9 ms·

Do I need to go to a big-name university?

83 points by meadhikari 16y ago

cmadan 16y ago
I think more than a "big-name" university, it is important to go to a university with a great course structure (which most "big-name" universities do have). I've often looked at courses at MIT, Stanford, CMU etc and said "I wish this course was offered at my school" or "I wish this course was structured like this at my school".
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Even better: go somewhere there is a prof you really click with and who would make for a great mentor. Difficult to imagine a practical way to do this? Congrats, you've stumbled on what's wrong with higher education in the US today!
ffffruit 16y ago
I would argue: it depends. I live and work in London ; the only places where I've seen recruiters or job ads specifically ask for a 'red brick' or 'top ten' university degrees is the financial domain. They specifically ask and check for a top ten university in order to hire you for most jobs, be it analyst or IT consultant. I would also argue that the pay scales you get there reflect this. Most startups I've seen, again in London, dont really care where you are coming from. I used to work with one which basically said 'we dont care how you look or where you finished uni or even if you did, we just want you to be a) hard working b) smart working c) eager to learn'. Worked very good for them as they are now a successful business and most people have stuck around for years. I now work in a "top 3" uni in central London and we also dont care where yo u got your degree from. Our job ads are, by law, neutral - we are not able to distinct between candidates based on university alone. Again, works fine for us. It doesn't matter where you went, it only matters what you are. At the end of the day, I myself did not finish a 'big name' university,far from it, and its worked out well for me.
- ottbot 16y ago
  I'm doing my MSc at potentially the same "top 3" uni in central London, after getting my undergraduate from a school much lower on the league tables. The biggest thing I've noticed, not considering any sort of academic rigor/quality differences, is the amount of on campus recruiting and outreach from big name employers in finance and engineering. It seems like there's someone on campus from DB, Barclays Capital, EY, Lehman, etc, everyday for the first month or so of the year. There's also things like opportunities to apply for McLaren racing sent from the department office -- things like that didn't exist at my old uni. It's not necessarily the case that these things would be unattainable, but you're much more aware of these opportunities at big name schools. The biggest boon comes if you're interested in entering the financial sector, or if you're really set on following the whole "graduate scheme" path. But like you suggest, it doesn't really matter outside of that.
- gaius 16y ago
  It's also a means to filter out the hundreds of CVs, many of which will be sent "on spec", from people who just send a CV to every job ad, down to a level at which someone can actually read them. Certainly it is the case that once upon a time, any degree was a "leg up" in your career, back when only 10% of school leavers went. Nowadays, that the last government set out to get 50% of school leavers into college, only Russell Group degrees still have that advantage - everywhere else adds little to your prospects above good A-levels.
- ig1 16y ago
  Not true, it's perfectly legal to distinguish candidates by university. It's not a protected category. (I'm not a lawyer; but I have had training in the legal aspects of hiring and I run a job board)
  - ffffruit 16y ago
    Are you 100% sure? Doesn't the whole 'equal opportunities' scheme dictate that you cant ?
    - ig1 16y ago
patio11 16y ago
I went to a major US research institution and double degreed in CS and East Asian Studies (Japanese, basically). The quality of the Japanese program was life-changing for me. The quality of the CS program -- meh, I'm not unhappy with it, but neither the instruction nor the brand name was worth substantially more than the equivalent degree from a less prestigious institution. Sevenish-years later I can guarantee you that no one who I do business with cares a lick about the name of my university. They don't ask, I don't tell. (Same with GPA, major, and specific wording of the degree, by the way. My professors and advisors carried on as if these were really important when I was in school. I actually cried when some minor academic rule looked like it was going to knock my degree from $ARBITRARY_LETTERS to $EQUALLY_ARBITRARY_LETTERS. I strongly suggest college kids have a professional mentor outside of academia in whatever industry/culture/etc they want to seek employment in, so you can figure out whether the things academia are so obsessed with actually matter at all.) This is, obviously, influenced by my career choices. If I had done what many kids at my university did and gone into investment banking, management consulting, or the like, I would have a 4x scale replica of my diploma made so that one could not help reading the name when one entered my office.
- patio11 16y ago
  Whoopsie. I just remembered that the YC application actually does ask for university, GPA, and major. I won't speak for pg and the gang, but I strongly suspect that these exhibit an exponential decay in saliency the longer you have been out of school. (i.e. if you're still in school, maybe getting good grades at a good school is a useful proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff, but if you have been out of school for seven years, having done meaningful stuff is a much better proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff.)
  - daniel-cussen 16y ago
    They don't ask for GPA.
    - patio11 16y ago
      You are correct. Please accept my apologies.
_delirium 16y ago
It depends on what you want to do, I think. I found my undergrad university's reputation useful for a few years; it wasn't very "big-name", but it was well-respected in its area (hmc.edu). I wanted to do sort of media/humanities oriented AI, artificial-creativity/etc. kind of stuff, and the fact that I came from a school with a solid technical reputation made people take me more seriously, and kept me out of the "guy who wants to do AI and read too many sci-fi books but doesn't have the technical chops" category. But either way it only matters for a few years. Once you've done something for 3-5 years since college, it's unusual for anyone to care greatly where you went to college. The other main factor is whether a university has strong recruiting relationships, which isn't identical to big-nameness, but can correlate with it. If lots of companies come to the school's career fair every year expecting to hire N graduates, it can make it easier to get in the door.
algorias 16y ago
It's interesting (if not disturbing) to see just how big of a gamble Americans are forced to make with their college decision. I'm lucky to live in a country (Switzerland) where college is practically free, making the whole thing a non-issue.
- smcl 16y ago
  Same thing here in Scotland. However even though we have plenty of good universities, we don't have anything quite like MIT, Harvard or Caltech.
  - nickbarnwell 16y ago
    While it's no comparison for the global recognition that like Harvard, Oxbridge, et. al enjoy, within certain fields the Scottish Unis are quite well known. For example, Edinburgh is widely regarded to be the worldwide leader in AI Research, and St. Andrews has a renowned International Relations division.
- troels 16y ago
  Yes, it's a surreal thought really. When I was in my late teens, I was certainly not capable of dealing with that kind of decisions. Must be very hard.
  - jarek 16y ago
    Yup. I'm really happy with the university decision I made when I was 17, because I now realize I didn't know shit and it was mostly through luck that I ended up making a decent one.
andrewcooke 16y ago
The one way an education at a "big name" university has helped me is that people trust me more. I moved from academia (astronomy) to software engineering and I have no formal qualifications (or training) in what I do for a living. But once people hear where I went they assume the best. I have noticed this several times. In retrospect I find the way that class and education are linked to be terrible (you could pretty much divide the place up into rich people and smart people, with only a small intersection), but it wasn't a bad experience.
kleinsch 16y ago
One thing that's frequently overlooked are the relationships you'll build at school. I went to a very solidly ranked state school (umd.edu), and most of the people I know got jobs at government contractors. I have friends I've met through jobs that went to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and they have a bunch of connections at Google, Facebook, and other hot startups. Getting jobs through personal connections is way more effective than combing Internet ads or dealing with recruiters, and the jobs you'll be exposed to through friends seem to be way better at a top-tier school.
- hammerdr 16y ago
  This. I was in a really good CS program at a top engineering school. I had great teachers, peers and courses. I had 2 years of real client experience when I walked out the door. That's all well and good. What I learned at school was far more on the social side. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to be more outgoing. I learned how to be comfortable with a large group of people. I did stupid things. I made life long friends. I made connections that continue to help me. You have to learn this stuff in a trial by fire. College is good because it a) forces you into those trials by nature of the beast and b) is expected that you screw up a few times in your college years.
ig1 16y ago
I don't know about the US but in the UK it does matter. If you have a university which takes students with A* average grades and a university with D average grades, they don't teach the same syllabus. It just doesn't make sense, universities have to teach a syllabus that matches the ability of it's student body. There's also significant difference in employability by university (statistically speaking).
- dasil003 16y ago
  My impression as an american is that grades mean more in UK schools than they do in the US where grade inflation has reached almost comical levels.
  - araneae 16y ago
    The grades probably mean more, but that doesn't mean that the students in more elite universities in the US don't learn more than their counterparts at other schools. At Cornell, all the classes were curved, and the curve was set (in most intro classes, somewhere between a C+ and a B). That meant if you wanted to get a B you had to beat at least half the people in the course. If those people got 1600 on their SATs and had gotten a 5 on their AP comp sci exam they're a bit more of a challenge than kids of lesser qualifications.
