Do I need to go to a big-name university?
programmers.stackexchange.com
programmers.stackexchange.com
Sevenish-years later I can guarantee you that no one who I do business with cares a lick about the name of my university. They don't ask, I don't tell. (Same with GPA, major, and specific wording of the degree, by the way. My professors and advisors carried on as if these were really important when I was in school. I actually cried when some minor academic rule looked like it was going to knock my degree from $ARBITRARY_LETTERS to $EQUALLY_ARBITRARY_LETTERS. I strongly suggest college kids have a professional mentor outside of academia in whatever industry/culture/etc they want to seek employment in, so you can figure out whether the things academia are so obsessed with actually matter at all.)
This is, obviously, influenced by my career choices. If I had done what many kids at my university did and gone into investment banking, management consulting, or the like, I would have a 4x scale replica of my diploma made so that one could not help reading the name when one entered my office.
(i.e. if you're still in school, maybe getting good grades at a good school is a useful proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff, but if you have been out of school for seven years, having done meaningful stuff is a much better proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff.)
PS: Some schools still attract talent, but plenty of terrible programmers graduated from ex: MIT.
I am not sure you can survive that rigorous a coursework and graduate with less-than-average skills in at least theory, systems, compilers / prog. languages (dunno if everyone there does other stuff like ML, Advanced theory courses etc).
1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school. You get to meet new people, get exposed to different perspectives, and perhaps even live in a different part of the country.
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
3) Getting into a top-10 school is hard. If someone suggests the "transfer after 2-years" option, ask them for stats. Be aware of "self-selection" in that people who bother applying will likely have solid stats to begin with.
4) The key benefits of a top-10 school are networking/peers and the school's selectivity. When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO. You can get more complete information in books. If you are truly stuck with a concept, you can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you. Oh .. and don't forget about all those lectures online :-)
5) Not having a lot of school-related debt makes it less stressful to become a young entrepreneur.
6) If you did a solid but cheap undergrad program, doing a course-based Masters at a top school might be worth it.
7) If you want to go into academia, school matters. Top-20 is okay for undergrad. Top-10 (general or field specific) for grad is a must.
Really. You've tried this? Because grad students and professors aren't busy at all...
When I was a grad student at Berkeley, there was a computational biology class where another student (I'll call him SG) and I hung around afterwards to talk to the professor. I assumed that he, like me, was looking for an advisor. The reality was a bit different.
SG wasn't a student at all. He worked from home as a programmer doing boring stuff and lived an hour away. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drove to Berkeley, snuck into the CS department by coasting behind someone else who left the door open, and went to the graduate classes he thought were interesting.
On day 1, SG asked the professor if he could sit in without formally registering for class. Sure, why not, the profs don't care about the administrivia. Halfway through the semester, SG explained his whole situation to the prof (and me, because I was waiting around too). How he was extremely motivated, hard working, and wanted to learn, and would work half-time for free indefinitely if someday there might be a job there for him. How could the prof say no?
Over the next few months, SG gets a lot done. A lot more than your average Berkeley grad student with no real-world software engineering experience. So when the prof next gets some grant money, it's a no-brainer to hire him full time. Suddenly SG has an interesting job and a great resume.
You can do a lot just with persistence....
...
2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea.
One caveat to those two - if you are not rich, and do get into a top 10 school, doing the fifth year Masters is very compelling, if only for the tuition you'd save + starting earning income a year earlier.
> When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO.
i have to disagree. it's a pretty reasonable statement in intro and intermediate level classes, but in advanced classes, a lot of the material covered does not exist in textbooks yet. the info is possibly located in academic papers, or maybe the result of unpublished research. even if the information theoretically exist in papers, it is very nontrivial to find the papers (typically only universities have subscriptions to the journals they appear in), determine which ones to read (just because its published doesn't mean its good, or even true), and then assemble that into a reasonable narrative.
I was in a really good CS program at a top engineering school. I had great teachers, peers and courses. I had 2 years of real client experience when I walked out the door.
