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I seriously doubt you've thought this comment through. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, among others, are renowned for producing important research. NCSA Mosaic and LLVM are just two noteworthy technologies coming from research done at UIUC. Alumni have come to form Netscape, AMD, Oracle, and YouTube.

UIUC is the most noteworthy of midwestern universities, but is hardly the only excellent education available to undergraduates and grad students.

I think part of the problem probably starts way before college.

I disagree. While you can't deny the supremacy of the elite coastal universities, there do exist great schools in the Midwest: Uni. of Illinois, Chicago, Case Western, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio State, Northwestern, etc. Oh and probably the most prestigious, Carnegie Mellon.

CMU/Pittsburgh is sort of in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Appalachia at the same time, so everyone gets that credit.

I doubt it's that. It's more likely that it's a combination of low quantity of software/tech jobs and low quality ones. "All" the people with any talent leave for places where these things aren't true.