“I don’t doubt that many quality SV companies recruit at GeorgiaTech, but most students do not seem to work for them, which I suspect is primarily by choice.”
Agree, my point though wasn’t on comparing CA vs GA for the GT grads, it was more on GT being a targeted school over some of the colleges discussed on this thread.
The title of the thread is payoff for prestige. I believe GT is considered prestigious in the CS space. No need to say much more.
Maybe others think it’s elite but your posts indicate you do not think it’s elite. The posts going back and forth with data10 on salary differences and that you think Brown grads could easily get a job in Atlanta, over ostensibly GT grads shows that as well. Put another way, if you thought GT was elite, you would have looked at the salary data another way and not gone back and forth, but you wanted to get across the superiority of Brown CS grads. It’s ok btw to think that GT is not elite.
Hardly what I said or think so no response forthcoming beyond that I suspect I am better positioned to say what I think then you are.
Thought for sure this thread would resolve the “is it worth it” debate once and for all. Though last few pages of posts is dimming that hope significantly. Maybe the next thread on the subject will get us there? 
Guess what- employers don’t generally think in terms of “elite” or “non-elite”. A U is either a core school or it’s not. And the list of core schools (typically where back pre-covid we’d have sent an interview team, have sent a group to do a presentation in early Fall, i.e. expend a lot of resources) is a school we’ve hired from in the past, have had great results (not just meeting strong candidates- but offers extended, offers accepted/denied, what the staying power of those new hires tracks to after one year, two year), etc.
Core schools don’t get removed from the list because someone arbitrarily decides they are not “elite”. They get removed when we have a couple of bad recruiting cycles there; they get removed when we can’t fill the interview slots with tippy top/best fit candidates so we need to dig deeper into the class.
And non-core schools don’t magically become a core school just because a magazine deems it “elite”. And there are plenty of colleges where certain programs are considered top notch, and others are not.
Thankfully, employers are not as prestige obsessed as your typical CC parent – otherwise how would most kids ever find a job!
Exactly. I worked for a large consumer products company which needed paper experts for packaging, shipping, etc. We LOVED University of Maine (company had no operations in Maine). In the world of cardboard/containers, U Maine is “prestigious” (we never called it that; it was just the best program in the country and everyone knew it).
This is generally correct in a way, and incorrect in a way. If companies did not care at all, then most universities would be uniformly represented at an employer. Instead we see strong preferences for particular schools. Even if you say that it is because of the quality of students coming out of that school, you are just saying that that particular school has prestige in that area. Take Google for example – a desirable employer. Please look at the schools that send people to Google.
A handful of universities are significantly overrepresented. This is not to say that you won’t get a job if you went to school at a place that is outside of this list. But it is likely not a target school at Google. A hiring manager at Google would think twice at looking at a candidate outside of this list because it takes effort to vet candidates. Hiring is a very time intensive process. So you do have “prestige” of universities considered at various businesses. It is a fact of life. Prestige will go down as a factor when the total effort at hiring someone (and firing them if they don’t work out) becomes painless.
Not everyone aspires to work at Google . . . or Apple or Facebook or whatever the tech darling is of the moment. Sure, those companies hire many folks from a limited list of schools, but that isn’t true of all companies. Much of hiring is regional and many schools that place their graduates in good, well paying jobs are places that get little attention on CC. Yes, if you want FAANG or MBB or investment banking it will be easier from “prestigious” schools but not every student is looking for that and, what’s more, not every graduate of a “prestigious” school will go on to be Uber-successful and make pots and pots of money.
There is absolutely nothing to disagree with any of that 
I believe that is a list of the colleges hat the 157,000 people who report currently working for Google on LinkedIn attended. The vast majority of these are 157k persons are experienced employees who have been out of college for a long time. I think it’s a stretch to assume from this information that Google is going to think twice about a highly qualified candidate who has relevant experience doing something similar to the desired job because he took a SUNY Excelsior scholarship to save money, or similar.
