4 ms·

> But the best students don’t want to attend them Admissions at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD is near Stanford level for in-demand programs like EECS and Busines

> But the best students don’t want to attend them Admissions at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD is near Stanford level for in-demand programs like EECS and Business, and plenty of us Ivy and Ivy-adjacents didn't get into a UC or didn't get Regents (thus potentially making an Ivy Adjacent cheaper). My sibling is much younger, and in their time (late 2010s/early 2020s), admission stats to CS or Business even in "middling" (imo criminally underrated) UCs like UCR or UCSC became comparable to UCB barely a decade ago.

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I'd reemphasize my point. When the discussion turns to public colleges in California, people often think exclusively of the UCs, which are genuinely prestigious and (non-coincidentally) expensive. The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent. For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these programs are very visible. The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate. Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to my sibling as well. This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because high demand programs in Californian public universities (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty or seats per department yet the number of students trying to apply to these programs has skyrocketed
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  Prop 13 (Property tax revolt) wreaked havoc on the UC, Cal State, and Community College systems. Tuition started to creep up at Berkeley shortly after I started a couple of years after the vote but it was absolutely nothing like it is today. Also, the competition to get in to UC schools is crazy. No way in hell I could get in were I to apply today with my high school grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Prop 13 wasn't the issue for us younger applicants (graduated HS in the last 20 years) - it's the austerity measures that were in place across California from 2009-2013. That prevented UCs and CSUs from being able to dynamically expand STEM and Business faculty headcount. That said, even Ivy League programs have fallen into the same trap - CS@Harvard is bursting at the seams and imo, the course quality is middling compared to UCs, UT, UIUC, UW, MIT, CMU, GT, etc, and recruiting isn't that different between a top public CS program and Ivies (the only difference is VC Analyst recruiting, but that's a horrible career that expires in 2-3 years. Only MBAs or experienced EMs/PMs/Founders or a handful of IB Analysts break into partner track [associate and above] roles).
    - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
      I think that was another of many blows to the head and gonads that the California public Universities have suffered. Prop 13 forced the state schools to adopt a private school model. Way back when, there was a tacit agreement that the public schools wouldn't tap private sources and in return, the private schools would be generally supportive of the state schools with respect to Sacramento. That all went by the boards and everyone is now selling off chunks of schools to private entities. In the early 1990s, the UC schools had to offer buyouts/retirements and a lot of very senior faculty left. Many were still in their prime and went to other Universities. Nasty brain drain. I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige. Edit: Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        > I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige. Fair enough! I can't speak for the sciences - only Engineering/CS. CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private sector funding, which is biased towards National Labs, which are overwhelmingly managed by public universities. At the federal level, the DoD and DoE has held this bias for decades due to a mix of pork barrel politicking as well as the fact that public university graduates tend to be overrepresented in career civil service roles. I personally know a couple SES types who purposely redirected CHIPS and IRA funding to flagship universites due to a bit of a grudge against the Private School IVorY tower (though lack of STEM research capacity also played a role) > Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school. As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain extent) Middle management turned upper management in most tech companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts recruiting as well. Ime, other than Penn and Cornell, Harvard and other Ivies are not as well represented compared to a program like EECS@Cal, CS@UT, CS@UW, etc. Most upper level Ivy grads I end up meeting tend to have done grad school at an Ivy (MBA@Wharton/HBS/CBS/Johnson) but undergrad at a public university either domestically (state flagships) or abroad (IIT D/K/B/M to Wharton pipeline) Stanford and MIT are a different story, but they also have much more rigorious admissions and student body. In addition, a lot of my professional (not age - precocious little scamp ain't I [0]) peers in Eng/Sales/VC leadership are at the "sending kids to college" stage, and most of them are sending their kids to flagship public and private engineering programs - not Ivies. This has a downstream impact on the network, as parents will help their kids and their kids friends get jobs and referrals. I personally know a Tech Billionare who sent their kids to a top public CS program despite having the option to send them to MIT or Harvard due to the larger network of mid-level managers turned founders/VCs from that school. And as you can probably tell from this conversation, I'm probably not in favor of giving a leg up to hiring or funding Ivy/Ivy Adjacent graduates, and I am in a position to make that choice. There are plenty of others like me. Tl;Dr - the tech industry has made upward mobility easier by overemphasizing work experience over Ivy/Private pedigree to a certain extent. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I'd reemphasize my point. When the discussion turns to public colleges in California, people often think exclusively of the UCs, which are genuinely prestigious and (non-coincidentally) expensive. The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent.