    - nickbarnwell 16y ago
      If I'm understanding correctly the parent is referring to high school, where to a large extent I can't help but agree. The situation at the university level is much different, as illustrated by your example.
iqster 16y ago
Random thoughts from my experience: 1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school. You get to meet new people, get exposed to different perspectives, and perhaps even live in a different part of the country. 2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea. 3) Getting into a top-10 school is hard. If someone suggests the "transfer after 2-years" option, ask them for stats. Be aware of "self-selection" in that people who bother applying will likely have solid stats to begin with. 4) The key benefits of a top-10 school are networking/peers and the school's selectivity. When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO. You can get more complete information in books. If you are truly stuck with a concept, you can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you. Oh .. and don't forget about all those lectures online :-) 5) Not having a lot of school-related debt makes it less stressful to become a young entrepreneur. 6) If you did a solid but cheap undergrad program, doing a course-based Masters at a top school might be worth it. 7) If you want to go into academia, school matters. Top-20 is okay for undergrad. Top-10 (general or field specific) for grad is a must.
- impendia 16y ago
  "You can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you." Really. You've tried this? Because grad students and professors aren't busy at all...
  - kd0amg 16y ago
    I might, probably just for the change of pace (though if you're looking for me, I'm more likely to be in the lab than in my office).
  - lacker 16y ago
    I haven't tried it. But I've seen it done, and more. When I was a grad student at Berkeley, there was a computational biology class where another student (I'll call him SG) and I hung around afterwards to talk to the professor. I assumed that he, like me, was looking for an advisor. The reality was a bit different. SG wasn't a student at all. He worked from home as a programmer doing boring stuff and lived an hour away. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drove to Berkeley, snuck into the CS department by coasting behind someone else who left the door open, and went to the graduate classes he thought were interesting. On day 1, SG asked the professor if he could sit in without formally registering for class. Sure, why not, the profs don't care about the administrivia. Halfway through the semester, SG explained his whole situation to the prof (and me, because I was waiting around too). How he was extremely motivated, hard working, and wanted to learn, and would work half-time for free indefinitely if someday there might be a job there for him. How could the prof say no? Over the next few months, SG gets a lot done. A lot more than your average Berkeley grad student with no real-world software engineering experience. So when the prof next gets some grant money, it's a no-brainer to hire him full time. Suddenly SG has an interesting job and a great resume. You can do a lot just with persistence....
jakevoytko 16y ago
Like most things, it depends. If you want to program in the industry, the name on your degree doesn't help you much. I couldn't justify paying for the big-name private university that accepted me, so I got a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey, and have since been fortunate enough to work at Google. I also paid off my student loans within 10 months of graduation. If you go this route, and do extra work on the side, you might get the same education you could at a top university. But you will have no help. A difference I didn't appreciate when I was 17 is the support structure a big-name university provides. They already have contacts everywhere, plus you're more likely to be surrounded with self-starters and high-energy workers. If you need help, you might get it. But if you want to work at a top research university, you might want to get the biggest name on your degree you can. I know a few PhDs who complain that degrees flow downhill - they feel they must get jobs in the industry, since they have degrees from second-tier schools. When they came to the USA, they viewed an economically-priced degree as the better deal. But there is a glut of people with degrees from top universities who are looking for research positions, so they believe theirs don't come up for consideration.
- drgath 16y ago
  I agree with this. It largely depends on where you want to take your career. I don't have a CS degree from $BIG_NAME, never had to take out a loan, and am very happy with my career thus far. If you want a top research position, yes, $BIG_NAME CS degree is almost required. If you want to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... It helps, but certainly isn't required. If you want to work for a startup or any other company, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is that you know your shit. $BIG_COMPANY isn't going to turn you down because you don't have a CS degree from Stanford even though you wowed them with your knowledge. All they care about is that you are you smart and gets shit done. That doesn't come from a degree, that comes from you.
ry0ohki 16y ago
To me as a someone hiring, the "big name" part doesn't matter, but the school itself does. The curriculums are just not the same everywhere. I worked in a computer lab of an "online university" at the same time I was getting my Comp Sci degree at a large state school, and was shocked to see that Juniors in the online university had projects where they had to write a Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion app in Java (this was more basic then my freshman level comp sci!). That said, you shouldn't just limit to Harvard, CMU etc... There is a very small four year school near us that I've seen crank out extremely smart Comp sci people, who have learned better fundamentals then people I know from CMU.
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  I should also say school only matters for people with < 3 years of work experience. After that I find the experience itself much more important.
damoncali 16y ago
I wouldn't trade the experience of watching Big 8 football from the student section for all the ivy in the world. I've said it before - too many young people are being pushed through life. It's a tragic waste of enthusiasm.
known 16y ago
Yes, if you need a job after education.
chollida1 16y ago
In one of the stackoverflow podcasts Joel did touch on this. I believe this comment was that a "big-name" school won't get you hired. Conversely not going to a "big-name" school won't get you excluded from hiring. To paraphrase what I remember him saying... The only thing a that going to a top school gets you is your resume move to the top of the pile when doing interviews. Meaning if they are hiring 2 people and the people who have the big name school on their resume do well then the person with out the big name school won't get a crack at the interview.
tmekjian 16y ago
As a graduate from a "big name" university I would say I am a little biased but honestly it depends on a few things but ultimately comes down to one principle: You will get out of school what you want. In that I mean, there are people who go to "big name" schools and make ZERO connections and take off after 4 years wondering why they took on 100k in debt. Then there are people who go to small schools (like my wife) who meet lots of great people in their field who eventually will be a great resource for them (eg, my wife now works at Google). She has zero debt and works beside graduates of top schools from around the country. Now personally, I think that she is the exception and not the rule. The biggest advantage of going to a big name school is that it lets you get your foot in the door. You never have to "hide" the fact that you went to a small school, and there will inevitably be times that you fill out an application and wish that you could put down Stanford/MIT/Univ. of Michigan Good luck in your decision. Remember that you will probably adjust your career path during college and that a school that offers an overall brilliant student body and faculty will only help you down the road.
deleted 16y ago
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bryanwb 16y ago
i went to a top-twenty liberal arts school in the US and frankly it wasn't worth the $. Further, top-tier private schools dumb you down when it comes to life skills because they coddle you. If I was this kid I would go to SUNY Binghamton A good school can help you but you really have to ask yourself if it worth $200,000 USD Also, this 18 year old may change his mind in two years about his major and decide that he wants to teach high school science, in which case he will be screwed financially.
nicpottier 16y ago
I went to CMU and dropped out after two years when I decided I was learning a lot more at a summer internship than I was at school. (this back in '96 BTW) Things that have surprised me: - the name does open the door more than you'd think, even to this day, it gets respect, even when I always disclaim it with dropping out - I don't think the quality of the education was particularly better, but the quality of the students was. Being surrounded by people that make you feel like a moron is a good life experience. - It won't automatically get you hired, but it will make people spend a bit more time on you. So I don't know, my advice? Drop out or transfer after a couple years, because jesus christ that shit is expensive these days.
- SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Dropping out of a top ranked CS program b/c you can learn/do/achieve/earn more on your own = the new MS.
meinhimmel 16y ago
I go to a 'meh' school, but it was by choice for me. I'm a math major for the theoretical background, and then a computer science major for the practical background. I do what I love, and I take misc. classes enough that my parents are legitimately worried about me becoming a 'professional student'. I didn't apply to any other schools than the one I'm at now. I believed that the campus was beautiful, and so I applied here. I could have gotten into any school I'd like to think, but life is too short to be worried about future financial gains or something like that. I'd rather go somewhere with a beautiful campus than be a person that's worried about some potential future monetary gains. Money is just money after all. After you have enough to buy a plane ticket to get to Google IO, what more could you really want? It's worked out for me fairly well though. I met a professor, and he's become a mentor in my life. We worked on a research project together last summer, and he has the connections to get my resume in at almost anywhere I'd want to go. He worked at Motorola in their research labs for 16 years, and he knows people that have been at Google, Microsoft, etc. from their very beginnings. Don't worry about what school you go to. Go to the school you want despite things such as academic standing or something equally silly. Things have a way of working themselves out if you give it a bit of effort. Just remember that life is about more than just your grades.
