Not exactly your question, but I did poorly in a state university, and dropped out after two years. I figure it cost me a decade of support and ancillary jobs before I fully self-educated in CS fundamentals and started my career as a professional software developer.
I’ve since been quite involved in hiring for large tech companies, and it’s clear that a degree from a top-20 school is far better than from a random one, which is better than no degree, in terms of likelihood of being taken seriously as a junior applicant. It takes 5-10 years of employment before it becomes irrelevant.
Questions of “worth the effort” are very hard to answer, because it’s impossible to know the counterfactuals. On a purely financial and comfort level, it’d have been worth the effort for me to have done better in school, and actually graduated, preferably from a better school. But that’s mostly because it’s easy to discount the cost to past-me of doing so. In fact, I didn’t and maybe couldn’t.
it’s clear that a degree from a top-20 school is far better than from a random one, which is better than no degree, in terms of likelihood of being taken seriously as a junior applicant.
Does this also apply to value (to the company) conditional on hiring?
Does this also apply to value (to the company) conditional on hiring?
To some extent, yes. Graduates from impressive schools seem to have a headstart at being professional contributors to their team. It’s a smaller effect than in hiring because there’s a lot more behavioral and individual variance in the path to valuable employee, and it’s less visible because, after hire, schooling isn’t much discussed. But it’s still somewhat noticeable, which means it’s larger than one might think.
Which is as expected—it’s a time-tested, repeatable, hard-to-fake signal. The fact that it’s painful and really sucks for those who don’t successfully pursue it is irrelevant to the fact that it is correlated to this dimension of fitness.
I would think no, but “conditional on hiring” is doing a lot more work than it looks there. Just like there is (supposedly, I haven’t checked) no correlation between height and scoring among NBA players. But that doesn’t mean that height isn’t a big asset in the NBA!
Not exactly your question, but I did poorly in a state university, and dropped out after two years. I figure it cost me a decade of support and ancillary jobs before I fully self-educated in CS fundamentals and started my career as a professional software developer.
I’ve since been quite involved in hiring for large tech companies, and it’s clear that a degree from a top-20 school is far better than from a random one, which is better than no degree, in terms of likelihood of being taken seriously as a junior applicant. It takes 5-10 years of employment before it becomes irrelevant.
Questions of “worth the effort” are very hard to answer, because it’s impossible to know the counterfactuals. On a purely financial and comfort level, it’d have been worth the effort for me to have done better in school, and actually graduated, preferably from a better school. But that’s mostly because it’s easy to discount the cost to past-me of doing so. In fact, I didn’t and maybe couldn’t.
Does this also apply to value (to the company) conditional on hiring?
To some extent, yes. Graduates from impressive schools seem to have a headstart at being professional contributors to their team. It’s a smaller effect than in hiring because there’s a lot more behavioral and individual variance in the path to valuable employee, and it’s less visible because, after hire, schooling isn’t much discussed. But it’s still somewhat noticeable, which means it’s larger than one might think.
Which is as expected—it’s a time-tested, repeatable, hard-to-fake signal. The fact that it’s painful and really sucks for those who don’t successfully pursue it is irrelevant to the fact that it is correlated to this dimension of fitness.
I would think no, but “conditional on hiring” is doing a lot more work than it looks there. Just like there is (supposedly, I haven’t checked) no correlation between height and scoring among NBA players. But that doesn’t mean that height isn’t a big asset in the NBA!