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Eh, competition, in general, makes you work harder. At more prestigious universities for CS there’s a ton of competition and to do well, you need to know more. Hence, you’re forced to learn more. Obviously, there’s people at lesser known universities who learn equally as much; I’m not disagreeing.</p>
<p>There are numerous studies that look at the original poster’s question. An example is the one at <a href=“http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0002.pdf[/url]”>http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0002.pdf</a> . It found a large lifetime difference in earnings based on the college’s ranking group (see study for definition of “ranking group”). Colleges were included in a wide variety of locations, which greatly reduces the effects of location differences. The author concluded that 2/3 to 3/4 of the lifetime salary difference between school ranking related to the academic strength of the individual, rather than the school name. That is if a student got accepted to MIT and Stanford, but chose to go to a much less prestigious school where he had a full ride scholarship instead, then he’d be expected to recover the majority of the difference in career earnings between the colleges, but the remaining difference in lifetime earnings would still be expected to be more than the inflation adjusted savings from the scholarship.</p>
<p>When I first applied to companies after graduating from Stanford with engineering degrees, I felt like the name of the school had a big effect on whether my resume passed the first level to move on to interviews and a significant effect on whether I was offered a quality job after the interviews (far less effect than the ability to get offered an interview from the resume).</p>
<p>Ho boy, an empirical study! I’m always cautious about studies even when on the surface they appear impressive. A quick glance at the report shows that the author does not distinguish between engineering, business and liberal arts. Are the conclusions valid for each area of study independently? I don’t know.</p>
<p>The study is questionable. </p>
<p>What are the hours of these Stanford/MIT graduates? Clearly your earning are going to be higher if they hour are longer. What jobs were they working in? Were the lifetime earning soley from their engineering job or did they have outside sources? </p>
<p>So many factors…</p>
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<p>Looking at through the open courseware for MIT, I compared its curriculum to Michigan’s CS program. In the first year, MIT covers a great deal of material that Michigan students do not.</p>
<p>Could you list some things that are covered by MIT’s undergrad curriculum that are missing from Michigans?</p>
<p>Not really missing, it’s just that MIT is courses are at a faster pace, take the intro to programming for example</p>
<p>All of these so-called viable “studies” and stats seem to assume the same thing…that an engineer is going to stay with the same company for years and years and not deviate too much in expertise.</p>
<p>I work in the era (and mindset) of hired mercenaries. We basically learn the “hottest thing (technology) on the streets” and go work for the highest bidder until some higher bidder and/or some “next big thing (technology)” comes out to start making money on.</p>
<p>For most jobs in software engineering, it really doesn’t matter if MIT or GaTech or Stanford or any other school has courses at a faster pace or teach more to their CS grads than other schools…IF…most of the companies are NOT going to use that “extra” that was taught anyway.</p>
<p>Most software jobs center around the manipulation, distribution and storage/retrieval of DATA. One could relate “manipulation of data” with programming, “distribution of data” with networks and “storage/retrieval of data” with databases. While the Stanford/MIT grads will be hired to more “think tank” type of employers, those employers are very few compared to the rest of the “hired mercenary companies”. While that Stanford/MIT grad is on their 10th year at the company that hired them out of school, the software engineer WITH THE MERCENARY MINDSET is on their 2nd or 3rd employer and has received the jumps in pay for 1) switching employers and 2) acquiring the latest technology as a skill-set.</p>
<p>The mercenary-mindset engineer is the one who will set up a 4-node Hadoop cluster in the basement/mancave while reading the latest professional books on the technology (using something like Safari Books Online) and get ready to get proficient in new technologies so they can ace the next interview…and get that new increase in pay too.</p>
<p>Yes, getting into a great school is ideal but there is WHOLE area of “playing the game in the industry and knowing the system” that involves much more than your undergrad degree.</p>
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I am not aware of any study that assumed this. Anyone who is seen the published median years of tenure knows that American employees typically stay at jobs for a few years, rather than their full career.</p>
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I agree with most of this statement. While there are exceptions, most graduates only use a small portion of what they covered in classes. On paper my job requires a masters and encourages a PhD. However, I probably have used less than 10% of what I learned in my tech classes, unless you count things like general problem solving. One of the most helpful engineers I have worked with did not have a college degree at all. It’s primarily experience learned in the workforce. That said the degree name usually helps in getting hired, particularly on your first jobs before you have much work experience. I say “usually” because it can also hurt you, if your GPA would have been a lot higher, had you attended a different school. </p>
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All data I have seen contradicts this. The difference between average salary of highly ranked schools and less highly ranked school increases over career length. Stanford (and probably MIT as well) encourages grads to be innovative thinkers rather than just restricting themselves to the the traditional career path you implied. Many tech grads I know have worked at well known companies, which you might call “think tanks,” such as Google or Microsoft. However, there are also others who have done completely untraditional things, like starting a unique company or focusing on bettering the world instead of how they can get the biggest salary increase. Overall ~70,000 active companies were started by alumni, employing over 5 million persons.</p>