ohyes 16y ago
My impression is that at 'big name' schools you don't really have much interaction with your professors, until you are at least at graduate level (and even then the doctoral students who get the attention, not the lowly masters students). In my opinion, what you are paying for at college is one on one time with intelligent people. Your peers and your professors. If the classes at the school consist of sitting through gigantic lectures, I feel like you are kind of missing out. There is currently a glut of talent competing for teaching jobs at universities, even at a slightly below top-tier school, you are likely to find capable, intelligent professors (as well as students). And at a smaller school you will get one on one time with those professors much more readily. You do, however, also want to make sure that the caliber of other students around you is high. It is hard to be motivated in an environment where you can simply breeze through everything that your classmate struggle with. I don't know about what to do in terms of landing a job. It seems to me that landing a first job is one thing (aided by a 'big-name' school, but having the appropriate skills to develop an entire career is entirely different (no one care where you got your degree once they hire you). My preference would be with the career developing skills, rather than the job-acquiring piece of paper. Others probably have different experiences. The important thing is to really consider your options and decide what is best for you. (You might not even like CS by the time you graduate).
silverlake 16y ago
It gets your foot in the door for your 1st and, maybe, 2nd job. If your first job is Google or Apple or Facebook, then you have an advantage going into your 2nd job or startup. This advantage compounds over your career. I went to a giant mid-western school with no recruiters from hot SV companies. Instead only large corporations came to hire drones. This is a significant disadvantage. It's not insurmountable, but it does suck. There is an assumption that a degree from Fancy School means you're smart. Also, I've noticed that many people from Fancy School have more self-confidence that allows them to take bigger risks. I was awed by MIT until I worked with someone with straight A's in CS there. He wasn't any smarter than me, but he did work 10X harder than me. I'm lazy.
imcqueen 16y ago
I think most people are saying the same thing, but the general idea is this: -Get good grades. Grades definitely matter. I worked at a local startup during college and I thought it mattered more than my grades. I now regret not putting that effort towards my academic performance. -Choose the best school you can afford and keep in mind that graduate school is becoming very common. If you have too much undergrad debt you may be forced to make a grad school decision based on finances.
andywood 16y ago
I think it really depends on you. More specifically, it depends on your learning style, how self-motivated you are, and how outgoing you are. There are big pros and big cons on both sides. I have a high school education. I've also been an extremely motivated self-learner and voracious reader since early childhood. I'm one of those who learned programming on my own, from books, at age 12, and then spent most of my waking life over the next 8 years writing code and reading about software development. And yes, for me it is something I truly love from the core of my being, and will never, ever be just a job. Although somewhat introverted, I tend to be very enthusiastic and aggressive while job-hunting. I started my software career at 20 and advanced very quickly during the dot-com boom. I just finished a 5-year stint at Microsoft. I don't think I could have landed a job at Google 5 years ago, but I've been contacted by their recruiters since leaving MS, and I believe I'd have a shot if I really poured myself into reviewing/studying the right subject matter. As I see it, the main advantage of my route is that I've never had any significant debt, but I still made the senior dev salary and the bonuses. More importantly, this has made it very easy for me to take time off between jobs to work on the side-projects that keep my love of programming strong. I'm on my second full-blown sabbatical in 10 years, working happily on my own dime, bootstrapping a one-man game development 'studio'. The main disadvantage is that I usually feel like I have to work to initially convince people that I'm good, and I do actively wonder whether I can get hired at certain companies. Conversely, I've worked with lots of people with Ivy League degrees. All those I've met are still paying off the loans, even in their late 20's - even at 30 (but as loans go, the interest is pretty low and the payments are small compared to their income). But on the office grapevine, when someone mentions that X went to Yale or Y went to Princeton, it's obvious that this sets up a positive expectation. Colleagues and managers start off expecting that they're good. I find I have to build a good reputation over time _first_, before people start talking about me that way. Also, these people always know lots of people working at other top employers, where I generally have to go out and meet people cold to find new opportunities (which I don't mind). So I'd say it depends on which of those trade-offs sounds more appealing to you, based on your personality and inclinations.
jchonphoenix 16y ago
This is purely anecdotal, but is probably less biased than most responses for I've experienced both sides of the table. It also reflects my perception at the time which may be skewed. In April of my Junior year of High School, I decided to graduate a year early and attend college. This was way after admissions deadlines, but the University of Pittsburgh let me in, so I decided to spend my "senior" year there. I then transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my degree. There were many major differences between the two. Namely, at Pitt, the professors were much better at explaining course material. However, the course material was also much easier and much simpler to understand. Where at Pitt, the professor would teach you combinatorics, at Carnegie Mellon, the professor would ATTEMPT to teach you combinatorics, then force you to do a problem set filled with Putnam level combinatorics problems. The result was you learned much more at CMU because much more material was covered. In addition, you were forced to learn on your own or else you would fail. At Pitt, few people drop out of their degree program because they can't handle the course load. There are a large number of people who drop out because they spend too much time partying, but if you put in the effort, you will receive a degree. Carnegie Mellon is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. In high school, I was top of my class, 1500's on my SATs, 5's on 6 AP exam's, made it to the USAMO. At Carnegie Mellon, I was just another above average student. Being well rounded meant absolutely nothing. The kid who failed English in high school but completely upset the curve in the class made you scramble the rest of the semester. Sure, I did well. But I was by far not the most intelligent student that professors fawn over. That person is a friend of mine. He placed in the top few at ICPC World Finals and can solve Putnam problems easily. He also doesn't know the definition of entertainment and, according to his housemate, hasn't been back to his room in 2 weeks for he's been sleeping in the library. When he was my TA, he gave me a word of advice. Go on amazon and buy yourself a shipment of the largest packet of Red Bull and Jolt you can find (he preferred Jolt). He was not wrong. The famously difficult 15-251 (that he TAed) forced you to spend 30-40 hours a week on the homework. I felt the absolute dumbest I have ever felt in my entire life. This was the first (and only) class I have ever taken where I've seen multiple students break down and cry during an exam. As a side note, the mathematics of CS was always much harder than programming. IMO programming is easy. This all paid off when I went to apply for internships. At the Pitt career fair, there were many large companies. Google and Microsoft showed up, but besides these two, no scrappy startups or hot valley companies were present. CS students were expected to work for the tech departments of Alcoa, or Union Railroad. Google or Microsoft was a big deal. At Carnegie Mellon, Google and Microsoft was the standard. Recruiters literally mob you to try to get your attention. A friend once joked after seeing the Spacex booth and their recruiters that Spacex was implementing the next level of recruiting for top level nerds: booth babes. If you had put any effort into your classes and actually had some coding ability, you were bound to land an internship. As I said, Google and Microsoft were prestigious but expected for those that were in the top 20% of their class. The most prestigious internships always came from Facebook and Palantir. Coincidentally, Palantir quickly gained fame throughout Carnegie Mellon for having the cockiest employees and the most killer interviews. They expected you to eat algorithms for breakfast and solve ACM ICPC World finals level problems in their interviews. At my internship at Microsoft after my second year of college, I also noticed some very telling signs of benefits of a top tier University. The best developers and most intelligent students all came from MIT, CMU, and Waterloo (I met no Stanford people). Even those that came from good schools such as Georgia Tech or Cornell had a marked difference in ability. Every student from the top tier CS institutions could out-code, out-theory, and out-problem solve all their peers. Was this due to intelligence? Maybe. But I highly suspect that this was also due to schooling. People from other universities had just never been exposed to the same kick-ass curriculum that we had been. They learned Dijkstra's, Union-Find, and Red Black Trees in their senior year. We learned it our freshman year. They knew hash table's were and how they worked. We implemented hash tables with 3 different hashing scheme's and learned about the bleeding edge algorithms in hashing such as Cuckoo hashing. They were taught splay trees. We were taught splay trees then had to rederive them on our final because our professor had invented them. They learned lisp. We had SML beaten into our heads by the best programming languages department in the country. They learned about Operating Systems, "wrote" one in python or java, and did so by filling in the blanks like parts of the scheduler and maybe some parts of vm. We wrote one in C and asm, from scratch starting with a blank file. We implemented a pre-emptive kernel with the ability to load programs and run on bare hardware. There was literally no way the other students from other universities could compete. We'd just had hundreds of times more practice than they had. As a side note, I'm not sure who has the better deal because they partied/slept 8 hours a night on average. For us, sleep was a luxury. What's the moral of this story? I don't really know. Top tier universities are hard--really hard. I've heard CMU and MIT are the two most difficult CS universities, so my opinion may be skewed. The most relaxing time of these 4 years has been during my internships. I got full nights of sleep and only worked up to 12 hours a day. I honestly feel that I've learned much more than my peers at other schools, but this is probably due to the fact that the material has been forcefully whipped into my brain, and I've spent many hundreds of hours more than my peers practicing and studying the material. The professors at CMU are more brilliant, but there appears to be an inverse correlation between brilliance and teaching ability.
