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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

Conversely, the correlation between university eliteness and occupational eliteness is weakening.

Who is more elite - a new grad who has founded a YC backed startup who attended UIUC (an elite and selective CS program at a university that is not viewed as prestigious by society at large) or a Yale grad working on the Hill earning $50k?

As of today, all UCs are viewed similarly from a tech hiring practice perspective, though there is a bit of a geographic bias helping UC Berkeley, but this same bias also helps much less selective and less socially prestigious SJSU.

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I have met more other founders that came from large engineering state schools then the next tier-up of prestigious schools, with one exception being Stanford. Of course these larger schools produce far more students. Purdue (where I went) generates over 3000 new engineering graduates every year.

From the hiring perspective - A degree from from ivy school means so little compared to the actual skill level of the applicant. I honestly could not tell you where the last 10 people I hired went to school, or if they even did.

That's my point.

Alma mater prestige is increasingly divorced from employability and thus financial prestige.

You don't need to go to an Ivy or Ivy adjacent to have a very successful career in Tech (software/hardware), Accounting, Actuary, Nurse Practitioners, and other high paying careers.

And historically (past 40-45 years) "prestigious" careers like law, consulting, marketing, advertising, publishing, and media with significant gatekeeping just haven't kept up.

A BBA from Purdue wouldn't get you an MBB interview, but that increasingly doesn't matter because now that BBA could land a PMM or FP&A role in a tech company and end up with a faster career potential than the MBB hire - both will end up fighting for the same job within 3-5 years of graduating anyhow.

Despite being an Ivy grad, I'm happy about this return to the pre-1980s norm.

Oh yea, 100% agree.

idk man, I’ve always thought UIUC was pretty selective, especially for their EE and CS programs. I’m also 10+ years out from college applications so maybe things have changed.

It's an elite program within a non-prestigious university. It goes to show how concepts like prestige are truly performative in nature.

Even at my Ivy League alma mater, a traditional public school like UIUC or UW was well regarded by most departments, but society at large pedestalled my alma mater to an unrealistic degree.

Pierre Bourdieu tends to dig deeper into the sociology of elitism, and is in my opinion a must-read.

UC Riverside, UC Merced etc are not viewed similarly to UCLA or UCB.

It's treated as "good enough", and now the the second generation of SWEs, PMs, and AEs are getting hired I've seen their parents (a large number of whom are now mid-level leadership in most tech companies here in the Bay) increasingly lobby to include these "lower tier" UCs to the recruiting pool.

My point is, for the younger generation a university's societal eliteness just isn't a strong predictor for success, and I strongly believe data will back up this observation within the next decade (there's usually a 5-7 year delay on data gathering in the social sciences, eg. Data from 2018-22 is only now starting to be analyzed).

UCR is where you want to go if you're going for Geology or Ag/Hort, you aren't really trying to go there for SWE or EE, it isn't exactly known for those sorts of programs.

Source: I live right next to their citrus and asparagus test fields and often visit their geology building to use their XRD and XRF systems.

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