Stanford Alumni 5x More Likely to Secure VC Funding Than Carnegie Mellon | Hacker News Reader

Stanford Alumni 5x More Likely to Secure VC Funding Than Carnegie Mellon

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Unimpressed by data presentation, with different entries for: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Sloan School of Management; MIT - Sloan School of Management; and MIT". Similar overlap for most other institutions on the list. If I was writing a blog post that was going to offer raw data for $4.99 and advertise an AI-driven data analytics product, I'd at least present well curated data in my Figure 1. But maybe that's why I'm still in academia and not in a startup....

Sharp eyes. I can also see "University of California, Berkeley" near the top of the figure and "UC Berkeley" near the bottom of the figure.

But agreed that the point of this dataset is not accuracy or explanatory power... it's to drive some clicks to a $4.99 Stripe flow and to "an AI powered data-driven market intelligence platform for private growth stage investors". HN loves eating up content-marking.

I could argue for breaking out business schools or not breaking out business schools but but you should do it cleanly and consistently.

I'd probably also argue that the headline is at least suggestive that the data is adjusted for school size and I don't believe it is. (Again, not clear if it should be or not but should be clear that this is about aggregates at the institution level.)

Berkeley occurs 4 times in the list. Similar repetitions occur for other schools.

  University of California, Berkeley
  University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business
  University of California, Berkeley - Walter A. Haas School of Business
  UC Berkeley

The data should also be scaled per-capita otherwise large schools have an advantage.

Some of these comments are sound like they were made by high schoolers who think HYPSM or bust. CMU has one of the most rigorous CS/engineering programs.

While the top 5% of Stanford grads might be "better" due to how selective they are. But I'd bet the median CMU CS major knows more, programs better etc. Simply because Stanford has a high percent of legacy, athlete, and moneyed international students that buy in. Whereas anecdotally, while CMU students are less well-rounded, those students are serious grinders.

If anything, this is proof that prestige, not talent, and who you know matters most. I've heard of several start ups with mostly Berkley/UC grads and one Stanford grad, and they always introduce him first for pitches.

yea, none of that stuff really matters though. The magic of the MIT type schools is that students are expected to go into entrepreneurial roles, found companies etc in a way that is not the norm at schools like CMU. The peer set at MIT will have better network for fundraising because more people do it, and the network allows the participants to have an edge in success through fair (they get feedback from friends who have done the process before and give suggestions on what to do) and unfair (their wealthy investor buddy can give them warm intros to VCs) means.

MIT can foster that attitude because funding is generous, there’s so much support and safety net even for undergrads. In turn the success stories feeds back and bolsters.

It’s only obvious because they are given the chance to demonstrate their capability.

I’m arguing that the inherent baseline quality of student does not differ much. If given the chance CMU/Berkeley/etc alums can also succeed. But they’re locked out of many chances due to school prestige.

It looks like there's a lot of correlation between the location of the school and the amount of VC funding associated with the location. Yes, it leans heavily towards elite schools but especially towards elite schools in (or in the orbit of) Silicon Valley, Boston/Cambridge, and NYC. (Schools like Yale, Princeton, and Cornell are obviously not in NYC but I'd consider them most associated with it.)

Rolls eyes. I thought in tech it was skills and deeds that matter not credentials. I suppose meritocracy devolves into credentialism in the long run.

I'm the OP of this post. Not sure why this is being flagged.

Yes I do agree that I could have done a better job at removing duplicates like "UC Berkeley" and "University of California, Berkeley" from the figure but the key takeaway wouldn't have changed.

Likely more related to West Coast and SV culture and proximity than anything else. The East generally doesn’t invest like SV. Note: I’m an early stage investor from the East Coast.

In other news, Stanford is one of the four best undergraduate programs and Carnegie Mellon is... not.

Don't get me wrong, CMU has a great computer science faculty, but looking at random CMU alumni doesn't tell you much because a random CMU grad isn't that different from a random Georgetown grad.

Full disclosure, I'm a CMU alum.

I think this article chose CMU because for Computer Science and technical startups, it's well understood in the valley that CMU is a top 4 school (and for many, a top 2 school) for producing software engineers, which tend to underpin a lot of tech startups.

Totally agree if you move outside of software companies that this makes sense. Anecdotally, I'll say CMU tends to produce individuals who are technically overweight but perhaps lacking in business sense. This is both because of school culture and the broader Pittsburgh community.

I'm a Georgetown alum. Georgetown alumni do the same thing with international relations that CMU alumni do with CS where we like to pretend that because there's a really good IR graduate program that we undergrads were somehow special because of that.

