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Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my experience, there's not much difference between a top MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school. The difference is in the distribution: the best schools can pick amongst great applicants, and therefore have a better average student.

The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs, and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.

But to the extent that this turns into a bias against students from other schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as every other accredited program. Even the books are the same.

But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone else. More candidates for the rest of us.

"In my experience, there's not much difference between an MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school."

So the average student at a top school is roughly equal to a top student at an average school?

As a former average engineering student at a top school who's befriended and worked with a good number of top students at good but not top schools (ex: students on full rides in state school engineering programs), top students at these schools are probably somewhat better than the average student at a top school.

Of course, this is just an anecdotal perspective. Your mileage may vary.

I spoke imprecisely -- I don't have enough information to make that kind of a claim about "average students" (hopefully obviously).

But of the people I've worked with, there's no difference at the high end. Good students are just as good at no-name schools as they are at MIT. I updated my comment to be more clear.

What you do get at the top schools are students who excel at being good/great "students" (ie excelling within a predefined system). Some companies probably want that sort of quality, and are okay with having a large number of false negatives with respect to technical talent.

I am firmly of the opinion that getting a high GPA in a degree program is a strong indicator of determination, focus and work ethic -- qualities that are essential to "technical talent", that people who complain the loudest about formal education often lack. Setting a high bar for academic achievement enriches your applicant pool more than most other signals.

So while I think that credentialism is bad when taken to an extreme, I do think that credentials still have value.

Actually Google found that GPA is a weak indication of how a person performs. Apparently, according to Google, the GPA is only weakly correlated with job success in the first year or two.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-google-hires-people-2013-...

I didn't say that I believe in GPA as a stack-ranking score. I just believe it has value when you're comparing someone who barely graduated with someone who graduated with honors. Even Google uses GPA for new grads (so says the article), probably for similar reasons.

Also, as long as we're being pedantic: "success at Google" is not clearly related to "success in a small company", or even "success in the world". We don't even know what they mean by "success".

No one doubts if unknown schools have any good candidates at all. It's all about probability of finding number of good candidates.

Top schools are all about providing fat pipelines of possibly talented individuals with very high probability. And let's not kid ourselves that every school has very large pool of talent. No one turns down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State. The most likely reason person ends up at non top 5 schools is because they couldn't get in those.

This implies that pretty much every one wants to study at top school. So top school gets first cut at widest possible selection of candidates and left over goes elsewhere. So the talent is indeed concentrated at top 5 schools.

Again keep in mind probabilities (take a course! This is one of the most important subject to learn, IMO) - it doesn't imply that talent is non-existent in other schools. So the probability of hiring 100 talented candidates who can get through same grueling interview at Fayetteville State should be fairly lower than at Stanford or MIT.

No one turned down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State

Probably not, but my hypothesis is that there are people at, say, Fayetteville State, that could have gone to Stanford but never even bothered applying. Maybe they thought they couldn't afford it, maybe they didn't want to move so far from home, who knows. And I also believe there are people who "couldn't get in" to, say, Stanford, who would still have excelled at Stanford had they attended. Some people aren't good high school students for any number of reasons, but are much better college students, but they don't have the grades to get into the "elite" schools.

So sure, if you came from a family who emphasized getting into Harvard or Stanford, and drove you relentlessly to get great grades, and provided all the support you needed all through high-school, and you were well fed everyday and had after-school SAT training, etc,, etc., then you probably should have gotten a 1600 on the SAT and gone to Harvard. But a LOT of people were missing one or more of those elements in their upbringing.

Not to mention, some people (this was my story) basically just blow off high-school because they're bored senseless, resent being forced to attend, and aren't the people with the right temperament to be part of the cool clique and therefore despise huge swathes of their time at school. Of course, that same kid is probably going home and building Tesla coils and experimenting with high-voltage electronics, or writing code or something after school, but it isn't reflected in their grades, and it won't help them get into an "elite" school.

Also keep in mind that I'm not saying that a Fayetteville State or UNC Pembroke represents a "fat pipeline". But I am saying it represents a pipeline, and one where a resource starved startup is less likely to be competing against Google or IBM or Facebook or Yahoo, etc., for people.

