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Comment by is_it_worth_it_ | Hacker News Reader

College degree matters way more than people like to admit. It matters in tech. If you get hired at google out of CMU, you are going to work in a better group with higher salary than a state school grad. Most elite finance jobs require a top degree, as do consulting, and business development/strategy groups at large companies. Any sort of investing job requires a good pedigree. Such a myth to pretend otherwise. Ofcourse there are outliers, but by and large top jobs go to top degrees, regardless of who is better than who.

I should make it clear im talking about jobs that pay 300k+. Below that and it isnt a highly selective enough for top pedigree to be such a huge deal.

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That may be true immediately out of college. But if you go to a state school, do well, work in industry for a few years, then apply to Google, you may be just as well off, and paid just as well without the student loans from an expensive school. (I graduated from Kent State with no loans in 2004, and now work for an Alphabet company.)

Sure, if you would have to take out loans to go to a top school, go to your state school. But many students don't have to take out loans (finaid?), and for them the elite schools are a better choice if they can get in.

What are you basing that on though? The article looked at "7,300 college graduates 10 years after graduation" and found that:

> For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

I know a good amount about the tech scene in nyc. It works like this, you can get paid a bunch by google or fb, maybe amazon. Sure if you make it in as a state school college grad you get paid. But developers in finance working on the actual trading models who make 300k+ almost exclusively went to top schools. Look at a front office development team at any quant fund.

The guys working at quant funds tend to have ph.d.s, in my experience. Some are certainly from state schools (UT Austin).

Right, but a phd is a different case than a bachelors. UT Austin is also a solid school.

Anecdotally, I am currently an undergraduate in a top 10 CS department and I have several friends who have $160k+ job offers straight out of undergrad at quant firms.

UT Austin has a top 10 CS program.

It's just below MIT/CMU/Stanford/Berkley. Typically just as well regarded as UW/Cornell/Princeton/UIUC/Georgia Tech/Caltech.

Dijkstra used to be the department chair in the 80s and early 90s.

Yeah. What makes STEM different is it's a lot easier to see who the productive people are. For MBAs in middle management at MegaCorp that's probably not the case, particularly since the people who went to more prestigious schools get started on a fast-track to upper management.

That's because computer science (programming jobs) is getting lumped in with biology jobs that pay half as much and the same everywhere you come from.

In the overall scheme of things, someone from SJ State who gets hired at Google is still doing better than most of the people out there regardless of school or major. Who cares if you're not in the Stanford/CMU/etc clique.

True but that guy probably got hired to shuffle data around, work on build systems, or A/B test the color of a button on a web page. He's not writing google's predictive advertising algorithms.

If you think that the University that you attended determines your job for the rest of your life, you deserve your fate.

I don't, I'm just saying a huge majority of elite high paying jobs are filled by top ten degrees.

Citation?

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