That's all well and good. What I learned at school was far more on the social side. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to be more outgoing. I learned how to be comfortable with a large group of people. I did stupid things. I made life long friends. I made connections that continue to help me.
You have to learn this stuff in a trial by fire. College is good because it a) forces you into those trials by nature of the beast and b) is expected that you screw up a few times in your college years.
Difficult to imagine a practical way to do this? Congrats, you've stumbled on what's wrong with higher education in the US today!
In retrospect I find the way that class and education are linked to be terrible (you could pretty much divide the place up into rich people and smart people, with only a small intersection), but it wasn't a bad experience.
If you want to program in the industry, the name on your degree doesn't help you much. I couldn't justify paying for the big-name private university that accepted me, so I got a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey, and have since been fortunate enough to work at Google. I also paid off my student loans within 10 months of graduation. If you go this route, and do extra work on the side, you might get the same education you could at a top university. But you will have no help. A difference I didn't appreciate when I was 17 is the support structure a big-name university provides. They already have contacts everywhere, plus you're more likely to be surrounded with self-starters and high-energy workers. If you need help, you might get it.
But if you want to work at a top research university, you might want to get the biggest name on your degree you can. I know a few PhDs who complain that degrees flow downhill - they feel they must get jobs in the industry, since they have degrees from second-tier schools. When they came to the USA, they viewed an economically-priced degree as the better deal. But there is a glut of people with degrees from top universities who are looking for research positions, so they believe theirs don't come up for consideration.
If you want a top research position, yes, $BIG_NAME CS degree is almost required. If you want to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... It helps, but certainly isn't required. If you want to work for a startup or any other company, it doesn't matter at all.
What matters is that you know your shit. $BIG_COMPANY isn't going to turn you down because you don't have a CS degree from Stanford even though you wowed them with your knowledge. All they care about is that you are you smart and gets shit done. That doesn't come from a degree, that comes from you.
I live and work in London ; the only places where I've seen recruiters or job ads specifically ask for a 'red brick' or 'top ten' university degrees is the financial domain. They specifically ask and check for a top ten university in order to hire you for most jobs, be it analyst or IT consultant. I would also argue that the pay scales you get there reflect this.
Most startups I've seen, again in London, dont really care where you are coming from. I used to work with one which basically said 'we dont care how you look or where you finished uni or even if you did, we just want you to be a) hard working b) smart working c) eager to learn'. Worked very good for them as they are now a successful business and most people have stuck around for years. I now work in a "top 3" uni in central London and we also dont care where yo u got your degree from. Our job ads are, by law, neutral - we are not able to distinct between candidates based on university alone. Again, works fine for us. It doesn't matter where you went, it only matters what you are. At the end of the day, I myself did not finish a 'big name' university,far from it, and its worked out well for me.
(I'm not a lawyer; but I have had training in the legal aspects of hiring and I run a job board)
Equal opportunities is about not discriminating on the basis of gender, race or disability. Also various bits of legislation also prohibit discrimination on the basis of financial status, nationality, religious or political beliefs and sexual orientation (although these don't normally come under the "equal opportunities" banner).
You can legally use performance correlation in hiring (people who went to X tend to do well, so we'll prefer to hire people who went to X), as long as it doesn't violate one of the legislated areas. In the legislated areas you can only discriminate on where there's evidence for a link. So for example you can favour Computer Science students for Developer jobs over non-CS students even though that contains an implicit gender bias.
It seems like there's someone on campus from DB, Barclays Capital, EY, Lehman, etc, everyday for the first month or so of the year. There's also things like opportunities to apply for McLaren racing sent from the department office -- things like that didn't exist at my old uni. It's not necessarily the case that these things would be unattainable, but you're much more aware of these opportunities at big name schools.
The biggest boon comes if you're interested in entering the financial sector, or if you're really set on following the whole "graduate scheme" path. But like you suggest, it doesn't really matter outside of that.
Certainly it is the case that once upon a time, any degree was a "leg up" in your career, back when only 10% of school leavers went. Nowadays, that the last government set out to get 50% of school leavers into college, only Russell Group degrees still have that advantage - everywhere else adds little to your prospects above good A-levels.
