<p>Entrepreneurs aside, you’re likely to be able to network with alumni who work for good companies, and you’ll have an advantage there when you’re looking for a job.</p>
<p>I have to disagree with the networking comment as a reason why top tier schools are automatically superior to (not surprisingly) USNWR lower ranked schools. If Harvard grads are the only people to have access to the network of Harvard alumns, then by that logic someone from Stanford will never have access to those possibilities. While I highly question the accuracy (or actual effect) of the 90% of jobs claim, experience should make much more of a difference than where you graduated from.</p>
<p>This is not to say Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT don’t have great CompSci programs - just that out of the hundreds of other colleges that offer degrees that teach the same material, you can have the same potential to learn and perfect the trade. As an employer, I would almost assuredly prefer someone from Podunk U who is fluent in the same coding languages as a UCB/Stanford/MIT, but has an internship or two, maybe even a co-op, some research, and took the time to really get to know some professors (that last point isn’t necessarily impossible at “high ranked” places, but not everyone that goes to those places does that). College is what you make of it, not just where you go.</p>
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<p>First off, I never said that networks were completely exclusive. School ties are obviously not the only way to build a network, and I never said that they were.</p>
<p>What I am saying is that school ties are one of the most powerful ways to build ties. Like I said in my previous post, it is quite undeniable that a lot of career moves happen through networking that is fostered by school ties. Again, consider how the founders and many of the early employees of Google all “coincidentally” happened to come from Stanford, or how the founders and many of the early employees of Facebook alll came from Harvard. </p>
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<p>Pick up any job-advice book or go to any job-advice website and inevitably they will tell you how important it is to use your network. Extensive academic literature has also been written about the importance of social networks in fostering job mobility and business success. To give you just one quote, from Elliott (2001) of the paper “Referral Hiring and Ethnically Homogeneous Jobs: How Prevalent Is the Connection and for Whom?” in the journal Social Science Research, and which gives you several other references which you are free to read yourself.</p>
<p>*“…answers to the distribution question focus on the salience of social
networks for finding employment (Aponte, 1996; Cohn and Fossett, 1996; Elliott, 1999, 2000; Kasinitz and Rosenberg, 1996; Sassen, 1995; Waldinger, 1997). Instead of emphasizing well-documented declines in blue-collar jobs, a social network approach highlights the functions that personal contacts play in the labor market. These functions are essentially twofold. At the most basic level, contacts can provide job seekers with timely information about employment opportunities that may not be widely or publically known. Second, contacts can refer, or sponsor, job seekers, thereby improving their odds of acquiring particular positions. This second function is especially relevant in cases in which the contact is already working for the prospective employer.”</p>
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<p>We can say whatever we want about what should happen. But that’s not relevant. What is relevant is what does happen, and like it or not, experience often times does not matter as much as where you graduated from.</p>
<p>Consider this quote from Fortune</p>
<p>*For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon–America’s top engineering schools–even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. “If you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, they don’t want you,” says an employee. *</p>
<p><a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm</a></p>
<p>Interesting quote sakky. Page went to Michigan undergrad and is a big booster of the school. This sounds like typical elitist talk, the kind i would expect to hear from a magazine called Fortune.</p>
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<p>Interesting indeed… particularly in how Page didn’t found Google (or any other successful company for that matter) until he met Brin at Stanford. Furthermore, most of the original Google engineering design team consisted of Brin and Page’s Stanford buddies, not guys from Page’s old days at Michigan. Like I said, interesting.</p>
<p>But don’t just take the Google story as gospel. Just count the number of successful tech startups that have come out of Stanford. Then do the same for Michigan. You tell me what that means.</p>
<p>Interesting quote, sakky… but to be fair, I’d like to add that its not impossible to get a job at Google, or similar, without a degree from such prestigious institutions. Though it may be much much harder.
Google holds info sessions at my school, which is well-ranked but its definitely not “a top engineering school,” and just last year they hired a CS major. He was easily one of the best, however.
I think that the prestige of these schools really shines in the business/banking sector as sakky has mentioned in countless other posts.</p>
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<p>Google has clearly become less ‘elitist’ (if that is the right word) over the last few years, for several reasons. First off, that article I cited was published in 2003, which, crucially, was before the 2004 IPO, and getting into Google in the pre-IPO days would have basically meant becoming an instant millionaire on IPO day, and everybody knew it. But you probably won’t get rich by joining Google now. Hence, for that one reason alone, clearly Google is not as desirable of a place to work as it used to be.</p>
<p>Secondly, the fact is, Google couldn’t be as selective as it used to be even if it wanted to be, simply because of the Law of Large Numbers. Google has been growing its employee base so quickly (now nearly 17k employees) that it has to be less selective. As a case in point, I was talking to a guy who served a summer internship at Google and he said that Google actually offers an inhouse software application to its employees that calculates your seniority (basically, how much more time you have over others) within the company. By the time his summer internship ended - hence, with just three months of time at Google - he already had greater seniority than a full 13% of the employees. In other words, on the day his internship ended, 13% of the employees at Google had been hired only after his internship had started. One of the guys he worked with, who had only been in Google for a few years, was already considered to be one of the “old men” of the company. Google’s appetite for hiring has been nothing less than voracious. </p>
<p>If there is one company that has now replaced Google as the ‘cool tech employer of choice’, it’s now almost certainly Facebook. A lot of tech cognoscenti - including many of Google’s best people - are now working for Facebook, and I have heard of some even saying that what attracted them is that the Facebook working environment is what Google used to be. Plus, of course, there is the considerable attraction of getting in on the ground floor of a white-hot pre-IPO company. Facebook’s hiring is, if anything, just as elitist as any elite consulting or banking firm. Just try getting an offer from Facebook coming from a low-ranked school, see how well you do.</p>