Interestingly, merely applying to top schools seems a very strong signal of future earning potential – whether or not you're admitted. See for example the details here:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-...

That is interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Well, I'm just an anecdote, but I think that's definitely true.

I never made less than an A in high school and I made a perfect score on the ACT. I feel pretty confident that had I applied at a "top school" I would have had a fair chance of getting in. Maybe not - I probably would have been weaker on the non-academic admission requirements. I ended up going to a local community college for free and then transferring to a state university where eventually I got my graduate degree. I received several awards while there for academic performance, had some papers published with my name on them, and had a 4.0 again.

Frankly it never even occurred to me to apply to other schools. I just wasn't interested and nobody talked about it. If you asked me now why I didn't, I couldn't really tell you. Looking back, I'm sure some of it was moving away from home. In retrospect I would have been worse off financially - the scholarship didn't hold past the CC, so I paid cash for the rest (I worked a _lot_) until I got a TA position and graduated debt free.

I think though some people in SV would still look at that in askance though, and see that as saying something - "hey, this guy's not as motivated" or "this guy wouldn't be as dedicate as much of his life" and maybe that's true. In terms of work performance, though, I don't see a difference and I've always received extremely positive reviews.

No doubt there are things I'm missing out on, like the kind of connections I might have made at a top school, but I'm doing pretty well for myself and I don't regret anything.

> No one turns down offer from Stanford for the opportunity to study at Fayetteville State. The most likely reason person ends up at non top 5 schools is because they couldn't get in those.

I am extremely skeptical of this line of reasoning because it assumes that only important criterion for choosing a school is whether it's good or not (or, alternatively, whether it has brand recognition, depending on one's perspective).

There are a vast swath of other reasons that could rank more highly then whether a school is good or not. Two reasons easily in reach are geography and financial resources. I certainly restricted my choice based on those criteria well before whether the school was any good, and I don't regret it at all.

This isn't about an individual. Of course Really Good People can come from anywhere, but not with the same probability. And when you're recruiting, you want to hit schools with high concentration of talents.

You'd be lying to yourself if you think schools like NCCU and Durham Tech have the same concentration of talents as MIT, Stanford, etc.

Agreed. I went to a decent but. It noteworthy state school (and the list of things it is known for does not include CS). But I've worked at more than one of the companies on that infographic, and have had a nice career so far. I don't feel that my lack of a brand name school has necessarily held me back (though I'd also agree that if I'd have known the career path I was going to take, and if I'd have been able to get into a top tier school, I would have).

I'm a little surprised that you've rattled off just about every single school in NC except NC State. Any particular reason?

Nah, there are a lot of other schools here: Western Carolina, UNC-Asheville, East Carolina, Appalachian State, Campbell, UNC-Charlotte, Elizabeth City State, Elon, Duke, Wake Forest, Winston-Salem State, etc. I wasn't trying to list them all, but trying to emphasize the ones that I perceive as being considered "less touted" in relative terms. NCSU is actually pretty highly regarded, especially the engineering programs and the veterinary program, so that's the only real reason I didn't mention them. Same for Duke, which is generally regarded as a fairly "elite" school as well.

I've definitely met some great minds from NC State :)

Same here. I have plenty of friends from all of NCSU, UNC, Duke, etc... sports rivalries and what-not aside, I consider all of them to be - at a minimum - "Pretty Good" schools. UNC is widely considered one of the so-called "Public Ivys" and Duke is generally held up as "elite" if a step below "Ivy League" or whatever. And State definitely has a strong reputation, especially in certain areas like engineering and veterinary science. I think their MBA program is also ranked fairly highly as well.

Heh, fair enough. Was just thinking for a minute that you were suggesting you'd consider Wake Tech grads over NCSU grads and I started getting a little concerned about my school's image :).

No, nothing like that at all. But what I would be saying is that - as a resource constrained startup - I'd likely recruit at Wake Tech before NCSU, since it's more likely the NCSU guy or gal is going to also be talking to various $BIGCORPs that are seen as highly desirable places to work.

and I started getting a little concerned about my school's image

Well, the old joke does still stand:

Person A: Where are you going to school?

Person B: NC State

Person A: Oh that's great, once you graduate you can get a job at John Deere.

(j/k'ing!!!!)