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Comment by bradlys | Hacker News Reader

Downside is that transferring into competitive top ranked programs is very difficult. And if you have anything shy of a 4.0, you're unlikely to get in.

Ask me how I know. :(

So, if you have good chances of getting in after high school to such programs, do it. There's no reason to risk your future on community college. Professors at all colleges are a gamble and even a slight misstep can ruin your chances of getting into a good program. (which then leads to better chances of getting good jobs - if you care) That said, if you don't get into the programs after high school then community college could be fine.

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> Downside is that transferring into competitive top ranked programs is very difficult.

What type of “top ranked” program are we talking about here? If parent is trying to get into MIT after a long educational hiatus, then, ok, maybe it’d be a bit difficult. But if they’re hoping to obtain an EE or CS degree (for example), these programs—in the states—are usually accredited and if their engineering program is not accredited, you shouldn’t even entertain the idea of entering that program.

There seems to be this constant myth that comes up when talking about higher education and that is a top ranking = better. Don’t get me wrong, a social science education from Yale or Brown will differ greatly then one at a state school but that is a given. Same goes for the select engineering programs or CS—think Cal, Georgia, MIT, etc.—but something like engineering is a program that has to follow strict course requirements so your end goal is practically the same no matter what your alma mater is.

Public schools are what I'm talking about - the ones people would actually transfer to. (UCB, UCLA, UW (where I went), UT Austin - all top ranked CS program schools) Private is much worse. You'll probably never get into a top private school unless you're transferring from another top tier institution - most people I saw transferring into such schools were already from other top tier schools. Stanford, for instance, accepted 27 transfer students last year. 27 - that's it. Same story for many other prestigious colleges.

The point of going to a top program isn't that it's a better program academically (maybe it is - maybe it isn't). It's about the resume and other things the university offers. Some of the schools help place you in co-op programs, have catered career fairs, and much more. They can set you far apart from other "lower tier" schools and make you stand out in the overwhelming crowd of new grads. It's mostly about signalling more than anything.

Sometimes I wonder if signaliing is the real 'value' they offer that people seem to want to work for, the problem isn't as much the education as it is.. everything else.

knowledge is knowledge, no matter where you obtained it. However, the connections you make during college is sometimes quite important, as they are the windows of opportunity that aren't available to the non-connected. E.g., if you have a friend in the same class, then they are more likely to refer you to their company if you are in need of a job (later in life). Or if they are already rich and are investors, you are more likely to be considered to be confounders or business partners.

Shouldn't you learn economics instead of CS if you want to run business?

Steve Jobs studied English. Ran multiple companies.

Consider many people here, who regularly complain about incompetent management.

If you want to run an already very large business your best bet is to go in to management consulting. In that case what you study is less important than getting top grades at a top school and interviewing like a champ.

If you want to run a business that isn't but has the potential to maybe be very large then easiest way to do that is to build your own and CS has a very low bar for entrepreneurial activity.

If you just want to run any business then no degree necessary. Just work in food service and treat it like a career. Maybe do a bookkeeping course. You'll get to manage a restaurant eventually.

Sure, one can run business incompetently, but is it desirable?

Well, yes, of course it is. If someone graduated from Oxford or Harvard then the reputation will follow them for the rest of their lives. It’s bizarre really but it’s also so normal that no one ever stops to question it. Same with some companies, e.g Google, they are 100,000 people now, very far from an elite, but work there even for a few months and you will be an ex-Googler for the rest of your life.

Is it like that for other FANG companies? Which ones constitute being an “elite”?

Maybe Netflix? The others are just on a level with IBM or HP or MS or whoever now. Big tech companies staffed with average engineers. They are coasting on reputations earned when they were just a few hundred of the best engineers.

Google Facebook Netflix.

Why isn’t there an A represented here?

Doesn't carry the same weight IMO.

Why?

Don't know. But you can get better opportunities everywhere with G on your resume over Amazon. Amazon also pays way less and has worse perks in everyway. Google was known to be a great place to work. That legend carries on amongst non tech people.

