I neither agree or disagree with you, but what concerns me is that your same logic can be applied to the "top tier university" farce: "They're equally competen

I neither agree or disagree with you, but what concerns me is that your same logic can be applied to the "top tier university" farce: "They're equally competent except that they didn't go to a school like MIT or Carnegie Mellon known for the highest quality CS departments. They obviously would've been accepted if they were top-tier grad material, so they are qualitatively not the same as being equally competent to someone who graduated from one of those programs". I do agree with you inasmuch as they need to be able to speak intelligently about CS. Whether or not they can recite some textbook taxonomy of algorithms, they need to know how to describe and critique an algorithm or describe how a program works.