Ask HN: College name vs. education

Big companies recruit where they know they will find talent (especially for internships). Unfortunately this means name matters more than content. Regional firms also like to hire from the biggest-name school in their vicinity.

That said, CMU, Cal and a handful of other schools with noted CS programs are bigger names in the west coast tech world than most of the Ivy League.

Source: Six years working at different jobs with people from the same seven schools.

Name matters far more than quality of education, which is hard (or currently impossible) to measure, and usually gleaned through your interviews. In fact, name is a proxy for the quality of education. This is true not just at companies, but in graduate programs. I've seen people in evaluating positions openly discriminate on the basis of school.

Also, you give Harvard and Yale as examples of the "good name" schools and UC Berkeley and CMU as examples of "quality education" schools, but it's not that simple. In my experience, schools with smaller programs tend to offer far better educational experiences than schools with very large programs. In this sense, Harvard is more likely to give you a better undergraduate education that UC Berkeley, where huge class sizes make for a very different classroom experience, and you will find it more difficult to get to know your professors than at a smaller school. If I were choosing, I would look for a school that had a good name, modest CS class sizes, high quality peers, and where undergraduates had many opportunities to work closely with faculty. The class size and faculty interaction is where schools like UC Berkeley lose out.

The awful truth is that names matter a lot, even if you want to go into academia, and even for the undergrad school you go to.

The top schools for computer science are: MIT, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. In the programming world, these schools both have the biggest "names" and provide their students with a top-notch education. (But Berkeley is pretty big, so you might get a slightly better education elsewhere.)

Several state schools also have fantastic computer science programs. These are: University of Washington, UT Austin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Georgia Tech. Glancing at the U.S. News CS rankings, it looks like Wisconsin, UCLA, Michigan, UCSD, and Maryland are also up there.

Some of the Ivy League schools also have very good computer science departments: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Cornell. Don't go to Yale for CS. Not sure about Dartmouth.

Caltech is also obviously really good.

If you want to do programming post-graduation, you'd be fine going to any of the schools I listed above. Google, Facebook, etc. recruit from all of them, and I'm sure they'd look good on a resume for a startup. If you go to a school not listed above, you'd probably have a little bit more difficulty getting an interview (though this would get to be less of a problem with time, after you have actual work experience).

If you want to go to graduate school for computer science, make sure you go somewhere where there are lots of good researchers so that you can get involved with research as an undergrad (any of the schools above would do).

Here's where it gets tricky. All of the schools I listed above have prestige in the CS world. However, in the general business world (i.e. not tech companies), and in finance, it's Ivy League schools that have prestige. So, if you want to go into traditional finance or management consulting, you'd be better off going to Yale than Carnegie Mellon. This is what people are talking about when they say that the "name" matters.

TLDR; if you're sure you want to do programming, go to a top CS school (public or private). If you think you might want to do finance or consulting instead, go to an Ivy.

(Source: I'm a CS student at Princeton.)

Nobody seems to care that I attended Caltech.

I actually graduated from UC Santa Cruz; in my actual experience, the classes at UCSC did me quite a lot more good in my career than the ones I took at Caltech. However my degree was in Physics, but the classes that really made a difference to me were psychology, social psychology and anthropology.

In the work world, you see, it helps a great deal to understand other people.

Sure, you want to study computer science today, but who knows after three years. If you do get into HYP, just go to HYP, instead of UCBerkely, CMU, MIT.

Undergrad from HYP can open doors in fields you may like: IB, PE, HF, Consulting, etc, in the case you lose interest in being a programmer. You can become a programmer even after an HYP education.

I'm quickly regretting my decision to be where I am.

My standard advice:

Decide where you want to live. Manhattan, NY is very.different from Manhattan, KS...so to speak. People who are well suited for one are not for the other.

Second piece of advice that's becoming one of my standards;

Decide if you will be happier as a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond. Being below average at MIT is way above average on an absolute scale but for some people it will be utterly miserable to the point they won't thrive.

The big name schools May open doors when you graduate, but in the long run its about what you can do.

Good luck.