Are you saying amazonians are inferior or something? Sounds out of touch and insulting to me.

You should check out the book The Case Against Education if you want to pull on that thread a little more with signaling. It's a compelling book for me.

Stanford's undergraduate enrollment is 7,087. Very very few if any of those 27 transfers were from JCs. Berkeley's undergraduate enrollment is 30,853. About 4,617 JC transfer students were offered admission.

For California in specific, there are special legal privileges for transfer applications from community colleges to the UC system. That's what you're supposed to do as a community college student, so e.g. it's easier to transfer into a UC from a community college than from a CSU, even though the CSU students are, by design, superior to the community college students.

I'm curious where you get your statistics from? Do they break down the transfer students' details, ie, how many of them are US students and how many are from China? The competition against rich Chinese students for getting accepted into Cal has gotten more and more fierce the past 20 years.

The UC system schools publish these statistics yearly.

Transfers don't include foreign students as they generally aren't eligible for transfers.

Undergraduate international students are limited at Berkeley:

  Freshman 869 (admit)
  Transfer 379
  Graduate 1,786

https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files...

UW being University of Washington? I transferred into UW CSE from N Seattle Community College as did many others! We had maybe 3.7+ GPAs in community college and intro courses overall.

Private like ivy leagues didn’t make sense for me then because tuition assistance was so poor. Unless you’re super highly ranked and can get a ton of merit based scholarships that was a bad idea anyway.

However, it’s perfectly reasonable to work hard in undergrad as a researcher and student then make your way into the top tier. James Mickens is a great example of this path. This is obviously not for everyone but neither are private world acclaimed universities.

Depends on the year. I mean, they take like over 5x the students now than they did when I was there. For the time I was going, they weren't accepting transfer students like myself with anything shy of a 3.9. I think that was the lowest I saw for accepted on the stats website.

I had a 4.0 before I moved up to Seattle. I thought it was going to be a done deal but then I got some bad professors and it screwed me over. Quite unfortunate.

I don't think people need to get into top private schools. It's just a matter of how hard you want to work after college because you won't have had the same footing as those other folks.

> Private like ivy leagues didn’t make sense for me then because tuition assistance was so poor. Unless you’re super highly ranked and can get a ton of merit based scholarships that was a bad idea anyway.

Another option (depending on the school) is low to no tuition if coming from a lower income family. I want to say it’s Stanford but i may be wrong, that offers free tuition to eligible students whose family income was less than something like $50,000/yr. So there are ways for poor students to get a great ivy league education but like you said, you must also have extremely high rankings in your class to attempt that route.

> and if their engineering program is not accredited, you shouldn’t even entertain the idea of entering that program

Did you know that, for example, Stanford’s CS program is not accredited?

Do you think people shouldn’t entertain the idea of going to Stanford for CS?!

> something like engineering is a program that has to follow strict course requirements

From what I know accreditation sets a super low bar because it’s all above that bar. What colleges teach varies massively. You definitely can go to a lower ranked but still accredited college and come out with massive gaps in your knowledge compared to an unaccredited program like Stanford that would push you much more.

> this constant myth that comes up when talking about higher education and that is a top ranking = better

I don’t think that any of us think that, but there are people doing the hiring that do think that. There are jobs you can get if you graduated from MIT that you can’t get if you graduated from Idaho State. Mr. Idaho State will find a job, and it will be a good job, but Mr. MIT will find a better one.

You can be perfectly successful without a degree from a top school.

Sure - I'm not disagreeing. In the same way that you don't have to start rich to end up being rich. I'm just saying you will likely have a more difficult time getting to the destination.

If someone spent as much time going to a university as teaching themselves how to program and contributing to an open source project they’d be able to apply to most places.

I’d actually argue there is more value in being a well known open source contributor than where you went to school in our industry.

There are way more candidates that went to X great university than have contributed to X great open source project.

> If someone spent as much time going to a university as teaching themselves how to program and contributing to an open source project they’d be able to apply to most places

That's irresponsibly false. Just because you want something to be true, don't repeat it as if it were a fact.