That said, looking at LinkedIn for the Silicon Valley Google location employees with job title “software engineer” were most likely to be alumni from the following colleges. I don’t think this list tells us much about Google’s hiring process ,particularly for new grads since most of the persons on LinkedIn have been out of college for a long time, and probably did not start at Google.
Largest Number of Alumni who are Google Software Engineers on LinkedIn
1 . Berkeley / CMU (tie due lo lack of precision) - ~1000
3. Stanford ~1000
4. USC ~600
5. UCSD ~500
6. Tsinghua – ~500
7. UCLA ~500
…
UIUC – 400
…
UT Austin – 300
MIT – 300
…
San Jose State ~200
NYU ~200
…
Brown ~100
Harvard ~100
Perhaps more telling is what Google hiring managers say about Google’s hiring process. For example the senior VP of People Operations at Google who says he has been involved in hiring thousands of persons for Google says the following in the interview at Google doesn't care where you went to college Consistent with this, Google recruits for desirable positions and participates at career fairs at a wide variety of colleges, not just ones that are considered “prestigious” on this forum.
"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.
“What we find is the best people from places like that are just as good if not better as anybody you can get from any Ivy League school,” said Bock,"
I’m not sure about the seniority of employees on LinkedIn. Why would they be experienced? I’ve assumed that most students have LinkedIn profiles while still in college and maintain they as they transition into the work force. I’ve always wondered why we don’t see more of a distribution at GOOG or any other large employers.
While GOOG May cast a wide net does that necessarily mean that certain schools will not be over represented in their work force?
157k persons on LinkedIn say they are currently employees of Google. Google usually hires under 10k employees per year. Assuming the vast majority are not lying, most of those 157k are not among the <10k hires per year.
In my personal and professional experience, it’s extremely common for tech employees who are not actively looking for a job to maintain a profile on LinkedIn. This is probably more true for SV tech companies like Google, which tend to have a high turn over rate… with most employees leaving and switching to a different company within a few years.
Sounds right. But why don’t we see more colleges represented at Google or any company? If you survey LinkedIn for SWE types at any large company certain schools seem over represented.
This past summer, Amazon had some 300 SWE interns from just UC Berkeley in just their Seattle office out of some 1500. We can be certain they don’t have 300 interns from U Alabama. Seemingly not all schools are the same, for whatever reason.
You cannot look at only half of the equation if you are trying to discern if any university has an employment advantage. Just looking at the hires only provides the numerator. You need to look at the applicants from each school as well. UCB placing 300 successful hires out of 1,000 applicants is a different story than 300/500. An even finer measure would be the “acceptance rate” by job description and degree required.
The 300 number is out of some 3000 total size of the CS cohort. Not every one applies because they’d like to other companies as well. These are sophomores and juniors together. Someone from U Alabama wouldn’t even apply, because the odds of their resume getting picked up and called is de minimis. For amazon, even if 300 out of 1000 applicants get in from UCB, most other schools would think those are good numbers. I don’t know the number of applicants. I suspect it is not a 1000. It would be less. We make do with what data we have to make reasonable inferences.
260,266 people as of this moment are listed as active employees of Google on LinkedIn. The last financial submission for Alphabet stated they had 150,028 employees.
Meta (FB) has 155,212 LinkedIn employees, and 68,177 per their financials.
I would think that Universities have a fair understanding of where their students are going to work upon graduation, but attempting to align that information back to other, primarily self-reported data about salary, isn’t very reliable. In similar schools, an individual student is likely to have very similar outcomes.
Making decisions on reported money and headcount is a bit silly. Something as innocent as an alum in HR leaving a firm could dramatically impact the numbers, especially 4 years from now.
If you search for persons who list their current employer as Google, the total is instead 157k persons as listed in my earlier post. This is more consistent with Alphabet’s 150k employees. I suspect most of the extra relate to past employees who have not updated their LinkedIn profile, but some are also likely being untruthful.