kd5bjo 16y ago
I interview most of the job candidates that we get at Justin.tv for technical positions. Once you get to the point that I see you, what degree you have doesn't matter at all. For most candidates, I never look or ask about their education. I used to, but the correlation between education history and hirability is weak enough to be useless to someone in my position. I think that most of the employees that are evaluating resumes feel about the same, as well. What's important to us is whether or not you can actually write code and reason about computer science problems; what path you've taken to get there doesn't really matter.
matwood 16y ago
I went to a small state college (www.cofc.edu). I feel that I received a very good education in CS mainly because the classes were small and the teachers were focused on teaching. I just wanted to point this out because I'm sure it reflects my opinions on big-name universities. IMHO, if you can get into a Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc... then yes you should go. If you can't get into the absolute top, then the school does not matter as much as long as it's an accredited institution.
_corbett 16y ago
I went to MIT and could not have been happier with my decision. Highest concentration of amazing people in the world IMHO (and I am proud to call a quite a few of them friends) and a huge density of inspiration. As for $100k, I went for free (c.f. financial aid) but would happily have taken out loans. A big name school is not necessary for everyone by any means, and in fact if I had my current skills and network when I was 18 I wouldn't choose to go again (well I'd skip university altogether) but for me it was invaluable.
drgath 16y ago
Doug Crockford has a degree in Radio & TV from San Francisco State University. /thread
bane 16y ago
http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator has been an unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners. One of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters where people went to college.
bane 16y ago
It depends, I've worked in industry and startups for about 15 years. Time and again I've found that people I work with from $BIG_NAME tend to not be the best performers. Often they operate with presumption that they should be in top positions, but rarely do the kinds of crap work that would actually earn them that slot. This can cause tons of friction in a team and I've personally found it better to try and not have people from $BIG_NAME on the team if I can help it. I've also found that they are rarely innovators or out-of-the-box thinkers. They tend to be conformists and try to execute within the given rule set to the best of their ability. However, I think perhaps my anecdotal experience runs contrary to the fact of how many SV types come from $BIG_NAME. Perhaps it's the circles I tend to work in, selecting less from $BIG_NAME and more from $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL...perhaps all the folks from $BIG_NAME are people I'm seeing who have slid quite down the ladder with respect to their peers and aren't star performers no matter what. Back in my college days at $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL I did notice that there were very few SV companies recruiting there and many more of the huge defense contractor type. It was alarmingly easy to get an internship at one of those huge companies and disappear into a long, but often reasonably rewarding career in the government. Some of the problems the government works on are impressively hard (see SV darling Palantir for an example) and there's no shortage of incredible people I've met who decidedly didn't go to $BIG_NAME and do fantastic, mind-blowing stuff. I think early in your career it can mean something. And except for a few holdouts that care about some largely irrelevant piece of paper you bought a decade before (see Google), most places won't care after 5 years in the field and I've found most people end up more or less even in term of pay, responsibility, position, etc. If you are starting your own company? It doesn't matter at all.
aaront 16y ago
In Canada, at least, the quality of education is monitored closely by the accreditation board. A degree from one university, for all intents and purposes, is equal to another. I go to a fairly good school for Software Engineering with a good reputation, but definitely not the best (by some standards). A lot of people consider Waterloo to be the "best" CS/Software Eng. school in Canada, but I end up getting the exact same degree. I've done the same courses, with some brilliant minds behind the podium. Mind you, my choice was also on the environment surrounding the program. The impression I had when I visited Waterloo was fairly bad. The campus is a huge sprawl, and not too many people on campus looked like they were having a good time. My tour guide, a software engineer, told us that Waterloo was the only place to go if I wanted to get a good job when I graduated. As well, beyond residences on campus, there wasn't a whole lot of housing surrounding the campus. Students are sprawled out around, leading to (in my opinion) not the true university experience. I'm currently a tour guide for my program, and I usually get the question: "Why would I go here when I can go to Waterloo?". First of all, I know this guy/girl is probably being forced to look at other schools as a backup plan, and I also know that I have about 60 seconds to state my case before he/she loses interest. My university was one of the first in Canada to have a Software Eng. program, and had several interesting "sub"-degrees with Software Eng & Game Design and Software Eng & Embedded Systems. The campus is beautiful and fairly compact--you can get from the furthest point in the campus to the other side in less than 10 minutes. People are socializing outside. In the spring, the field in the middle of campus is full of people having picnics and playing pick-up soccer, football, and cricket. I tell the student that it's not so much about where you'll be in 4-5 years, but how you get there that's important. University was my first taste of the world, and I'd much rather have a good experience transitioning to the working world than asking myself about what I actually did in the past few years.
denisonwright 16y ago
Here is my general take on this: Going to a top school can probably be a great experience, have you learn things from top professors/researchers in the field, get exposure to great companies recruiting at the university, be part of a pool of highly competitive high achieving students, etc. All this is probably worth a lot and might lead to one being better prepared, having connection or access to a network of people who might have more influence, connections, means, etc. However, there is not sure path to success and the things mentioned above might give one a higher chance at success, but no guarantee. I would say that ones personality, ambition, and hard work play a huge factor in ones success, perhaps even a bigger factor, so I believe someone can be successful irrespective of the school they attended. Taking on $100K+ debt at such young age is a huge risk as well. There are many problems with debt, but the major one I consider is how it ties you down and prevents you from taking risks and being able to take risks at a young age is really important. If one graduates with lots of debt, one has to have a steady job (and hopefully one that pays very well) to meet the financial obligations. That might hinder one's ability to take a job at an early stage startup or other opportunities that might enable one to learn and grow faster than working at a more stable company. I personally like experiencing freedom from debt (as much as possible), so I would (and did) pursue the best educational option that would only cost an amount that I feel would still grant me a certain degree of freedom/risk-taking ability.
kadavy 16y ago
I often wish I had attended a big-name university. When I chose a college, I didn't give it much thought. I didn't get much advice or guidance on what a big decision choosing a college was. Plus, I would have been too scared to move very far away from Nebraska, where I was born and raised. I wasn't surrounded by people who encouraged - or even considered - this sort of behavior. Through a crazy turn of events, I eventually ended up living and working in Silicon Valley. I met many people who went to Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and found that I got along with them very well. It was the first time I was surrounded by people I understood, and I was 25 years old. With my upbringing, I expected them to be God-like, but it seemed like most of them were coastal people with backgrounds through which it seemed natural for them to go to schools like that. I made some great connections in the valley, but I still think I could have done better if I had college friends there from one of these universities. There was nobody in my social and professional circles that was from my school. Meanwhile, college friends from these schools were starting successful startups. Everything has turned out pretty well so far, but I often wonder what my life would be like if I had been encouraged to try to go to a better school.