I actually agree with it. For all of the criticisms tech receives for being elite and sexist--they are actually quite open to diversity of background.

Forget about top schools for a second--there are plenty of people at top companies who did not even attend university at all. Compare that to the management consultant industry where one's school is practically the beginning and end of their resume.

Of course the reason most students don't contribute to FOSS is that it's hard. Very few just-out-of-high-schoolers could really make inroads to contributing. Colleges and universities are helping hands that guide them to where they need to go.

I tend to agree, though our industry is much less pedigree obsessed than most. A degree from a top CS program will get you an interview at a FANG, but a degree from a top law school (I'm talking really top, like top 5) will largely get you a job at a big firm. Similar situation for top MBA programs.

I wish I had a cite, but I remember reading a while back a study that concluded it doesn't matter where you go to college - provided you major in STEM. I suppose the corollary is that it does matter quite a bit if you don't major in STEM.

This, as an aside, might explain why the most elite students in the US (unlike internationally) still eschew engineering and hard science in favor of economics, humanities, law, and other non-STEM fields. If you're at Harvard, why not study the thing where the Harvard pedigree actually gets you ahead? A CS degree from Harvard may land you that google interview, but if you're applying for an SWE position, you still need to be able to write snappy tight code a the whiteboard to find all matching subtrees in a binary tree. Law school interviews seem to be more general and conversational (this is anecdotal, but based on quite a few close friends who went this route) - law firms don't subject their candidates to a detailed re-hash of their 1L civil procedure exam.

That said, our industry is so obsessed with technical interview exams that I'd say neither degree nor open source projects is especially important, beyond what it takes to get you into the door. After that, you really do need very sharp whiteboard coding skills, and if you have them, it doesn't really matter if you went to SJSU or MIT.

I don't love interview coding exams, but I actually do like the fact that high tech is less obsessed with where you got your degree (or whether it was a math, CS, other related fields), provided it was from a program that teaches the proper curriculum. And I am genuinely relieved that we haven't empowered some NGO to decide what degree is required and where it can be earned, the sort of thing that allows law schools to put a $150,000 degree between smart people and the practice of law (backed with the force of criminal and civil sanctions). That last bit about SJSU wasn't meant as any sort of dig art all, there are lots of very talented people at that school, the curriculum is proper and rigorous, and their tech graduates have a much better crack at joining top tech companies than a 3rd tier law school grad would have at a big firm job (whether a big law job is any sort of prize to covet is a different matter, of course!)

The problem is that bias is introduced heavily in the technical interview process still. It's still very flawed.

A classic example of this is that people read the resume before they enter the room to interview someone. They see the person went to their alma-matter (let's say MIT/Stanford). They will have a bias - whatever way it swings. (I've seen it go both ways - people hating on their alma and some loving it) It will completely color the way they give hints, the way they evaluate the candidate, and much more. If they went to a less competitive school, they might nitpick every thing the candidate does to confirm their belief that less competitive school candidates are garbage. Whereas if the candidate went to a very competitive school, they might overlook the candidates mistakes by saying, "oh, it happens - but they're clearly very smart, they went to that competitive school."

Whether you like it or not, I've seen top 10 schools overrepresented within the bay area wildly. One could say that it's because those who went to those competitive schools are more likely to be competitive and strive to work at the most prestigious companies but that alone cannot explain just how wide this division is.

That’s a good thesis. I have no idea if it was true for me, and if course one data point isn’t terribly useful. My impression during my interview at google and amazon was that the interviewers were indifferent to what school I’d gone to, and my guess is that if I’d stopped in the middle of my whiteboard session and asked them where I’d gone to college, they wouldn’t have been able to answer (Berkeley in my case).

I also think you have overestimated the probability that interviewers read the resume. My interviewers at most jobs were at best faintly aware of the projects, degrees, and jobs I’d held. They tend to come in with their own agenda. I’ve mentioned things in it during interviews and it seems pretty clear they are trying to feign awareness if the contents of the resume or cover letter.

In spite of that anecdote, I think there’s a good chance your thesis has some merit. I certainly don’t want to defend the technical interview as it is currently practiced.

