ to me, and I donât need the endless regurgitation of Dale and Kreuger to show me how delusional I am.
I agree that youâre not delusional. It sounds like you know what you want, and presumably so do your kids. However, someone calculating it as monetary ROI who concluded they had to second-mortgage their house to send their kid to a private university, would probably be making a mistake. There are many other ways to maximize your lifetime income. Like the quote from Citizen Kane: âWell, itâs no trick to make a lot of money⊠if what you want to do is make a lot of money.â
I sometimes look at my own education and speculate when would have been the best time to leave school and start working just to optimize my financial reward. I canât say exactly when, but it would surely have been well before getting a PhD in computer science. My grad school was paid all the way including a masters degree, and I suspect that the best launching point would have been with a masters. A BS without any internships might have stranded me in junior positions. Still⊠just the time advantage would have made a huge difference in 401(k) savings so honestly who knows. I also missed out on a chunk of the first dot-com boom doing a postdoc.
I do know that I wanted to do original research and obtain a PhD. That was my primary reason. It had nothing to do with money. I started thinking about money when I no longer had engaging research to occupy me. Itâs a hobby like collecting the worldâs biggest ball of string in your garage. I donât need Harvard for that.
Funny you mention JHU and UMD. There were actually a lot of ties between those CS departments when I was a grad student. For grad school in CS, I think UMD College Park would probably be a stronger choice, or at least at the time Iâm thinking of. For an undergrad, itâs a different question entirely. I know biomedical engineering was a big major at JHU the time. Not sure about now (though these things rarely change fast). Just a different experience all around, and not worth measuring in a simple cost-benefit fashion.
Agree! Low income, went to Duke on pell grant and lots of other need based aid, because it was the same as UNC. Parents let me pick which one and I picked the one with the highest concentration of people like meânerdy, bright, intellectual, all that. As an in-state student I knew a lot about UNC and even with an honors program I still would not have fit in as much as at Duke. So I picked Duke. And was amazed to find SO many of âmy peopleâ thereâI had never experienced that in my life. And it was much much much harder than my public HS (where I was Val and had stats above Dukeâs (then)75th %ile), but the math indicates it was still easier to get out than to get in.
Now, as a full-pay parent, I definitely advocate for the schools that will have the best fit/likelihood of true friends for my nerdy kids. Even at a test-in prep school, my kids are too interested in learning and mocked maybe more than I was in my big public HS.
There were some good fits just outside the top 20 for one(she picked Duke anyway), but for the other, she is truly a different level of kid and will need the high percent intellectuals around her to fit in. It is going to be an interesting journey for that one. Would I feel differently or encourage a different decision if I were in the donut hole, too rich for much need based aid but too poor to write the checks (with some real but tolerable sacrifices)? Absolutely. I do not think it is easy to parse out the college preference and ideal fit from financial reality.
A BA/BS or MA/MS in CS would normally lead to starting in a junior position; advancement to higher level positions would be based on work experience. PhD in CS would mainly be helpful for research jobs (whether academic or industry), but not so much for other jobs.
I totally understand your point about the âwhenâ. I have an MBA which is overkill for the most part for the work I do (a Masterâs in psych or behavioral economics would be more useful). But it was a signaling device way back when (I had been a Classics major in college) and it still functions that way, to my absolute astonishment. I did not use my b-schoolâs alumni network, I have never attended an event, I donât âuseâ my connections for professional advancement. But since it confers some level of âBusiness Smarts Sitting at this meetingâ (which I do have- but thatâs from 35 years in corporate America, not from some operations research course I took) it was not a bad decision.
I HAVE calculated that ROI (many times, as I was paying off my loans, first the old fashioned way, aka monthly, and then accelerated before my second child was born). Those were the good old days- took me 14 months to finish a two year MBA, I tripled my salary AND moved to a lower cost of living city, and then the increases in salary came off the post-MBA comp. But for someone earning a higher BA/BS salary than I was, of course the math looks very different.
Sounds like youâve got a great post-retirement career ahead of you!
Agreed. The large corporate labs were mostly on the way out when I graduated. I have never had a âresearchâ position outside of academia, though I have had some nice âresearchyâ work at some smaller companies, mostly biotechs (it can be fun but also a little depressing if I donât think itâs adding value). I also think it helps my lateral mobility to be known as someone with a deep understanding of computer science. In terms of financial cost/benefit, though, I could not possibility argue for spending the time I spent in grad school. Itâs something I wanted to do and that still gives me a sense of accomplishment.
As an unquestionably nerdy kid, I really enjoyed going to a big state university. In fact this was after going to a prep school where I had not been very happy though it offered a great education and actually was more writing intensive than most of my college career.
Big public universities offer anonymity and autonomy. You could party all the time if you so choose and maybe still graduate. You could also spend the whole weekend at the library and absolutely nobody is going to notice or care. The independence was the exciting part. There are also enough people total, that you can find ones with interesting things to talk about, and they may feel under less pressure in their classes and have the time (or did way back when⊠I think everyone is stressed out now).
Itâs not for everyone, but I did want to make the point that some people may actually prefer a large state university even if they have other choices. This is not about ROI but personality fit.