83 points by meadhikari 16y ago

I think more than a "big-name" university, it is important to go to a university with a great course structure (which most "big-name" universities do have). I've often looked at courses at MIT, Stanford, CMU etc and said "I wish this course was offered at my school" or "I wish this course was structured like this at my school".

stcredzero 16y ago
Even better: go somewhere there is a prof you really click with and who would make for a great mentor. Difficult to imagine a practical way to do this? Congrats, you've stumbled on what's wrong with higher education in the US today!

ffffruit 16y ago

I would argue: it depends. I live and work in London ; the only places where I've seen recruiters or job ads specifically ask for a 'red brick' or 'top ten' university degrees is the financial domain. They specifically ask and check for a top ten university in order to hire you for most jobs, be it analyst or IT consultant. I would also argue that the pay scales you get there reflect this. Most startups I've seen, again in London, dont really care where you are coming from. I used to work with one which basically said 'we dont care how you look or where you finished uni or even if you did, we just want you to be a) hard working b) smart working c) eager to learn'. Worked very good for them as they are now a successful business and most people have stuck around for years. I now work in a "top 3" uni in central London and we also dont care where yo u got your degree from. Our job ads are, by law, neutral - we are not able to distinct between candidates based on university alone. Again, works fine for us. It doesn't matter where you went, it only matters what you are. At the end of the day, I myself did not finish a 'big name' university,far from it, and its worked out well for me.

ottbot 16y ago
I'm doing my MSc at potentially the same "top 3" uni in central London, after getting my undergraduate from a school much lower on the league tables. The biggest thing I've noticed, not considering any sort of academic rigor/quality differences, is the amount of on campus recruiting and outreach from big name employers in finance and engineering. It seems like there's someone on campus from DB, Barclays Capital, EY, Lehman, etc, everyday for the first month or so of the year. There's also things like opportunities to apply for McLaren racing sent from the department office -- things like that didn't exist at my old uni. It's not necessarily the case that these things would be unattainable, but you're much more aware of these opportunities at big name schools. The biggest boon comes if you're interested in entering the financial sector, or if you're really set on following the whole "graduate scheme" path. But like you suggest, it doesn't really matter outside of that.
gaius 16y ago
It's also a means to filter out the hundreds of CVs, many of which will be sent "on spec", from people who just send a CV to every job ad, down to a level at which someone can actually read them. Certainly it is the case that once upon a time, any degree was a "leg up" in your career, back when only 10% of school leavers went. Nowadays, that the last government set out to get 50% of school leavers into college, only Russell Group degrees still have that advantage - everywhere else adds little to your prospects above good A-levels.
ig1 16y ago
Not true, it's perfectly legal to distinguish candidates by university. It's not a protected category. (I'm not a lawyer; but I have had training in the legal aspects of hiring and I run a job board)
- ffffruit 16y ago
  Are you 100% sure? Doesn't the whole 'equal opportunities' scheme dictate that you cant ?
  - ig1 16y ago

patio11 16y ago

I went to a major US research institution and double degreed in CS and East Asian Studies (Japanese, basically). The quality of the Japanese program was life-changing for me. The quality of the CS program -- meh, I'm not unhappy with it, but neither the instruction nor the brand name was worth substantially more than the equivalent degree from a less prestigious institution. Sevenish-years later I can guarantee you that no one who I do business with cares a lick about the name of my university. They don't ask, I don't tell. (Same with GPA, major, and specific wording of the degree, by the way. My professors and advisors carried on as if these were really important when I was in school. I actually cried when some minor academic rule looked like it was going to knock my degree from $ARBITRARY_LETTERS to $EQUALLY_ARBITRARY_LETTERS. I strongly suggest college kids have a professional mentor outside of academia in whatever industry/culture/etc they want to seek employment in, so you can figure out whether the things academia are so obsessed with actually matter at all.) This is, obviously, influenced by my career choices. If I had done what many kids at my university did and gone into investment banking, management consulting, or the like, I would have a 4x scale replica of my diploma made so that one could not help reading the name when one entered my office.

patio11 16y ago
Whoopsie. I just remembered that the YC application actually does ask for university, GPA, and major. I won't speak for pg and the gang, but I strongly suspect that these exhibit an exponential decay in saliency the longer you have been out of school. (i.e. if you're still in school, maybe getting good grades at a good school is a useful proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff, but if you have been out of school for seven years, having done meaningful stuff is a much better proxy for future ability to do meaningful stuff.)
- daniel-cussen 16y ago
  They don't ask for GPA.
  - patio11 16y ago
    You are correct. Please accept my apologies.

_delirium 16y ago

It depends on what you want to do, I think. I found my undergrad university's reputation useful for a few years; it wasn't very "big-name", but it was well-respected in its area (hmc.edu). I wanted to do sort of media/humanities oriented AI, artificial-creativity/etc. kind of stuff, and the fact that I came from a school with a solid technical reputation made people take me more seriously, and kept me out of the "guy who wants to do AI and read too many sci-fi books but doesn't have the technical chops" category. But either way it only matters for a few years. Once you've done something for 3-5 years since college, it's unusual for anyone to care greatly where you went to college. The other main factor is whether a university has strong recruiting relationships, which isn't identical to big-nameness, but can correlate with it. If lots of companies come to the school's career fair every year expecting to hire N graduates, it can make it easier to get in the door.

algorias 16y ago

It's interesting (if not disturbing) to see just how big of a gamble Americans are forced to make with their college decision. I'm lucky to live in a country (Switzerland) where college is practically free, making the whole thing a non-issue.

smcl 16y ago
Same thing here in Scotland. However even though we have plenty of good universities, we don't have anything quite like MIT, Harvard or Caltech.
- nickbarnwell 16y ago
  While it's no comparison for the global recognition that like Harvard, Oxbridge, et. al enjoy, within certain fields the Scottish Unis are quite well known. For example, Edinburgh is widely regarded to be the worldwide leader in AI Research, and St. Andrews has a renowned International Relations division.
troels 16y ago
Yes, it's a surreal thought really. When I was in my late teens, I was certainly not capable of dealing with that kind of decisions. Must be very hard.
- jarek 16y ago
  Yup. I'm really happy with the university decision I made when I was 17, because I now realize I didn't know shit and it was mostly through luck that I ended up making a decent one.

andrewcooke 16y ago

The one way an education at a "big name" university has helped me is that people trust me more. I moved from academia (astronomy) to software engineering and I have no formal qualifications (or training) in what I do for a living. But once people hear where I went they assume the best. I have noticed this several times. In retrospect I find the way that class and education are linked to be terrible (you could pretty much divide the place up into rich people and smart people, with only a small intersection), but it wasn't a bad experience.

kleinsch 16y ago

One thing that's frequently overlooked are the relationships you'll build at school. I went to a very solidly ranked state school (umd.edu), and most of the people I know got jobs at government contractors. I have friends I've met through jobs that went to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and they have a bunch of connections at Google, Facebook, and other hot startups. Getting jobs through personal connections is way more effective than combing Internet ads or dealing with recruiters, and the jobs you'll be exposed to through friends seem to be way better at a top-tier school.

hammerdr 16y ago
This. I was in a really good CS program at a top engineering school. I had great teachers, peers and courses. I had 2 years of real client experience when I walked out the door. That's all well and good. What I learned at school was far more on the social side. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to be more outgoing. I learned how to be comfortable with a large group of people. I did stupid things. I made life long friends. I made connections that continue to help me. You have to learn this stuff in a trial by fire. College is good because it a) forces you into those trials by nature of the beast and b) is expected that you screw up a few times in your college years.

ig1 16y ago

I don't know about the US but in the UK it does matter. If you have a university which takes students with A* average grades and a university with D average grades, they don't teach the same syllabus. It just doesn't make sense, universities have to teach a syllabus that matches the ability of it's student body. There's also significant difference in employability by university (statistically speaking).

dasil003 16y ago
My impression as an american is that grades mean more in UK schools than they do in the US where grade inflation has reached almost comical levels.
- araneae 16y ago
  The grades probably mean more, but that doesn't mean that the students in more elite universities in the US don't learn more than their counterparts at other schools. At Cornell, all the classes were curved, and the curve was set (in most intro classes, somewhere between a C+ and a B). That meant if you wanted to get a B you had to beat at least half the people in the course. If those people got 1600 on their SATs and had gotten a 5 on their AP comp sci exam they're a bit more of a challenge than kids of lesser qualifications.
  - nickbarnwell 16y ago
    If I'm understanding correctly the parent is referring to high school, where to a large extent I can't help but agree. The situation at the university level is much different, as illustrated by your example.

