The payoff for a prestigious college degree is smaller than you think

College Search & Selection
1022

If I search for the Amazon + job title includes word “intern” on linked in, I get the following schools most represented. U Alabama did have a non-zero amount, but was nowhere near the schools listed below, which are all publics, in a variety of states.

  1. U Berkeley – 80
  2. U Michigan – 50
  3. U Washington – 45
  4. Georgia Tech – 40
  5. U Illinois – 30

If I control for location, then a pattern becomes more clear. For example, at Amazon intern + state of CA, the results were all colleges in CA, as listed below. Note that this list is extremely similar to the one for Google’s Silicon Valley location.

  1. Berkeley
  2. UCLA
  3. Stanford
  4. UCSD
  5. USC

If I instead search for Amazon intern + NYC, then the results were all colleges in the NY/NJ area, as listed below:

  1. Rutgers
  2. Rutgers
  3. Cornell
  4. NYU
  5. Columbia

I don’t think the takeaway from this is Amazon only hires from “prestigious” colleges or seems to be really big on prestige.

2 Likes
1023

If you look at LinkedIn’s guidance, individuals with Google listed as an active employer will appear as associated with the entity.

Per their page, there are 260,000 employees.

Not sure how your search and my search are different, but if you agree that the link I attached shows 260k, and that there are 150K, then it’s likely there are people out there associating themselves to Google currently who would not generally be classified as employees (per someone’s point earlier).

1024

Amazon hires from all kinds of places. But they also happened to hire 300 from UCB this summer into just Seattle – about 20% of the class in Seattle. So you can make what you will of that piece of information. The 80 number you have from Linkedin is incorrect. Not every kid has a linkedin.

1025

This is a sum of 5 companies including YouTube, Capital G, etc. I was only listing employees for Google, which is the stated 157k.

1026

I have no doubt that the topic will come up again in the future, and likely debated by the same people. But since this 2 year old thread had basically become a conversation with a handful of people engaging in OT stream of consciousness, I think it’s time to close.

4 Likes