In that I mean, there are people who go to "big name" schools and make ZERO connections and take off after 4 years wondering why they took on 100k in debt. Then there are people who go to small schools (like my wife) who meet lots of great people in their field who eventually will be a great resource for them (eg, my wife now works at Google). She has zero debt and works beside graduates of top schools from around the country.
Now personally, I think that she is the exception and not the rule. The biggest advantage of going to a big name school is that it lets you get your foot in the door. You never have to "hide" the fact that you went to a small school, and there will inevitably be times that you fill out an application and wish that you could put down Stanford/MIT/Univ. of Michigan
Good luck in your decision. Remember that you will probably adjust your career path during college and that a school that offers an overall brilliant student body and faculty will only help you down the road.
There is an assumption that a degree from Fancy School means you're smart. Also, I've noticed that many people from Fancy School have more self-confidence that allows them to take bigger risks. I was awed by MIT until I worked with someone with straight A's in CS there. He wasn't any smarter than me, but he did work 10X harder than me. I'm lazy.
There's also significant difference in employability by university (statistically speaking).
At Cornell, all the classes were curved, and the curve was set (in most intro classes, somewhere between a C+ and a B). That meant if you wanted to get a B you had to beat at least half the people in the course. If those people got 1600 on their SATs and had gotten a 5 on their AP comp sci exam they're a bit more of a challenge than kids of lesser qualifications.
That said, you shouldn't just limit to Harvard, CMU etc... There is a very small four year school near us that I've seen crank out extremely smart Comp sci people, who have learned better fundamentals then people I know from CMU.
I used to, but the correlation between education history and hirability is weak enough to be useless to someone in my position. I think that most of the employees that are evaluating resumes feel about the same, as well.
What's important to us is whether or not you can actually write code and reason about computer science problems; what path you've taken to get there doesn't really matter.
In my opinion, what you are paying for at college is one on one time with intelligent people. Your peers and your professors. If the classes at the school consist of sitting through gigantic lectures, I feel like you are kind of missing out.
There is currently a glut of talent competing for teaching jobs at universities, even at a slightly below top-tier school, you are likely to find capable, intelligent professors (as well as students). And at a smaller school you will get one on one time with those professors much more readily.
You do, however, also want to make sure that the caliber of other students around you is high. It is hard to be motivated in an environment where you can simply breeze through everything that your classmate struggle with.
I don't know about what to do in terms of landing a job. It seems to me that landing a first job is one thing (aided by a 'big-name' school, but having the appropriate skills to develop an entire career is entirely different (no one care where you got your degree once they hire you).
My preference would be with the career developing skills, rather than the job-acquiring piece of paper.
Others probably have different experiences. The important thing is to really consider your options and decide what is best for you. (You might not even like CS by the time you graduate).
In April of my Junior year of High School, I decided to graduate a year early and attend college. This was way after admissions deadlines, but the University of Pittsburgh let me in, so I decided to spend my "senior" year there.
I then transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my degree.
There were many major differences between the two. Namely, at Pitt, the professors were much better at explaining course material. However, the course material was also much easier and much simpler to understand. Where at Pitt, the professor would teach you combinatorics, at Carnegie Mellon, the professor would ATTEMPT to teach you combinatorics, then force you to do a problem set filled with Putnam level combinatorics problems. The result was you learned much more at CMU because much more material was covered. In addition, you were forced to learn on your own or else you would fail.