Are you saying I have less value because I didn’t get into a top school? I went to a mid ranked state school and transferred credits from CC.

Nope. Saying you're likely to have a more difficult time getting to prestigious places than someone who graduated from Stanford/(insert top school).

That’s.. saying the same thing.

How are you even defining prestigious? Am I incapable of doing so? Please explain.

Prestigious would be - FAANG/Uber-adjacent/whatever-competitive-admission-company.

You might work at Amazon - that's fine - congrats. I'm saying that it's /more difficult/ to get there on average than if you had gone to Stanford. You're more likely to get overlooked for another candidate who has all the same credentials you do but went to Stanford instead of generic school.

Just because you did it does not mean that it's a completely level playing field.

You will have a harder time because half the value in a degree is the easy HR filtering. HR isn't willing to spend a lot of time to find the needle in the haystack. They are always on the lookout for heuristics that have no false positives and a degree from a top school is a pretty good heuristic.

He may not be saying so, but the recruiters at Google are.

I work at Amazon. Is OP implying that is not good enough or something?

It's not elite. Doesn't carry same weight. Tech is also less "pedigree" driven. You would definitely have a hard time in Business tacks without elite schools.

In what sense does it not carry the same weight?

Try get into I-Banking (Big 4) without a big school.

Also no one had NCSU as their "Dream" school when they apply to college. That's reserved for an elite few. This perpetuates into a brand when people graduate. There is a certain bar of candidates that companies expect from these schools. Not to say someone at other schools can't meet the bar. But it's easier for HR to just start with the top 10

> Also no one had NCSU as their "Dream" school when they apply to college.

Are you sure? Where exactly did you go?

Based on how this thread is going, you seem to be projecting a lot of insecurity of what school you went to? Literally the words were "you will likely have a more difficult time being successful if you did not get a degree from a top school". Those words do not intrinsically say that someone who did not get a degree from a top school has less value.

It does not say that someone who did not go to a top school performs more poorly. It does not say that those who did not graduate from a top school are not good enough. All it says is that from a relative starting point, if you graduate from e.g. Harvard, you are more likely to be successful than if you did not.

My nitpicks with this premise are: is success defined in financial terms? Is it in position (CEO vs engineer)? What is the empirical evidence that graduating from a top school confers greater success (I think that there is such data, but citing it would be nice). There's enough stuff here to talk about that I am somewhat flabbergasted that you took this as a personal affront and misconstrue what's actually being talked about.

> It does not say that those who did not graduate from a top school are not good enough. All it says is that from a relative starting point, if you graduate from e.g. Harvard, you are more likely to be successful than if you did not.

These seem like they’re saying the same thing. If people like me were considered “good enough” OP wouldn’t have said that to begin with and CC to state school would have been fine

Most top CEOs didn't go to IVY league schools at least for their BS

https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/new-data-shows-that...

There are (or were, it was a while ago) rare exceptions. The community college I went to had a deal with CalTech that if a student aced all 4 semester of physics at the CC they did not have to take some of the entrance exams. So it was actually easier to get in.

> Downside is that transferring into competitive top ranked programs is very difficult. And if you have anything shy of a 4.0, you're unlikely to get in.

That...depends. There are a number of very highly ranked public universities with transfer agreements with same-state community colleges, in which case it's not all that difficult.

UCLA and UCB do not have those agreements. I don't know if UT Austin has the agreement anymore (they had some agreement about being in the top 10% of your high school or something). UW has no such agreement either.

Most of the high ranked public schools afaik have gotten rid of such things because they are impacted heavily on all their programs.

It does seem to be a trend that state universities are ending transfer agreements to 4 year universities. George Mason University ended their transfer agreement with NVCC 5-ish years ago.

I went to a CC during high school and only got into my two state schools - NC State and UNC Chapel Hill. Are you saying I ruined my chances of something? Because if not you should probably rephrase.

OP was specifically discussing transfer students, not high-schoolers in accelerated CC programs.

Ultimately the net effect is identical, since I did get a CC degree out of it.

None of those are elite schools.

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