Having been involved in quite a bit of college recruiting in my former life as a hiring manager for a development/test org, I learned a couple of very important

Having been involved in quite a bit of college recruiting in my former life as a hiring manager for a development/test org, I learned a couple of very important lessons: - Every real school, no matter how low in the ranking, produces at least one competitive graduate each year and rarely an amazing candidate. - The top schools produce not only a large number of competitive graduates, but also at least one amazing candidate each year. For companies searching for a large number of candidates, hitting the top schools makes a lot of sense. Further, you also start to get data on your hiring so you can know if your yield was low in a given year; if some bad attrition means the manager is likely poor or if that school's candidates are just larger flight risks; etc. Sourcing candidates from small schools, at least for us, usually meant that they had either done something noteworthy or an alum already at the company was contacted by a professor at their alma mater, who passed along a resume and asked us to interview them. That said, the amazing candidates from top schools are usually funneled off to graduate school without ever touching the recruiting process, whereas at non-top-tier schools they are much more recruitable for either a startup or software development shop.