At Pitt, few people drop out of their degree program because they can't handle the course load. There are a large number of people who drop out because they spend too much time partying, but if you put in the effort, you will receive a degree. Carnegie Mellon is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. In high school, I was top of my class, 1500's on my SATs, 5's on 6 AP exam's, made it to the USAMO. At Carnegie Mellon, I was just another above average student. Being well rounded meant absolutely nothing. The kid who failed English in high school but completely upset the curve in the class made you scramble the rest of the semester. Sure, I did well. But I was by far not the most intelligent student that professors fawn over. That person is a friend of mine. He placed in the top few at ICPC World Finals and can solve Putnam problems easily. He also doesn't know the definition of entertainment and, according to his housemate, hasn't been back to his room in 2 weeks for he's been sleeping in the library. When he was my TA, he gave me a word of advice. Go on amazon and buy yourself a shipment of the largest packet of Red Bull and Jolt you can find (he preferred Jolt). He was not wrong. The famously difficult 15-251 (that he TAed) forced you to spend 30-40 hours a week on the homework. I felt the absolute dumbest I have ever felt in my entire life. This was the first (and only) class I have ever taken where I've seen multiple students break down and cry during an exam. As a side note, the mathematics of CS was always much harder than programming. IMO programming is easy.
This all paid off when I went to apply for internships. At the Pitt career fair, there were many large companies. Google and Microsoft showed up, but besides these two, no scrappy startups or hot valley companies were present. CS students were expected to work for the tech departments of Alcoa, or Union Railroad. Google or Microsoft was a big deal.
At Carnegie Mellon, Google and Microsoft was the standard. Recruiters literally mob you to try to get your attention. A friend once joked after seeing the Spacex booth and their recruiters that Spacex was implementing the next level of recruiting for top level nerds: booth babes. If you had put any effort into your classes and actually had some coding ability, you were bound to land an internship. As I said, Google and Microsoft were prestigious but expected for those that were in the top 20% of their class. The most prestigious internships always came from Facebook and Palantir. Coincidentally, Palantir quickly gained fame throughout Carnegie Mellon for having the cockiest employees and the most killer interviews. They expected you to eat algorithms for breakfast and solve ACM ICPC World finals level problems in their interviews.
At my internship at Microsoft after my second year of college, I also noticed some very telling signs of benefits of a top tier University. The best developers and most intelligent students all came from MIT, CMU, and Waterloo (I met no Stanford people). Even those that came from good schools such as Georgia Tech or Cornell had a marked difference in ability. Every student from the top tier CS institutions could out-code, out-theory, and out-problem solve all their peers. Was this due to intelligence? Maybe. But I highly suspect that this was also due to schooling. People from other universities had just never been exposed to the same kick-ass curriculum that we had been. They learned Dijkstra's, Union-Find, and Red Black Trees in their senior year. We learned it our freshman year. They knew hash table's were and how they worked. We implemented hash tables with 3 different hashing scheme's and learned about the bleeding edge algorithms in hashing such as Cuckoo hashing. They were taught splay trees. We were taught splay trees then had to rederive them on our final because our professor had invented them. They learned lisp. We had SML beaten into our heads by the best programming languages department in the country. They learned about Operating Systems, "wrote" one in python or java, and did so by filling in the blanks like parts of the scheduler and maybe some parts of vm. We wrote one in C and asm, from scratch starting with a blank file. We implemented a pre-emptive kernel with the ability to load programs and run on bare hardware. There was literally no way the other students from other universities could compete. We'd just had hundreds of times more practice than they had. As a side note, I'm not sure who has the better deal because they partied/slept 8 hours a night on average. For us, sleep was a luxury.
What's the moral of this story? I don't really know. Top tier universities are hard--really hard. I've heard CMU and MIT are the two most difficult CS universities, so my opinion may be skewed. The most relaxing time of these 4 years has been during my internships. I got full nights of sleep and only worked up to 12 hours a day. I honestly feel that I've learned much more than my peers at other schools, but this is probably due to the fact that the material has been forcefully whipped into my brain, and I've spent many hundreds of hours more than my peers practicing and studying the material. The professors at CMU are more brilliant, but there appears to be an inverse correlation between brilliance and teaching ability.
You are right. I learned about operating systems, but never implemented one. I learned about hasing, red-black trees, and other algorithms and data structures, but never studied them in depth in my classes. In fact, many basic algorithms and data structures (such as red-black trees) are not taught at all except in an elective course (which very few people take). In addition, I only had half a term of functional programming (and see no other courses which studies it deeply).
