> The point of Harvard is that you can become pals with a senator’s son
That's half the point. The other half is to say that you went to Harvard.
That's half the point. The other half is to say that you went to Harvard.
Another one of my buddies at UCSF ended up rooming with the daughter of owner of one of the major DNC SuperPACs.
Public schools absolutely have strong alumni networks as well despite not necessarily having legacy admissions.
I went to a state university, and I didn't meet anyone rich or famous.
My roommate peed on our carpet.
They still peed on the carpet.
This dataset from the economic mobility lab at UCR is great to find which schools have an elite student body - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
Also, I went to an Ivy-or-Ivy Adjacent program and my roommate also vomited on my bed after getting plastered during rush week (I accidently returned the favor a weeks after during my rush).
I went to a Big 10 university.
"Some 843 UW–Madison alumni serve as CEOs, and nearly 16,000 hold an executive management position. Additionally, as of November 2018, the current CEOs of 14 Fortune 500 companies have attended UW–Madison, the most of any university in the United States." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Wisconsin%E2%80%...
That sounds like a lot, but in any given semester, UW enrollment is 40-50K, and it awards 10K degrees every year.
I attended a very affluent Bay Area HS (there kind where the VPs and C-Suites of tech and biotech companies sent their kids) and they overwhelmingly sent their kids to top public schools (they were targeting top STEM programs, which by default skewed public excluding Stanford/MIT/CMU/Cornell). A couple of their kids attended CS@UW Madison and most of us applied there as a backup in case we didn't get into one of the T10 CS programs.
This was the early-mid 2010s.
The key thing is going to an elite program. Doing CS at a school like UDub or UIUC means you open the door to VCs, IBs, and Founders who all also attended that elite program (as well as their equally elite parents). You might not get that network majoring in English or Horticulture at either college, but you definetly will if you're in a top program.
In addition, Asian (India, China, SK) Elites target colleges based on how the specific major they are targeting ranks. As this overwhelmingly skews STEM and Business, you end up getting a massive cohort of foreign elites at Public schools.
A lot of this is also because of targeted branding by public unis and regional private schools to undercut the more established private unis like Harvard.
For example, within India Harvard has a weaker pop culture branding and alumni network than a top CS program like Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UIUC, or UC Berkeley.