After you meet a few dunces from a top school and the rare genius who went to CC, you really stop caring.
College is what you make it. If you aren't networking a top school, I don't see the purpose, we all learn math.
I'll never be able to truly compare the two, but I know at my state school that I learned a lot, improved my ability to learn, and gained a lot in perseverance, not to mention made some great friends.
My friends generally did not have parents who worked at top Wall Street firms, were nationally-elected politicians, or were celebrities, and my friends generally were not going to work at the most high-paying, time-demanding, possibly-quality-of-life-shrinking companies/jobs. That's okay, because I don't want to do 80 or 100 hour work weeks, and I don't want the people around me encouraging that, because I want to experience a lot more to life than those kinds of work experiences. Nothing wrong with people who want that, but this route worked well for me.
Part of why it worked for me is because I was privileged enough to have parents who helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life.
>if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over.
If 50 developers apply for a job and 3 of them are from MIT and 47 are from lesser known schools, using the MIT signal as a filter is efficient. If $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal. Of course there are other filters too. Previous employers is an important one. You can create comprehensive professional examinations like they do in medicine, where a passing grade is a major achievement. But these don't scale well because the more they scale the easier it is to cheat, especially if the risks of getting caught cheating are minor (i.e. there aren't previous barriers that must be overcome via investment of time in other institutions first).
The other dynamic of top schools is the networking effect. There is real value in concentrating thousands of the "best and brightest" together in one place and bouncing them off each other. It doesn't scale, which is both a problem (for qualified people who are excluded for whatever reason) and a benefit (for those who participate, there is value in the scarcity).
Only for companies who hire for signals.
For companies that hire for throughput this does not hold.
Additionally, a person with a hard science BS from a small college may well have received a far superior education than someone graduating from a top tier university in the same discipline. It makes a huge difference for many students how engaged their professors are in teaching, vs research.
My undergrad courses might not have gotten me totally ready for an interview at a FAANG company (though it's been over a decade since I graduated!), but that also wasn't a goal of mine.
And my undergrad courses did totally prepare me for a few interviews at very highly-respected companies, complete with job offers, without needing a lot of external practice.
Indeed. Additionally --- not sure if this is true for all fields --- the stuff taught on the college level is basic enough so that passable level of teaching is fine, as better teaching is marginally useful for good students. Things change a bit on the doctoral level, where the topics diverge more and it's important to go to a good direction early on --- however, not sure how much this differentiates universities inside the US.