iqster 16y ago

Random thoughts from my experience: 1) Doing a fifth year Masters at the same University is a waste. It is better to go to a different school. You get to meet new people, get exposed to different perspectives, and perhaps even live in a different part of the country. 2) If you are not rich and do not get into a top-10 school, taking on a 100K in debt for college is a bad idea. 3) Getting into a top-10 school is hard. If someone suggests the "transfer after 2-years" option, ask them for stats. Be aware of "self-selection" in that people who bother applying will likely have solid stats to begin with. 4) The key benefits of a top-10 school are networking/peers and the school's selectivity. When it comes to knowledge, classes are useless IMHO. You can get more complete information in books. If you are truly stuck with a concept, you can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you. Oh .. and don't forget about all those lectures online :-) 5) Not having a lot of school-related debt makes it less stressful to become a young entrepreneur. 6) If you did a solid but cheap undergrad program, doing a course-based Masters at a top school might be worth it. 7) If you want to go into academia, school matters. Top-20 is okay for undergrad. Top-10 (general or field specific) for grad is a must.

impendia 16y ago
"You can hop on a bus to the local elite school and convince a grad student or professor to explain something to you." Really. You've tried this? Because grad students and professors aren't busy at all...
- kd0amg 16y ago
  I might, probably just for the change of pace (though if you're looking for me, I'm more likely to be in the lab than in my office).
- lacker 16y ago
  I haven't tried it. But I've seen it done, and more. When I was a grad student at Berkeley, there was a computational biology class where another student (I'll call him SG) and I hung around afterwards to talk to the professor. I assumed that he, like me, was looking for an advisor. The reality was a bit different. SG wasn't a student at all. He worked from home as a programmer doing boring stuff and lived an hour away. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he drove to Berkeley, snuck into the CS department by coasting behind someone else who left the door open, and went to the graduate classes he thought were interesting. On day 1, SG asked the professor if he could sit in without formally registering for class. Sure, why not, the profs don't care about the administrivia. Halfway through the semester, SG explained his whole situation to the prof (and me, because I was waiting around too). How he was extremely motivated, hard working, and wanted to learn, and would work half-time for free indefinitely if someday there might be a job there for him. How could the prof say no? Over the next few months, SG gets a lot done. A lot more than your average Berkeley grad student with no real-world software engineering experience. So when the prof next gets some grant money, it's a no-brainer to hire him full time. Suddenly SG has an interesting job and a great resume. You can do a lot just with persistence....

jakevoytko 16y ago

Like most things, it depends. If you want to program in the industry, the name on your degree doesn't help you much. I couldn't justify paying for the big-name private university that accepted me, so I got a BS in CS from The College of New Jersey, and have since been fortunate enough to work at Google. I also paid off my student loans within 10 months of graduation. If you go this route, and do extra work on the side, you might get the same education you could at a top university. But you will have no help. A difference I didn't appreciate when I was 17 is the support structure a big-name university provides. They already have contacts everywhere, plus you're more likely to be surrounded with self-starters and high-energy workers. If you need help, you might get it. But if you want to work at a top research university, you might want to get the biggest name on your degree you can. I know a few PhDs who complain that degrees flow downhill - they feel they must get jobs in the industry, since they have degrees from second-tier schools. When they came to the USA, they viewed an economically-priced degree as the better deal. But there is a glut of people with degrees from top universities who are looking for research positions, so they believe theirs don't come up for consideration.

drgath 16y ago
I agree with this. It largely depends on where you want to take your career. I don't have a CS degree from $BIG_NAME, never had to take out a loan, and am very happy with my career thus far. If you want a top research position, yes, $BIG_NAME CS degree is almost required. If you want to work for Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc... It helps, but certainly isn't required. If you want to work for a startup or any other company, it doesn't matter at all. What matters is that you know your shit. $BIG_COMPANY isn't going to turn you down because you don't have a CS degree from Stanford even though you wowed them with your knowledge. All they care about is that you are you smart and gets shit done. That doesn't come from a degree, that comes from you.

ry0ohki 16y ago

To me as a someone hiring, the "big name" part doesn't matter, but the school itself does. The curriculums are just not the same everywhere. I worked in a computer lab of an "online university" at the same time I was getting my Comp Sci degree at a large state school, and was shocked to see that Juniors in the online university had projects where they had to write a Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion app in Java (this was more basic then my freshman level comp sci!). That said, you shouldn't just limit to Harvard, CMU etc... There is a very small four year school near us that I've seen crank out extremely smart Comp sci people, who have learned better fundamentals then people I know from CMU.

ry0ohki 16y ago
I should also say school only matters for people with < 3 years of work experience. After that I find the experience itself much more important.

damoncali 16y ago

I wouldn't trade the experience of watching Big 8 football from the student section for all the ivy in the world. I've said it before - too many young people are being pushed through life. It's a tragic waste of enthusiasm.

known 16y ago

Yes, if you need a job after education.

chollida1 16y ago

In one of the stackoverflow podcasts Joel did touch on this. I believe this comment was that a "big-name" school won't get you hired. Conversely not going to a "big-name" school won't get you excluded from hiring. To paraphrase what I remember him saying... The only thing a that going to a top school gets you is your resume move to the top of the pile when doing interviews. Meaning if they are hiring 2 people and the people who have the big name school on their resume do well then the person with out the big name school won't get a crack at the interview.

tmekjian 16y ago

As a graduate from a "big name" university I would say I am a little biased but honestly it depends on a few things but ultimately comes down to one principle: You will get out of school what you want. In that I mean, there are people who go to "big name" schools and make ZERO connections and take off after 4 years wondering why they took on 100k in debt. Then there are people who go to small schools (like my wife) who meet lots of great people in their field who eventually will be a great resource for them (eg, my wife now works at Google). She has zero debt and works beside graduates of top schools from around the country. Now personally, I think that she is the exception and not the rule. The biggest advantage of going to a big name school is that it lets you get your foot in the door. You never have to "hide" the fact that you went to a small school, and there will inevitably be times that you fill out an application and wish that you could put down Stanford/MIT/Univ. of Michigan Good luck in your decision. Remember that you will probably adjust your career path during college and that a school that offers an overall brilliant student body and faculty will only help you down the road.

deleted 16y ago

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bryanwb 16y ago

i went to a top-twenty liberal arts school in the US and frankly it wasn't worth the $. Further, top-tier private schools dumb you down when it comes to life skills because they coddle you. If I was this kid I would go to SUNY Binghamton A good school can help you but you really have to ask yourself if it worth $200,000 USD Also, this 18 year old may change his mind in two years about his major and decide that he wants to teach high school science, in which case he will be screwed financially.

nicpottier 16y ago

I went to CMU and dropped out after two years when I decided I was learning a lot more at a summer internship than I was at school. (this back in '96 BTW) Things that have surprised me: - the name does open the door more than you'd think, even to this day, it gets respect, even when I always disclaim it with dropping out - I don't think the quality of the education was particularly better, but the quality of the students was. Being surrounded by people that make you feel like a moron is a good life experience. - It won't automatically get you hired, but it will make people spend a bit more time on you. So I don't know, my advice? Drop out or transfer after a couple years, because jesus christ that shit is expensive these days.