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<p>Agreed. I am responding to the countless posts that seem to suggest that folks feel that “if I don’t get into this specific school and get hired at this specific company right at age 22…then I will always be behind”.</p>
<p>This is the USA, the are countless paths.</p>
<p>Plus, it is computer science and software. The industry that hires the most folks with majors not in its “default” major. The industry that really doesn’t keep everything “linear and step-by-step” (as far as career progression). I have buddies in the accounting, finance and marketing industries and I they tell me that “What was your B-School?” still comes up 10 and 15 years later.</p>
<p>I give them one of my examples of the NSA contractor who did 2 years at Anne Arundel Community College, 2 years at U-Maryland Baltimore County (not College Park) and bills NSA at $150/hour…would that happen in your industry?</p>
<p>…and each of my business/finance friends say “Ummm…very slim chance”.</p>
<p>Also, I like responding to the posts about folks would want to take the already crowded path. Some like to make their mark knowing that the had to compete, compete, compete.</p>
<p>Me?..I rather learn something new and hot and not many people are into…then cash in…and you don’t have to be super-duper expert. I always figured…that merchant is not going to care as long as that credit-card swipes approved.</p>
<p>What do you guys think about the practicality of computational linguistics?</p>
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<p>This is a very good example. </p>
<p>Generally speaking, the defense and aerospace industries are much more well-rounded than other industries in terms of the types of schools represented (especially the non-contractor government organizations). And honestly, that’s a great thing. Where I work, we have engineers and scientists from MIT, Iowa State, Montana, Embry Riddle, Harvey Mudd, Cal State Long Beach, UCLA, you name it… it’s a truly spectacular work environment, and because of the diversity, you get diverse ideas, from people with different backgrounds, seeing things from different perspectives.</p>
<p>Having had the experiences I’ve had, I could never work for companies like Google, Apple, or Microsoft, that hire heavily from elite schools, if for nothing other than the lack of diversity. It’s a big deal… but this is something most high school students and even college students don’t understand yet because they haven’t started working.</p>
<p>Computational Linguistics is cool if you get a job with a Nuance type company… Most of our products are voice rec and text to speech enabled and yet we don’t have anyone doing computational linguistics. We let the vendor de jour worry about it.</p>
<p>Turbo: UCLA’s major “linguistics and computer science” would be similar to computational linguistics right?</p>
<p>And how’s the job outlook?</p>
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<p>Why do people assume that the big well known name companies are the most school-elitist? Indeed, their large size probably causes them to recruit a lot more widely than smaller companies (both because they can with more recruiting resources, and because they have to in order to get the numbers of employees needed).</p>
<p>Indeed, it is not uncommon on these forums for boosters of less well known schools to mention GAFAM recruiting at such schools, indicating that GAFAM companies recruit in a lot more places than most people here seem to expect.</p>
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<p>You are absolutely correct. Most of the big companies do cast a wider net. This is especially true in the aerospace and defense industries. Companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, and even DoD organizations and Government Labs, hire from a wide range of schools, from top 10’s to 4th tier state schools. The distribution is pretty uniform as well.</p>
<p>Even companies like SpaceX, which is pretty much the rockstar of the aerospace industry at the moment (akin to Facebook, Google, etc) hires from a wider range of schools than you might think, and with great success. </p>
<p>But for some reason or another, the commercial tech industry powerhouses (GAFAM) seem intent on hiring heavily from elite schools. I’m not entirely sure why though… it could be that these companies have a [higher</a> than normal percentage of elite school grads at the very top](<a href=“Google - About Google, Our Culture & Company News”>Google - About Google, Our Culture & Company News), creating an atmosphere of hypercompetitiveness. It could be that these companies just happen to be located in areas with elite schools nearby which happen to have great CS/EE/CE programs (i.e. bay area/silicon valley). It could be that the CE/EE/CS market is saturated and that only “the best” make it in to the “desirable” companies. More than likely, it’s a combination of all the above.</p>
<p>It has been commented before that the top software developers may be more than an order of magnitude more productive than the worst. (e.g. [Coding</a> Horror: Skill Disparities in Programming](<a href=“http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/skill-disparities-in-programming.html]Coding”>http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/09/skill-disparities-in-programming.html) ).</p>
<p>The preponderance of people from “top CS schools” may be more due to high hiring standards. For example, a company might recruit everywhere, but a greater percentage of recruits from “top CS schools” will pass the various technical interviews than those at other schools. But this may be more of a selection effect than a treatment effect of the “top CS schools”, which likely get a higher percentage of students who will be high-productivity at programming than other schools.</p>
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<p>FYI, all of these schools recruit heavily from Michigan (it seems like Apple less so, but the other 4 definitely recruit very heavily here).</p>
<p>LinkedIn has a function to check what colleges employees of a specific company attended. Most of the companies mentioned have a good mix of schools, include less “elite” schools. For example, Apple has more employees on LinkedIn who attended San Jose State than any other school. If I search for job titles that contain the word “Engineer” Sat Jose State drops to #2.</p>
<p>Top 3 schools for some companies are below (with the word “engineer”):</p>
<p>Apple
<p>Microsoft
<p>Google (the top 5 match the top 5 US news report grad school CS rankings, when sorted by ranking, then distance)
<p>Lockheed Martin (to compare with defense and aerospace industry)
<p>^are those graduate students? Or undergraduates.</p>