Also, as with CMU, there are definitely more people who are interested in the topic, and a subset of them really are quite talented, but the talent density just isn't as high as at HYPS/MIT/Caltech, and as you noted, the talented people aren't as well-rounded (because if they were, they would've gotten into HYPS/MIT/Caltech).

CMU School of Computer Science has its own admissions for undergrad which is dramatically more selective than CMU as a whole. It really is well known for undergrad CS, it's not just a halo effect of the grad program.

CMU has 7000 undergrads, of whom 600 are in the School of Computer Science. So, if you take a random CMU student who decided to start a company and looked for VC funding, you've got a <10% chance of an SCS alum and a 90% chance of a non-SCS student (assuming likelihood of starting companies is uniform, which who knows if it is but I have no reason to assume otherwise). Whereas at Stanford 100% of students had to get into Stanford.

Carnegie Mellon has a top caliber undergraduate AND graduate program in CS though. The graduate program was heavily focused on research and similarly the undergrad program is heavily focused on execution (coding, fundamentals, design) because... that is where you start and even with the level up most entrants have to the program, they don't have as strong fundamentals (or rigorous math/stats) training.

I might argue that CalTech fits more of the analogy you are looking to make re: Georgetown, but not Carnegie Mellon.

Georgetown has the School of Foreign Service, which has tougher admissions standards than the other 3 Georgetown undergraduate schools, and is the #2 ranked undergraduate program in blah blah blah but seriously the number of people who turned down Harvard for Georgetown SFS was very small, whereas the number of people in the SFS with a big chip on their shoulder because they didn't get into Harvard was very large. (I, personally, did not get turned down by Harvard because I had zero chance of getting in and so did not waste any money on filing an application and was happy to even get admitted to Georgetown.)

CMU is the same. The School of Computer Science had an an undergraduate admit rate 1 or 2% higher than Princeton when I attended. But agree that I only saw a handful of students at CMU who were accepted into MIT or Stanford. And they usually had scholarships or other reasons to attend.

What's your top 4?

The standard top 4 is HYPS (plus MIT and Caltech)

Engineering schools?

My top 4 would be mit, Berkley, Stanford, and caltech.

Berkeley is not that hard to get into for in-state students (much easier than CMU or Georgetown). But, yes to Stanford/MIT/Caltech.

Sad Georgia Tech noises

Yeah a random Georgetown or CMU grad has a lot more question marks than a top 4 school. They may be good but if so why werent they in a top 4 school?

Because there are literally more qualified students than spots available at a top school? Also because of other factors like financial need, geographic location, program preference, faculty preference, campus preference, etc. that might influence the decision?

It's so funky to read this as a European.

I've probably never looked at the edu section of any CV.

> so funky to read this as a European

France and Italy have their gatekeeping schools. And at the level of high finance bridging into politics, I don’t usually know anyone’s education, but am somehow familiar with their families at the end of a dinner meeting.

In the UK, a lot of people definitely notice Oxbridge. (Obviously other good UK schools as well.)

I've lived in South Korea for four years, and the academic class system there is incredibly intense as well. If you didn't get a chance to go to a SKY uni (Ivy League on steroids), you're essentially a different species as far as society is concerned. Whether you get in depends on a single standardized one-day test at the end of your HS journey that seals your fate for life. Have a bad day? Tough. Alternate pathways and wiggle room are close to non-existant.

My wife (who grew up with Korean as her mother tongue, and did well on that test) chose to go to Peking University and did her undergrad (in sociology) in Mandarin, i.e. she spent a couple of extra years beforehand acquiring a foreign language first to be able to speak/write it at college level (and later she added a Master's in Public Policy in English from a European school). At work in Korea this then sometimes got her mobbed for "taking the easy route" vs. attending a SKY uni. It was really crazy given the effort she put in.

Overall, I prefer the more laid-back European (perhaps just German?) every-school-is-decent-on-average-and-really-no-one-cares. Sure, someone will say "it's why you don't have Google" next. Maybe.

It's somewhat complicated in the US.

There are big both technical-focused, primarily liberal arts, and broader programs that "everyone" has heard of. There are also big state schools that may let you take "rocks for jocks" but actually have some pretty good faculty and programs if you seek them out.

There are also a lot of regionalisms. In a given state, a lot of hiring managers probably went to one of those big state schools. In any case, if you're in the Boston area say, someone hiring for a technical role is far more likely to have gone to one of the engineering schools in the area than Stanford or Berkeley. And, while I'm pretty sure I'd have gotten the position anyway (for various reasons), the fact that I went to the same school as my original hiring manager probably helped seal the deal.

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