I really thought I was a good programmer until I started doing ICPC problems and going to competitions. Nothing really made me realize the skill difference between programmers--it was a humbling experience. Doing these problems have helped greatly however, and I am confident in implementing and describing many algorithms.
- being forced to learn difficult problems
- being surrounded by very smart people
In the long run it really helps to be forced to learn difficult ideas. If you aren't forced to learn them then you are unlikely to put forth the effort necessary. This is why it is a nice benefit to be in a class where they expect you to do hard problems and you have the pride to not want to let them down. As you stated, big state universities cater to a lower common denominator so the focus on difficulty is not as extreme.
Anyone that is reasonably intelligent and very self-motivated can conquer the hard problems students go through in top Computer Science programs. They can also network in a similar, although not as easy, fashion as done at top-tier universities by doing open-source. So, while a top-tier university does make things easier, it isn't a requirement. This is doubly true for Computer Science.
I do think that your experience at Microsoft was purely anecdotal as you stated. The part where those from top-tier schools were always better than those from a lower-tier is very far from a universal truth. Following that train of logic in the real world will get you burned.
I've noticed that the MIT interns are noticeably ahead of interns from other schools, and that fresh grads from top tier schools tend to be ahead of other fresh grads (actually, fresh grads from state schools tend not to end up at Google - nearly everyone above except the Brown & Stanford grads came to Google after work experience elsewhere). But that advantage fades after a year or two, and the long-term top performers are often folks who blew off college or went on tour with their punk-rock band.
tl;dr At a top tier university, you learn way more than your peers elsewhere and when you graduate you are much more proficient. This doesn't come cheap. You work a billion times harder and pay for your knowledge in blood and sweat.
>The best developers and most intelligent students all came from MIT, CMU, and Waterloo (I met no Stanford people).
Stanford people strongly prefer to work in SV, either for startups or for Google or Facebook. When I was at Microsoft, there were 12 or 13 other Stanford interns, but most of them were Indian (I'm not) and they generally socialized primarily with other Indians.
Also, now that I think about it, I only managed to meet one MIT person and one or two CMU people while there. I met a lot more people from UMich and RIT than anywhere else.
I've also competed in ICPC and finished an internship at Microsoft. What I saw most often at the elite schools was that they cultivated enthusiasm better than many of their peers. I'm self-driven to be good at what I do but many people are not (e.g., nontrivial programming outside of class (I know, I don't understand how CS majors can not do that)). Hard classes make even the less driven compete in a higher class of difficulty.
Side-note: why are so many people saying "I went to a Big Name university" instead of just saying what university? The graduating classes aren't that small that it's totally personally identifiable and the benefit to readers is probably tangible.
Things that have surprised me: - the name does open the door more than you'd think, even to this day, it gets respect, even when I always disclaim it with dropping out - I don't think the quality of the education was particularly better, but the quality of the students was. Being surrounded by people that make you feel like a moron is a good life experience. - It won't automatically get you hired, but it will make people spend a bit more time on you.
So I don't know, my advice? Drop out or transfer after a couple years, because jesus christ that shit is expensive these days.
I go to a fairly good school for Software Engineering with a good reputation, but definitely not the best (by some standards). A lot of people consider Waterloo to be the "best" CS/Software Eng. school in Canada, but I end up getting the exact same degree. I've done the same courses, with some brilliant minds behind the podium.
Mind you, my choice was also on the environment surrounding the program. The impression I had when I visited Waterloo was fairly bad. The campus is a huge sprawl, and not too many people on campus looked like they were having a good time. My tour guide, a software engineer, told us that Waterloo was the only place to go if I wanted to get a good job when I graduated. As well, beyond residences on campus, there wasn't a whole lot of housing surrounding the campus. Students are sprawled out around, leading to (in my opinion) not the true university experience.
I'm currently a tour guide for my program, and I usually get the question: "Why would I go here when I can go to Waterloo?". First of all, I know this guy/girl is probably being forced to look at other schools as a backup plan, and I also know that I have about 60 seconds to state my case before he/she loses interest.
