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Comment by geogra4 | Hacker News Reader

What's a 'top tier tech company'? When I went to school at Penn State, we had Amazon, MS, Google, Cisco, Intel, Oracle, etc. all come to our career fair. It's not like quality graduates had trouble finding excellent jobs.

I had a roommate who ended up at JPMorgan, and a few more distant associates really hit the jackpot in the Oil and Gas industry.

I will agree that if your life goal is a 100/hr a week investment banking position or some top tier management consulting position in NYC then a big state school probably isn't where you want to be. But you can't study petroleum engineering at Yale so it works both ways.

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Coming to a career fair is quite a bit different than coming to a school expecting to hire tons of people from there. Lots of companies go to career fairs at certain schools looking to pick off the very tippy-top kids, but they go to Stanford, Harvard, etc, looking to really fill their class. JPM doesn't care if it doesn't pick up anyone at UNC in a given year. It'd be a disaster to the recruiting people if they didn't pick up anyone at Wharton in a given year.

Of course you're right, these companies aren't the beginning and end of the great jobs available to college grads. If you have zero interest in these jobs, going to the most elite schools is much less important. At the same time, there is a reason a quarter of MIT grads end up in finance and consulting (pre-recession, it was a third). For better or worse, they offer relatively low-risk paths into the upper echelons of corporate America.

Penn State is not a typical public university. You might as well have said UC-Berkeley.

Hell Penn is a public university and an Ivy.

Penn and Penn State are distinct universities; Penn State is a public university (and not an Ivy), while Penn is a private university (and an Ivy).

I knew that Penn & Penn State are distinct schools. Though I did not know that University of Pennsylvania is a private university. My mistake.

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