Does it matter where you go to college?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is probably not just due to snobbery; it's much more likely for the admissions committee to have heard of your recommenders and such. If you do research with a famous professor at a non-elite school you'd probably have similar results, but the barrier is a bit higher.
Your social skills really matter in your life after college and it might help you paying your student debt.
I do remember an interesting flurry or articles from a study a couple of years ago suggesting it doesn't matter much where you go to college provided you major in STEM. From my limited observations and experience, I'd say that's true - I doubt a strong CS major from UCSD experiences any real disadvantage vis-a-vis more selective ivies, but an international relations major from Yale definitely has a leg up on securing those prestigious early career internships and positions.
It may not be an elite Yale or Stanford education, but most folks don't have that anyway.
For one: I don't think most families can pay the extra fees associated w/ going to an out of state school. Second: most states have at least one solid state school that has a relatively high acceptance rate for residents, third: students and parents really need to have frank discussions about the economic potential of a degree. Fourth: Students and parents should strongly consider a "half and half" between community college and a state school to complete their degree.
At the end of the day, a lot of parents are paying for prestige, but if you can get the right degree and internship experience I don't think where you went to school is weighted as heavily.
I'm fortunate to be in software (although I did do market research before declaring), I doubt anyone who's read my resume has heard of the school I went to, but a critical internship really opened up the doors for me and I've had opportunities to interview at some of the biggest companies in the world. You gotta think outside the box.
I wonder if this this advice would actually be harmful. The real cachet of the elite colleges is not so much their elite teaching, but that the elite go to them. Going to these colleges as a non-elite kind of "adopts" you into the elite and has great benefits for these non-elites. However, if these elite colleges basically become a reflection of the United States where the vast majority of people are non-elite, these elite colleges will lose their aura over time. The elite won't really be affected by this as they have other social networks to connect with fellow elite. However, the non-elite will lose this important way of networking with the elite.
Is it better to have a high SAT score and go to San Jose State vs low SAT score and go to (say) UVa (University of Virginia which is a good school far away from Silicon Valley) to get a job in Silicon Valley.
Anedoctal example, but I graduated with a decent mark from the top CS department in my country (106/110) as an UG, I couldn't even apply for a masters in top universities in the UK (let alone US) since their requirements are skewed towards not accepting people from my country (if you came from the UK you needed a 2:1, which if I remember correctly is around 70%, if you came from my country you needed 109/110, which is over 99%. Scores for other EU countries like Spain and France were converted to their 70%). This led me to going into a masters in my country, which will most likely hinder me from getting a PhD in any top institution in the EU just because of the country I was born in, even though some of the professors in my current masters degree course are top researchers in their fields. So yes, I feel like where you go to school earlier in life greatly influences where you will end up in the future; and even more so, where you were born influences your chances of making it anywhere in life. This is not to say that I am some unrecognised genius, I feel like I am a "median" CS student with a poor math background to booth; but at the same time I absolutely feel like a lot of talent will go unrecognised and won't have the same chances in life others have just because they happened to be born in a country rather than another (even more so after having studied in the UK for a year and having met people who went on to work for top companies when they clearly were subpar compared to people studying in my own country)
I've interviewed plenty of people in SF - candidates from top tier universities like MIT. And have passed on them. They simply lacked a proficiency in doing the basics (Rails in this case).
There's so many opportunity to be had by just showing very specific proficiencies with a personal project.
Skip all of the hoops you've outlined above, because they never matter anyway. A majority of candidates never have a portfolio, it's the biggest opportunity that is missed by most.
> I feel like most big names in tech won't even look at your resume.
Do you think your suggestions work for Facebook or Google (which i assume OP means by "big names", among others)?
1) Keep your personal items separate from your technical. If I'm looking to hire you to do something technical I really don't care about your kids t-ball game, the latest recipe you made, or pretty much anything that doesn't have to do with technology. Non-software related tech is fine as long as it's not most of the content. 2) There needs to be more than just code in your software related posts. If the post is 90% code I have no way to know if you actually know what it does or if you wrote it. 3) Provide links to working demos of the concepts if possible. Public repos with instructions for setting up and running it are almost as good. 4) Please no videocasts. Text is so much easier to consume and scan through. I'm not going to watch a bunch of 30min videos of you explaining a concept. I will read an in-depth article from beginning to end. 5) If you have side projects you work on in your spare time, please make it a prominent part of your site. Even more than in-depth articles, this is what shows me you can build working software which is the single most important thing I care about when hiring to fill software positions.
Just a few items that might help you out depending on what sort of company you're looking to land a job with.
IIRC my education history came up once in the interview process (I was interviewed by 6 different people that day and only one brought it up), and that part of the conversation basically consisted of:
Interviewer: "You don't have a degree?"
Me: "No, I'm self-taught."
Interviewer: "Oh okay, that's cool."
Literally nobody that I work with talks or cares about where you went to school or what your grades were. YMMV I guess.
All either of these anecdotes illustrate is it really depends on the circumstances.
Definitely agree that it's very circumstantial.
I am confident that if big companies actually interviewed people coming from different universities they would find that most top-uni grads are worse that people coming from different institutions who always feel like they have to perform 110% just to level the playing field.
I doubt google would hire me due to lack of experience working on a large team with many departments,even though my GPA was 3.9 from a average Chicago Uni.
I suspect I'm kinda in the middle, UC Davis represent! Great school, glad to have attended, but not really seen as a Stanford, Berkeley, UIUC, or CMU tier either.
If the universities want to help low income students, and are only able to help a certain number of them given the resources they have available, academic merit is the best way to do it.
Edit: To your "This is patently untrue" comment. Taking AP courses and scoring 5s on the exams is pretty standard for applicants getting into elite colleges. By not taking those courses you are huritng yourself when applying to such places.