SkyMarshal 16y ago
Dropping out of a top ranked CS program b/c you can learn/do/achieve/earn more on your own = the new MS.

meinhimmel 16y ago

I go to a 'meh' school, but it was by choice for me. I'm a math major for the theoretical background, and then a computer science major for the practical background. I do what I love, and I take misc. classes enough that my parents are legitimately worried about me becoming a 'professional student'. I didn't apply to any other schools than the one I'm at now. I believed that the campus was beautiful, and so I applied here. I could have gotten into any school I'd like to think, but life is too short to be worried about future financial gains or something like that. I'd rather go somewhere with a beautiful campus than be a person that's worried about some potential future monetary gains. Money is just money after all. After you have enough to buy a plane ticket to get to Google IO, what more could you really want? It's worked out for me fairly well though. I met a professor, and he's become a mentor in my life. We worked on a research project together last summer, and he has the connections to get my resume in at almost anywhere I'd want to go. He worked at Motorola in their research labs for 16 years, and he knows people that have been at Google, Microsoft, etc. from their very beginnings. Don't worry about what school you go to. Go to the school you want despite things such as academic standing or something equally silly. Things have a way of working themselves out if you give it a bit of effort. Just remember that life is about more than just your grades.

ohyes 16y ago

My impression is that at 'big name' schools you don't really have much interaction with your professors, until you are at least at graduate level (and even then the doctoral students who get the attention, not the lowly masters students). In my opinion, what you are paying for at college is one on one time with intelligent people. Your peers and your professors. If the classes at the school consist of sitting through gigantic lectures, I feel like you are kind of missing out. There is currently a glut of talent competing for teaching jobs at universities, even at a slightly below top-tier school, you are likely to find capable, intelligent professors (as well as students). And at a smaller school you will get one on one time with those professors much more readily. You do, however, also want to make sure that the caliber of other students around you is high. It is hard to be motivated in an environment where you can simply breeze through everything that your classmate struggle with. I don't know about what to do in terms of landing a job. It seems to me that landing a first job is one thing (aided by a 'big-name' school, but having the appropriate skills to develop an entire career is entirely different (no one care where you got your degree once they hire you). My preference would be with the career developing skills, rather than the job-acquiring piece of paper. Others probably have different experiences. The important thing is to really consider your options and decide what is best for you. (You might not even like CS by the time you graduate).

silverlake 16y ago

It gets your foot in the door for your 1st and, maybe, 2nd job. If your first job is Google or Apple or Facebook, then you have an advantage going into your 2nd job or startup. This advantage compounds over your career. I went to a giant mid-western school with no recruiters from hot SV companies. Instead only large corporations came to hire drones. This is a significant disadvantage. It's not insurmountable, but it does suck. There is an assumption that a degree from Fancy School means you're smart. Also, I've noticed that many people from Fancy School have more self-confidence that allows them to take bigger risks. I was awed by MIT until I worked with someone with straight A's in CS there. He wasn't any smarter than me, but he did work 10X harder than me. I'm lazy.

imcqueen 16y ago

I think most people are saying the same thing, but the general idea is this: -Get good grades. Grades definitely matter. I worked at a local startup during college and I thought it mattered more than my grades. I now regret not putting that effort towards my academic performance. -Choose the best school you can afford and keep in mind that graduate school is becoming very common. If you have too much undergrad debt you may be forced to make a grad school decision based on finances.

andywood 16y ago

I think it really depends on you. More specifically, it depends on your learning style, how self-motivated you are, and how outgoing you are. There are big pros and big cons on both sides. I have a high school education. I've also been an extremely motivated self-learner and voracious reader since early childhood. I'm one of those who learned programming on my own, from books, at age 12, and then spent most of my waking life over the next 8 years writing code and reading about software development. And yes, for me it is something I truly love from the core of my being, and will never, ever be just a job. Although somewhat introverted, I tend to be very enthusiastic and aggressive while job-hunting. I started my software career at 20 and advanced very quickly during the dot-com boom. I just finished a 5-year stint at Microsoft. I don't think I could have landed a job at Google 5 years ago, but I've been contacted by their recruiters since leaving MS, and I believe I'd have a shot if I really poured myself into reviewing/studying the right subject matter. As I see it, the main advantage of my route is that I've never had any significant debt, but I still made the senior dev salary and the bonuses. More importantly, this has made it very easy for me to take time off between jobs to work on the side-projects that keep my love of programming strong. I'm on my second full-blown sabbatical in 10 years, working happily on my own dime, bootstrapping a one-man game development 'studio'. The main disadvantage is that I usually feel like I have to work to initially convince people that I'm good, and I do actively wonder whether I can get hired at certain companies. Conversely, I've worked with lots of people with Ivy League degrees. All those I've met are still paying off the loans, even in their late 20's - even at 30 (but as loans go, the interest is pretty low and the payments are small compared to their income). But on the office grapevine, when someone mentions that X went to Yale or Y went to Princeton, it's obvious that this sets up a positive expectation. Colleagues and managers start off expecting that they're good. I find I have to build a good reputation over time _first_, before people start talking about me that way. Also, these people always know lots of people working at other top employers, where I generally have to go out and meet people cold to find new opportunities (which I don't mind). So I'd say it depends on which of those trade-offs sounds more appealing to you, based on your personality and inclinations.

jchonphoenix 16y ago

This is purely anecdotal, but is probably less biased than most responses for I've experienced both sides of the table. It also reflects my perception at the time which may be skewed. In April of my Junior year of High School, I decided to graduate a year early and attend college. This was way after admissions deadlines, but the University of Pittsburgh let me in, so I decided to spend my "senior" year there. I then transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my degree. There were many major differences between the two. Namely, at Pitt, the professors were much better at explaining course material. However, the course material was also much easier and much simpler to understand. Where at Pitt, the professor would teach you combinatorics, at Carnegie Mellon, the professor would ATTEMPT to teach you combinatorics, then force you to do a problem set filled with Putnam level combinatorics problems. The result was you learned much more at CMU because much more material was covered. In addition, you were forced to learn on your own or else you would fail. At Pitt, few people drop out of their degree program because they can't handle the course load. There are a large number of people who drop out because they spend too much time partying, but if you put in the effort, you will receive a degree. Carnegie Mellon is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. In high school, I was top of my class, 1500's on my SATs, 5's on 6 AP exam's, made it to the USAMO. At Carnegie Mellon, I was just another above average student. Being well rounded meant absolutely nothing. The kid who failed English in high school but completely upset the curve in the class made you scramble the rest of the semester. Sure, I did well. But I was by far not the most intelligent student that professors fawn over. That person is a friend of mine. He placed in the top few at ICPC World Finals and can solve Putnam problems easily. He also doesn't know the definition of entertainment and, according to his housemate, hasn't been back to his room in 2 weeks for he's been sleeping in the library. When he was my TA, he gave me a word of advice. Go on amazon and buy yourself a shipment of the largest packet of Red Bull and Jolt you can find (he preferred Jolt). He was not wrong. The famously difficult 15-251 (that he TAed) forced you to spend 30-40 hours a week on the homework. I felt the absolute dumbest I have ever felt in my entire life. This was the first (and only) class I have ever taken where I've seen multiple students break down and cry during an exam. As a side note, the mathematics of CS was always much harder than programming. IMO programming is easy. This all paid off when I went to apply for internships. At the Pitt career fair, there were many large companies. Google and Microsoft showed up, but besides these two, no scrappy startups or hot valley companies were present. CS students were expected to work for the tech departments of Alcoa, or Union Railroad. Google or Microsoft was a big deal. At Carnegie Mellon, Google and Microsoft was the standard. Recruiters literally mob you to try to get your attention. A friend once joked after seeing the Spacex booth and their recruiters that Spacex was implementing the next level of recruiting for top level nerds: booth babes. If you had put any effort into your classes and actually had some coding ability, you were bound to land an internship. As I said, Google and Microsoft were prestigious but expected for those that were in the top 20% of their class. The most prestigious internships always came from Facebook and Palantir. Coincidentally, Palantir quickly gained fame throughout Carnegie Mellon for having the cockiest employees and the most killer interviews. They expected you to eat algorithms for breakfast and solve ACM ICPC World finals level problems in their interviews. At my internship at Microsoft after my second year of college, I also noticed some very telling signs of benefits of a top tier University. The best developers and most intelligent students all came from MIT, CMU, and Waterloo (I met no Stanford people). Even those that came from good schools such as Georgia Tech or Cornell had a marked difference in ability. Every student from the top tier CS institutions could out-code, out-theory, and out-problem solve all their peers. Was this due to intelligence? Maybe. But I highly suspect that this was also due to schooling. People from other universities had just never been exposed to the same kick-ass curriculum that we had been. They learned Dijkstra's, Union-Find, and Red Black Trees in their senior year. We learned it our freshman year. They knew hash table's were and how they worked. We implemented hash tables with 3 different hashing scheme's and learned about the bleeding edge algorithms in hashing such as Cuckoo hashing. They were taught splay trees. We were taught splay trees then had to rederive them on our final because our professor had invented them. They learned lisp. We had SML beaten into our heads by the best programming languages department in the country. They learned about Operating Systems, "wrote" one in python or java, and did so by filling in the blanks like parts of the scheduler and maybe some parts of vm. We wrote one in C and asm, from scratch starting with a blank file. We implemented a pre-emptive kernel with the ability to load programs and run on bare hardware. There was literally no way the other students from other universities could compete. We'd just had hundreds of times more practice than they had. As a side note, I'm not sure who has the better deal because they partied/slept 8 hours a night on average. For us, sleep was a luxury. What's the moral of this story? I don't really know. Top tier universities are hard--really hard. I've heard CMU and MIT are the two most difficult CS universities, so my opinion may be skewed. The most relaxing time of these 4 years has been during my internships. I got full nights of sleep and only worked up to 12 hours a day. I honestly feel that I've learned much more than my peers at other schools, but this is probably due to the fact that the material has been forcefully whipped into my brain, and I've spent many hundreds of hours more than my peers practicing and studying the material. The professors at CMU are more brilliant, but there appears to be an inverse correlation between brilliance and teaching ability.

