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Comment by grimberg | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar situation less a local top-10 local university. I could go locally and walk out debt-free (actually ended up about $10k positive) or go to a better university (Illinois or Georgia Tech) and walk out with ~100k in debt. A bunch of very sharp people of modest means stayed local. Those that didn't had parents taking second mortgages to help pay.

Suffice to say, I went local and things worked out in the end. I calculated that now, with a top job, I would have broken even in about two years. The only open question is if it will impact my future career prospects.

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Do you think going to a better college would have made much of a difference in job opportunities? It seems like some of the larger tech companies do a lot of recruiting at state colleges.

[Anecdote] Here in Boston Microsoft built an entire office just to offer a great internship program (Foundry, now Microsoft Garage) to Harvard and MIT students. I think on average recruiters view top tier schools as places where your ROI for headhunting is higher, because more prospects are more likely to make it through the recruiting process -- but that's just a hunch.

That's true I guess. I did transfer from a really small college to a big state school with a decent cs program. It's not a top college, but we do get a ton of money for research. And I did notice a huge difference in opportunities.

But I don't see going here as being drastically worse than a better school. I've gotten interviews at a bunch of places, and every summer I have classmates that intern at highly competitive companies like Google/MS/Amazon/Palantir. I don't know some of what I'm missing because I'm not at Harvard or MIT but I don't know how my school would be a negative at most places.

> But I don't see going here as being drastically worse than a better school.

Honestly I'd be surprised if there are radical differences in how prepared you are for industry coming out of undergrad from Harvard, MIT, or an average state school because tech is much more of a meritocracy than a lot of other career paths, and because their undergrad programs are notably underwhelming (while their graduate programs are phenomenal).

I think recruiters see top-tier college graduates as one of two things. Either they come from a good school so they must know their stuff so they must be able to pass (making the recruiter's ROI more secure) or they come from a good school so they know how to play the acceptance game, and their pedigree alone will legitimize our program by association (our internship program hosted 3 MIT students, 5 Stanford students, etc etc). I don't agree with either of these metrics, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were common thoughts among recruiters.

> I don't know some of what I'm missing because I'm not at Harvard or MIT but I don't know how my school would be a negative at most places.

I think if you were in a field other than tech or were relying on your academics alone you'd notice how easy it is to get that first phone interview. As is, I don't think it ultimately makes much of a difference. Also, your alma mater creates your post-graduate immediate network. Getting in touch with a "fellow" Stanford graduate is probably more valuable than your average state school graduate depending on the industry. However, I believe that if you were to do research at these top-tier places you'd notice a huge boost from being at a university that gets huge endowments and talented professors. That's the one other exception (to me).

Note: I don't mean that Stanford students are smarter or more capable than state school students, only that the association of getting into a high pedigree high cost school probably means your peers are well connected and/or wealthy. Maybe that's not a fair assumption.

Yes. A top tier college will get you out in front of more employers. I did my undergrad at a lower tier state commuter school, and I got my master's at a top 10 school in CS. It's night and day difference in how recruiters will treat you.

I would tentatively add a caveat to that.

> A top tier college will get you out in front of more employers...

...when you don't have anything more impressive than your college choice on your resume.

Harvard students will always beat out comparable state school students to get that Microsoft phone interview. But they won't always beat out the student who ran a full-scale web app after sophomore year to help students plan courses if they don't have comparable experience. Another thing I love about tech is as many strings as you can pull to get that initial phone interview, you're on your own from there. In my experience I've done general website applications and called up friends of friends and once you're staring at a whiteboard it makes no difference who you know or where you came from.

The two part related problem to this is a recruiting one. If you use a resume as a litmus test for "smart programmers" as opposed to those faking it, you're undoubtably going to get a bunch of people who went to the best possible schools. This also means you wind up with a lot of candidates who had the means to go to really good schools. Maybe there's someone just as smart at your local state school who couldn't afford CMU who would bring a completely different mindset and style of thinking, but you'll never find them.

>If you use a resume as a litmus test for "smart programmers" as opposed to those faking it, you're undoubtably going to get a bunch of people who went to the best possible schools.

Yes, and that's exactly what happens at the most desirable companies.

>Maybe there's someone just as smart at your local state school who couldn't afford CMU who would bring a completely different mindset and style of thinking, but you'll never find them.

If you're really a stand-out, IQ-wise, you can go to the top tier schools even if you have no money. The people who get screwed are the people who are pretty smart but not exceptionally so.

I'd wager there are more people who have snuck into top-tier universities than there are people who are there without paying/accruing massive debt. This is also ignoring the fact that Ivies and other top-tier universities are overwhelming homogenous.

More to the point, the thing everyone in a top-10 school has in common is that they're really good at looking good on paper. It says near nothing about what they'll contribute on a team, how they'll function with other people, or base programming skill. My only point is that if a company seeks diversity, they should seek it in all avenues.

>I'd wager there are more people who have snuck into top-tier universities than there are people who are there without paying/accruing massive debt.

Probably. The people who go without paying are pretty desirable from the university's point of view.

>This is also ignoring the fact that Ivies and other top-tier universities are overwhelming homogenous.

I'm not a worshiper of diversity for its own sake. The benefits seem pretty theoretical, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest homogeneous populations function better.

>More to the point, the thing everyone in a top-10 school has in common is that they're really good at looking good on paper.

Being able to do things well on paper is pretty important in 21st century US. It's also important to hire people who can figure out what your customers (internal and external) want and put it on paper in a way that will make the sale.

>It says near nothing about what they'll contribute on a team, how they'll function with other people, or base programming skill.

That's all true. The problem is we don't really have any way to get a good picture that kind of stuff outside of hiring everyone and culling the ones we don't want. Pretty much every applicant to an ivy league school lists a nonprofit on their application these days, and 99% of them are bullshit.

>My only point is that if a company seeks diversity, they should seek it in all avenues.

I suppose, if that's your goal. Were I running a company I'd be mostly focused on profitability.

I think maybe we just have an idealogical difference of opinion here, and that's fine.

It's my belief that if you take 10 similar people and give them a problem to solve, they'll all solve it the same way. Whereas if you take 10 different people and give them a problem to solve, they'll each individually be challenged to think differently and question their assumptions. If I ran a company I'd prefer the latter, because intuition tells me it will lead to the best answers (people questioning their opinions means thinking through whether they're as well founded as they hope, and teases out the problems with those opinions).

I think this innovation goes hand in hand with profitability. I'm not saying I wouldn't pick the creative driven innovative Harvard grad every time -- I'm saying I'd pick the creative driven innovative community college grad every time over the Harvard grad with the same background as everyone else in the company.

> Being able to do things well on paper is pretty important in 21st century US.

Except when it comes time to actually do work, it's not. The overlap in relevant skills between convincing people you're a good engineer and being a good engineer is very small. One is mostly about leveraging your background and social engineering, the other is about how you solve problems. While one could argue that being good on paper is good indicator of drive, I'd counter that a candidate with drive but without skills is less preferable than a candidate with skills.

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