This is patently untrue.
The rest of youe post is accurate, although the words help and hurt are the keys to keeping it accurate. None of these things are required.
So many schools are doing exactly what you suggest. It is kind of weird to teach there & realize pretty quickly that the rich kids are mostly not the smart ones, to be blunt.
There are an abundance of people who are qualified to get into elite universities at less-than-best schools in a given state.
There are three main issues that I see:
1. They self-select out of applying. They know lots of smart people, but they don’t know anyone else who applied, so those elite schools must be impossible to get into.
2. Their teachers/administrators have no idea how to write a strong recommendation for a stellar student. The applicants don’t know how to choose people who can write good recommendations.
3. The applicants don’t know about the small tweaks in their extracurriculars that will make them standout (e.g., demonstrating leadership, vision, etc.), and/or they don’t know how to write about their considerable achievements in a compelling way (e.g., I’ve heard an incredible and incredibly modest person saying that their considerable achievements were not worth discussing on an appication because “Well, what else would you do? Isn’t this just normal?” Answer, no, it was not normal.).
Note also that plenty of the “poor” students have been recruited in one way or another, with athletes probably being the biggest recruiting pool.
I think that these schools could do a better job at educating potential applicants and the circle of people around said potential applicants much better. In my opinion, the internet has democratized this process considerably over the past 20 years or so, but I think there is still considerable room for improvement, especially by the universities themselves.
So you get a boost for being a legacy, for having parents who are rich, for being from a rich feeder school that indicates you have parents who are rich, etc. It's not that you get a -1 on your point total for being poor. It's that you get a lot of +1s for being well-off, because ultimately well-off people give more money back to the school & produce well-off alumni who are attractive to well-off applicants. At private colleges and universities in particular there is a careful attention paid to long-term revenue, as colleges are feeling the economic squeeze in the amenities arms race. Colleges are separating into 'winners' and 'losers' and that sorting is along the lines of revenue and endowment.
The article is right on that connecting unconnected kids with connected peers is the biggest benefit of an 'elite' education. 'Winner' colleges today are trying to surf the wave of existing power structures rather than create/educate a new wave of potential elites.
A run of the mill guy or gal with a straight A record and shooting 60% from three will find a ready welcome at Stanford. That same run of the mill straight A student would be laughed out of the room if they applied without the elite basketball skills. Your daughter might not have much of a chance as a simple straight A student, but if she has straight A's and runs a 48 or 49 second 400... yeah... I can guarantee you that they'll make room for her.
If you're talking about using sports to get in, then almost any sport will do, you don't have to have money for the expensive ones. Problem is, you kind of have to be elite to make it work. Four year varsity starter, state champion level basically.
Maybe at Stanford. Maybe at Ivies in certain highly competitive sports (e.g., rowing).
In most sports, simply being a recruitable athlete at a level lower than “power conference” but higher than NAIA (maybe?) is possible depending on the sport and/or specialty. In terms of skill, any high school with 1000+ students probably has 10-50+ students in this category — grades and/or lack of desire are often holding them back from a tertiary education of any kind. Said another way, that’s much lower than “state champion” level.
Again, knowing how to get recruited and having a coach who knows how to showcase talent for recruiters goes a long way. That said, it only helps, but is not required in most sports.
I’m really glad you mentioned running as an example. There are a ton of good track & field and cross-country folks who: 1) can improve significantly just by training well, and 2) are very recruitable at the Ivy League level. Want-to goes a long way.
Have to be? Or tend to be. I think we often overlook that richer families tend to have a lot better parenting. It's not just about money. Good parenting is arguably more important than being wealthy.
I grew up helping my dad with every project around the home. Economics improved over the course of my childhood and my much younger brother spent his after school time playing sports and musical instruments. He got to put that on his college applications. "Dig's a good fence post hole" is not something you put on a college application. I went to the state school that gave me the best aid. He got an almost full ride at an exclusive liberal arts college. His side projects during college were audio related. My side projects involved parting out vehicles. When you're interviewing for an entry level job at FAANG and they ask you to tell them a little bit about yourself talking about how you do custom speaker enclosures is probably a good choice. Talking about your side gig selling used car parts will get blank stares if you're lucky and make you look like white trash if you're not. We'll see what he does after college but I suspect he'll be doing better than me by the time he's 30.
Having enough money to give your kids a marginally higher class upbringing from day 1 makes a world of difference.
I'm (still) trying to find a job in New Zealand, Australia, or Canada. Despite an MEng and 4 years work experience to satisfy immigration, companies aren't interested in interviewing people who aren't already physically there and have the right to work.
The only solution seems to be to get a student visa by joining a course in underwater basket weaving, and continue looking for a job locally when physically present. It's a terrible misuse of the visa system, but there seems to be no other way.
I've read that SATs are heavily g-loaded.
In such a case, your success being correlated with the SAT is obvious, as IQ being positively correlated with income is well-accepted in psychometrics.
So yes, you can be successful without going to a good school, but mostly because you're relatively intelligent.
I'm not sure what 'rich' means in the article, but if it means 'not poor' then for middle class white males it doesn't matter what school is on your resume.
That's not what the studies show. What the studies show is that, if you're a well-off white male who is in the top 1% academically then it doesn't matter, long-term financially, where you go to university.
I mean, I found the article interesting but that's a pretty niche bunch of chaps right there.
"The simplest answer to the question “Do elite colleges matter?” is: It depends on who you are. In the big picture, elite colleges don’t seem to do much extra for rich white guys. But if you’re not rich, not white, or not a guy, the elite-college effect is huge. It increases earnings for minorities and low-income students, and it encourages women to delay marriage and work more, even though it doesn’t raise their per-hour wages."