Pretty similar experience at Palantir. The CEO would get up on stage every quarterly on-hands and say, almost verbatim, "Where are the people from the bad schools? The best candidates are at the bad schools!"

We hired people in the single digits from the "bad schools." At one point we sent our VP Brian Schimpf on a tour of Texas and the Southwest to scout out potential hiring pools and locations to put a regional office, and he came back with only negative recommendations. We don't have a hiring presence anywhere outside the Bay Area, Seattle, and NYC. Barely anything in Denver, which is our nominal "headquarters."

To be honest, we only trust candidates from the 4-5 top CS programs in the US. Candidates at lower-tier schools generally can't pick up concepts fast enough to keep up with our work. Most CS programs around the country outside the top tier are diploma mills, and it's hard to even trust those students complete their projects independently without hiring someone to do the classwork for them.