My university was one of the first in Canada to have a Software Eng. program, and had several interesting "sub"-degrees with Software Eng & Game Design and Software Eng & Embedded Systems. The campus is beautiful and fairly compact--you can get from the furthest point in the campus to the other side in less than 10 minutes. People are socializing outside. In the spring, the field in the middle of campus is full of people having picnics and playing pick-up soccer, football, and cricket.
I tell the student that it's not so much about where you'll be in 4-5 years, but how you get there that's important. University was my first taste of the world, and I'd much rather have a good experience transitioning to the working world than asking myself about what I actually did in the past few years.
I've said it before - too many young people are being pushed through life. It's a tragic waste of enthusiasm.
I didn't apply to any other schools than the one I'm at now. I believed that the campus was beautiful, and so I applied here. I could have gotten into any school I'd like to think, but life is too short to be worried about future financial gains or something like that. I'd rather go somewhere with a beautiful campus than be a person that's worried about some potential future monetary gains. Money is just money after all. After you have enough to buy a plane ticket to get to Google IO, what more could you really want?
It's worked out for me fairly well though. I met a professor, and he's become a mentor in my life. We worked on a research project together last summer, and he has the connections to get my resume in at almost anywhere I'd want to go. He worked at Motorola in their research labs for 16 years, and he knows people that have been at Google, Microsoft, etc. from their very beginnings.
Don't worry about what school you go to. Go to the school you want despite things such as academic standing or something equally silly. Things have a way of working themselves out if you give it a bit of effort. Just remember that life is about more than just your grades.
A big name school is not necessary for everyone by any means, and in fact if I had my current skills and network when I was 18 I wouldn't choose to go again (well I'd skip university altogether) but for me it was invaluable.
I believe this comment was that a "big-name" school won't get you hired. Conversely not going to a "big-name" school won't get you excluded from hiring.
To paraphrase what I remember him saying...
The only thing a that going to a top school gets you is your resume move to the top of the pile when doing interviews.
Meaning if they are hiring 2 people and the people who have the big name school on their resume do well then the person with out the big name school won't get a crack at the interview.
However, there is not sure path to success and the things mentioned above might give one a higher chance at success, but no guarantee. I would say that ones personality, ambition, and hard work play a huge factor in ones success, perhaps even a bigger factor, so I believe someone can be successful irrespective of the school they attended.
Taking on $100K+ debt at such young age is a huge risk as well. There are many problems with debt, but the major one I consider is how it ties you down and prevents you from taking risks and being able to take risks at a young age is really important. If one graduates with lots of debt, one has to have a steady job (and hopefully one that pays very well) to meet the financial obligations. That might hinder one's ability to take a job at an early stage startup or other opportunities that might enable one to learn and grow faster than working at a more stable company.
I personally like experiencing freedom from debt (as much as possible), so I would (and did) pursue the best educational option that would only cost an amount that I feel would still grant me a certain degree of freedom/risk-taking ability.
IMHO, if you can get into a Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc... then yes you should go. If you can't get into the absolute top, then the school does not matter as much as long as it's an accredited institution.
When I chose a college, I didn't give it much thought. I didn't get much advice or guidance on what a big decision choosing a college was. Plus, I would have been too scared to move very far away from Nebraska, where I was born and raised. I wasn't surrounded by people who encouraged - or even considered - this sort of behavior.
Through a crazy turn of events, I eventually ended up living and working in Silicon Valley. I met many people who went to Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and found that I got along with them very well. It was the first time I was surrounded by people I understood, and I was 25 years old.
With my upbringing, I expected them to be God-like, but it seemed like most of them were coastal people with backgrounds through which it seemed natural for them to go to schools like that.
I made some great connections in the valley, but I still think I could have done better if I had college friends there from one of these universities. There was nobody in my social and professional circles that was from my school. Meanwhile, college friends from these schools were starting successful startups.
Everything has turned out pretty well so far, but I often wonder what my life would be like if I had been encouraged to try to go to a better school.
-Get good grades. Grades definitely matter. I worked at a local startup during college and I thought it mattered more than my grades. I now regret not putting that effort towards my academic performance.