kd5bjo 16y ago

I interview most of the job candidates that we get at Justin.tv for technical positions. Once you get to the point that I see you, what degree you have doesn't matter at all. For most candidates, I never look or ask about their education. I used to, but the correlation between education history and hirability is weak enough to be useless to someone in my position. I think that most of the employees that are evaluating resumes feel about the same, as well. What's important to us is whether or not you can actually write code and reason about computer science problems; what path you've taken to get there doesn't really matter.

matwood 16y ago

I went to a small state college (www.cofc.edu). I feel that I received a very good education in CS mainly because the classes were small and the teachers were focused on teaching. I just wanted to point this out because I'm sure it reflects my opinions on big-name universities. IMHO, if you can get into a Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc... then yes you should go. If you can't get into the absolute top, then the school does not matter as much as long as it's an accredited institution.

_corbett 16y ago

I went to MIT and could not have been happier with my decision. Highest concentration of amazing people in the world IMHO (and I am proud to call a quite a few of them friends) and a huge density of inspiration. As for $100k, I went for free (c.f. financial aid) but would happily have taken out loans. A big name school is not necessary for everyone by any means, and in fact if I had my current skills and network when I was 18 I wouldn't choose to go again (well I'd skip university altogether) but for me it was invaluable.

drgath 16y ago

Doug Crockford has a degree in Radio & TV from San Francisco State University. /thread

bane 16y ago

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html Between the volume of people we judge and the rapid, unequivocal test that's applied to our choices, Y Combinator has been an unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick winners. One of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it matters where people went to college.

bane 16y ago

It depends, I've worked in industry and startups for about 15 years. Time and again I've found that people I work with from $BIG_NAME tend to not be the best performers. Often they operate with presumption that they should be in top positions, but rarely do the kinds of crap work that would actually earn them that slot. This can cause tons of friction in a team and I've personally found it better to try and not have people from $BIG_NAME on the team if I can help it. I've also found that they are rarely innovators or out-of-the-box thinkers. They tend to be conformists and try to execute within the given rule set to the best of their ability. However, I think perhaps my anecdotal experience runs contrary to the fact of how many SV types come from $BIG_NAME. Perhaps it's the circles I tend to work in, selecting less from $BIG_NAME and more from $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL...perhaps all the folks from $BIG_NAME are people I'm seeing who have slid quite down the ladder with respect to their peers and aren't star performers no matter what. Back in my college days at $LOCAL_STATE_SCHOOL I did notice that there were very few SV companies recruiting there and many more of the huge defense contractor type. It was alarmingly easy to get an internship at one of those huge companies and disappear into a long, but often reasonably rewarding career in the government. Some of the problems the government works on are impressively hard (see SV darling Palantir for an example) and there's no shortage of incredible people I've met who decidedly didn't go to $BIG_NAME and do fantastic, mind-blowing stuff. I think early in your career it can mean something. And except for a few holdouts that care about some largely irrelevant piece of paper you bought a decade before (see Google), most places won't care after 5 years in the field and I've found most people end up more or less even in term of pay, responsibility, position, etc. If you are starting your own company? It doesn't matter at all.

aaront 16y ago

In Canada, at least, the quality of education is monitored closely by the accreditation board. A degree from one university, for all intents and purposes, is equal to another. I go to a fairly good school for Software Engineering with a good reputation, but definitely not the best (by some standards). A lot of people consider Waterloo to be the "best" CS/Software Eng. school in Canada, but I end up getting the exact same degree. I've done the same courses, with some brilliant minds behind the podium. Mind you, my choice was also on the environment surrounding the program. The impression I had when I visited Waterloo was fairly bad. The campus is a huge sprawl, and not too many people on campus looked like they were having a good time. My tour guide, a software engineer, told us that Waterloo was the only place to go if I wanted to get a good job when I graduated. As well, beyond residences on campus, there wasn't a whole lot of housing surrounding the campus. Students are sprawled out around, leading to (in my opinion) not the true university experience. I'm currently a tour guide for my program, and I usually get the question: "Why would I go here when I can go to Waterloo?". First of all, I know this guy/girl is probably being forced to look at other schools as a backup plan, and I also know that I have about 60 seconds to state my case before he/she loses interest. My university was one of the first in Canada to have a Software Eng. program, and had several interesting "sub"-degrees with Software Eng & Game Design and Software Eng & Embedded Systems. The campus is beautiful and fairly compact--you can get from the furthest point in the campus to the other side in less than 10 minutes. People are socializing outside. In the spring, the field in the middle of campus is full of people having picnics and playing pick-up soccer, football, and cricket. I tell the student that it's not so much about where you'll be in 4-5 years, but how you get there that's important. University was my first taste of the world, and I'd much rather have a good experience transitioning to the working world than asking myself about what I actually did in the past few years.

denisonwright 16y ago

Here is my general take on this: Going to a top school can probably be a great experience, have you learn things from top professors/researchers in the field, get exposure to great companies recruiting at the university, be part of a pool of highly competitive high achieving students, etc. All this is probably worth a lot and might lead to one being better prepared, having connection or access to a network of people who might have more influence, connections, means, etc. However, there is not sure path to success and the things mentioned above might give one a higher chance at success, but no guarantee. I would say that ones personality, ambition, and hard work play a huge factor in ones success, perhaps even a bigger factor, so I believe someone can be successful irrespective of the school they attended. Taking on $100K+ debt at such young age is a huge risk as well. There are many problems with debt, but the major one I consider is how it ties you down and prevents you from taking risks and being able to take risks at a young age is really important. If one graduates with lots of debt, one has to have a steady job (and hopefully one that pays very well) to meet the financial obligations. That might hinder one's ability to take a job at an early stage startup or other opportunities that might enable one to learn and grow faster than working at a more stable company. I personally like experiencing freedom from debt (as much as possible), so I would (and did) pursue the best educational option that would only cost an amount that I feel would still grant me a certain degree of freedom/risk-taking ability.

kadavy 16y ago

I often wish I had attended a big-name university. When I chose a college, I didn't give it much thought. I didn't get much advice or guidance on what a big decision choosing a college was. Plus, I would have been too scared to move very far away from Nebraska, where I was born and raised. I wasn't surrounded by people who encouraged - or even considered - this sort of behavior. Through a crazy turn of events, I eventually ended up living and working in Silicon Valley. I met many people who went to Stanford, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and found that I got along with them very well. It was the first time I was surrounded by people I understood, and I was 25 years old. With my upbringing, I expected them to be God-like, but it seemed like most of them were coastal people with backgrounds through which it seemed natural for them to go to schools like that. I made some great connections in the valley, but I still think I could have done better if I had college friends there from one of these universities. There was nobody in my social and professional circles that was from my school. Meanwhile, college friends from these schools were starting successful startups. Everything has turned out pretty well so far, but I often wonder what my life would be like if I had been encouraged to try to go to a better school.