This is interesting, and it came up recently in a WSJ study that showed that the eliteness of your college doesn't matter - if you major in engineering or CS.

This is interesting, and it came up recently in a WSJ study that showed that the eliteness of your college doesn't matter - if you major in engineering or CS. I started to wonder if maybe there's another distinction that is hidden in the data. I think we can all agree that there is a difference between earning 150k a year as a senior software engineer and as a director of the American Musical Heritage foundation. Some people could reasonably see those as very different outcomes, one job far more desirable than the other. Here's the thing - do those distinctions actually exist within computer science as well? There's a big difference within tech. Think about being a data scientist who writes a lot of code, but has a tremendous amount of autonomy and freedom, who gets to initiate projects, direct his or her own work, make presentations, speak at conferences, and so forth. Now imagine being a senior crud bug fixer who checks JIRA every morning and works (under constant pressure to provide updates about whether we'll still meet the "deadline") to figure out why some payroll calculations are sometimes included twice in the pdf report but not the excel report. Say both jobs pay 150k. There's a big difference between that first job and the second one. Is it possible that elite schools make it more likely that you'll get that first job? I'm not saying this is the case, just that a hidden distinction similar to the humanities/engineering divide may exist here...