Some schools have great signal to noise ratio, and you can be pretty confident when hiring. It's not just reputation. Some school (Poly in Montreal is a good example - but other do it as well) requires all student to complete a paid internship in their field of study to graduate. So you know if you hire someone from there that they are able to code professionally.
MIT moreso, no one is skating under the radar at MIT
Funny you should say that.
A past CEO I worked with was a CS grad from MIT. He would laugh about the fact that "he could code, but no one would want to use the code he wrote."
I've also heard another anecdote about an MIT grad who had excellent grades but who somehow couldn't get any work done on a relatively straightforward project.
So yeah, even MIT graduates CS students who aren't the best at code. CS being "Computer Science" means they need to understand the theory, but even an MIT grad isn't guaranteed to be capable and talented in writing code in practice.
If there were a "software engineering" major (or certification?) which, among other things, required the student to write nontrivial code, and it was judged by experts, including using subjective design criteria, then maybe we could start using that degree or certification to prove that, at least at the time of the tests, that person could code. But the devil is in the details even then...
Paying someone else the equivalent of a (low) full-time salary to take your courses for you? Probably.
> Standford
If you can't even spell it... I don't think you should assume anything about Stanford...
My comment wasn't so much assumptions as it was my reinforced opinion over the last decade talking to students and faculty
I'd probably want to see something more open ended, like a system arch/design if possible
Because everyone keeps paying so much tuition. Why does _everyone_ can afford to pay so much is another question worth exploring.