-Choose the best school you can afford and keep in mind that graduate school is becoming very common. If you have too much undergrad debt you may be forced to make a grad school decision based on finances.
But either way it only matters for a few years. Once you've done something for 3-5 years since college, it's unusual for anyone to care greatly where you went to college.
The other main factor is whether a university has strong recruiting relationships, which isn't identical to big-nameness, but can correlate with it. If lots of companies come to the school's career fair every year expecting to hire N graduates, it can make it easier to get in the door.
Often they operate with presumption that they should be in top positions, but rarely do the kinds of crap work that would actually earn them that slot. This can cause tons of friction in a team and I've personally found it better to try and not have people from $BIG_NAME on the team if I can help it.
I've also found that they are rarely innovators or out-of-the-box thinkers. They tend to be conformists and try to execute within the given rule set to the best of their ability.
However, I think perhaps my anecdotal experience runs contrary to the fact of how many SV types come from $BIG_NAME.
Perhaps it's the circles I tend to work in, selecting less from $BIG_NAME and more from $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL...perhaps all the folks from $BIG_NAME are people I'm seeing who have slid quite down the ladder with respect to their peers and aren't star performers no matter what.
Back in my college days at $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL I did notice that there were very few SV companies recruiting there and many more of the huge defense contractor type. It was alarmingly easy to get an internship at one of those huge companies and disappear into a long, but often reasonably rewarding career in the government. Some of the problems the government works on are impressively hard (see SV darling Palantir for an example) and there's no shortage of incredible people I've met who decidedly didn't go to $BIG_NAME and do fantastic, mind-blowing stuff.
I think early in your career it can mean something. And except for a few holdouts that care about some largely irrelevant piece of paper you bought a decade before (see Google), most places won't care after 5 years in the field and I've found most people end up more or less even in term of pay, responsibility, position, etc. If you are starting your own company? It doesn't matter at all.
I have a high school education. I've also been an extremely motivated self-learner and voracious reader since early childhood. I'm one of those who learned programming on my own, from books, at age 12, and then spent most of my waking life over the next 8 years writing code and reading about software development. And yes, for me it is something I truly love from the core of my being, and will never, ever be just a job. Although somewhat introverted, I tend to be very enthusiastic and aggressive while job-hunting.
I started my software career at 20 and advanced very quickly during the dot-com boom. I just finished a 5-year stint at Microsoft. I don't think I could have landed a job at Google 5 years ago, but I've been contacted by their recruiters since leaving MS, and I believe I'd have a shot if I really poured myself into reviewing/studying the right subject matter.
As I see it, the main advantage of my route is that I've never had any significant debt, but I still made the senior dev salary and the bonuses. More importantly, this has made it very easy for me to take time off between jobs to work on the side-projects that keep my love of programming strong. I'm on my second full-blown sabbatical in 10 years, working happily on my own dime, bootstrapping a one-man game development 'studio'.
The main disadvantage is that I usually feel like I have to work to initially convince people that I'm good, and I do actively wonder whether I can get hired at certain companies.
Conversely, I've worked with lots of people with Ivy League degrees. All those I've met are still paying off the loans, even in their late 20's - even at 30 (but as loans go, the interest is pretty low and the payments are small compared to their income). But on the office grapevine, when someone mentions that X went to Yale or Y went to Princeton, it's obvious that this sets up a positive expectation. Colleagues and managers start off expecting that they're good. I find I have to build a good reputation over time _first_, before people start talking about me that way. Also, these people always know lots of people working at other top employers, where I generally have to go out and meet people cold to find new opportunities (which I don't mind).
So I'd say it depends on which of those trade-offs sounds more appealing to you, based on your personality and inclinations.
Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator has been an unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners. One of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters where people went to college.
If I was this kid I would go to SUNY Binghamton
A good school can help you but you really have to ask yourself if it worth $200,000 USD
Also, this 18 year old may change his mind in two years about his major and decide that he wants to teach high school science, in which case he will be screwed financially.
/thread