alephnerd 2y ago
> The CSU system is larger, much cheaper, and thus entirely invisible to most who identify as Ivy-adjacent. For top Californian students targeting Eng/CS these programs are very visible. The good CSU programs (Eng/Business @ SJSU, SDSU, and CalPoly SLO) tend to overprotect their yield rate. Personally, I and a significant proportion of my HS friend group would have preferred attending CalPoly SLO (it's a fun campus, great hiking, great beach, great academics, great job placements), but we all got rejected because our scores (SAT/GPA) were way higher than the median, yet we ended up at Ivy Tier programs (EECS@MIT/Berkeley/Stanford/etc). Same thing happened to my sibling as well. This has been an issue for almost 2 decades now because high demand programs in Californian public universities (STEM, Business) haven't increased the amount of faculty or seats per department yet the number of students trying to apply to these programs has skyrocketed
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
Prop 13 (Property tax revolt) wreaked havoc on the UC, Cal State, and Community College systems. Tuition started to creep up at Berkeley shortly after I started a couple of years after the vote but it was absolutely nothing like it is today. Also, the competition to get in to UC schools is crazy. No way in hell I could get in were I to apply today with my high school grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Prop 13 wasn't the issue for us younger applicants (graduated HS in the last 20 years) - it's the austerity measures that were in place across California from 2009-2013. That prevented UCs and CSUs from being able to dynamically expand STEM and Business faculty headcount. That said, even Ivy League programs have fallen into the same trap - CS@Harvard is bursting at the seams and imo, the course quality is middling compared to UCs, UT, UIUC, UW, MIT, CMU, GT, etc, and recruiting isn't that different between a top public CS program and Ivies (the only difference is VC Analyst recruiting, but that's a horrible career that expires in 2-3 years. Only MBAs or experienced EMs/PMs/Founders or a handful of IB Analysts break into partner track [associate and above] roles).
  - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    I think that was another of many blows to the head and gonads that the California public Universities have suffered. Prop 13 forced the state schools to adopt a private school model. Way back when, there was a tacit agreement that the public schools wouldn't tap private sources and in return, the private schools would be generally supportive of the state schools with respect to Sacramento. That all went by the boards and everyone is now selling off chunks of schools to private entities. In the early 1990s, the UC schools had to offer buyouts/retirements and a lot of very senior faculty left. Many were still in their prime and went to other Universities. Nasty brain drain. I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige. Edit: Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > I'll defer to your assessment of CS programs. I studied a science but not computer science. In my experience, an Ivy league name is worth a huge amount in prestige. Fair enough! I can't speak for the sciences - only Engineering/CS. CS/Eng is much more driven by defense and private sector funding, which is biased towards National Labs, which are overwhelmingly managed by public universities. At the federal level, the DoD and DoE has held this bias for decades due to a mix of pork barrel politicking as well as the fact that public university graduates tend to be overrepresented in career civil service roles. I personally know a couple SES types who purposely redirected CHIPS and IRA funding to flagship universites due to a bit of a grudge against the Private School IVorY tower (though lack of STEM research capacity also played a role) > Also, the contacts one makes at an Ivy or a Stanford are leagues ahead of what's available at a public school. As someone who attended an Ivy/Ivy Adjacent, I highly disagree, at least in Eng (and Eng adjacent roles like PM/EM/Sales/Entrepreneaurship and even VC to a certain extent) Middle management turned upper management in most tech companies tended to attend flagship publics in the West Coast/TX/Midwest plus some elite privates like Stanford/Claremont Colleges/USC/CMU, which impacts recruiting as well. Ime, other than Penn and Cornell, Harvard and other Ivies are not as well represented compared to a program like EECS@Cal, CS@UT, CS@UW, etc. Most upper level Ivy grads I end up meeting tend to have done grad school at an Ivy (MBA@Wharton/HBS/CBS/Johnson) but undergrad at a public university either domestically (state flagships) or abroad (IIT D/K/B/M to Wharton pipeline) Stanford and MIT are a different story, but they also have much more rigorious admissions and student body. In addition, a lot of my professional (not age - precocious little scamp ain't I [0]) peers in Eng/Sales/VC leadership are at the "sending kids to college" stage, and most of them are sending their kids to flagship public and private engineering programs - not Ivies. This has a downstream impact on the network, as parents will help their kids and their kids friends get jobs and referrals. I personally know a Tech Billionare who sent their kids to a top public CS program despite having the option to send them to MIT or Harvard due to the larger network of mid-level managers turned founders/VCs from that school. And as you can probably tell from this conversation, I'm probably not in favor of giving a leg up to hiring or funding Ivy/Ivy Adjacent graduates, and I am in a position to make that choice. There are plenty of others like me. Tl;Dr - the tech industry has made upward mobility easier by overemphasizing work experience over Ivy/Private pedigree to a certain extent. [0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uofjc65LEJM