I don't know about the marketability aspect, so perhaps this doesn't answer the question. I went to a top tier CS school and enjoyed the curriculum. I never rea

I don't know about the marketability aspect, so perhaps this doesn't answer the question. I went to a top tier CS school and enjoyed the curriculum. I never really worried about my GPA, I just took the hard, interesting classes. It was a good experience if you can fit it in. Mostly, I just know little tricks that I never use for problems I never have, like using parser generators for parsing context-free languages and how dynamic programming neatly solves some problems that look really hard arbitrarily close to the perfect solution, map-reduce as a useful programming paradigm to scale things that parallelize easily. Oh, and perfect uniform hashing. One of these days, I'm sure it'll come in handy.