I know, I know, mostly just undergrads care about undergrad prestige (except resumé bots on LinkedIn scanning for “MIT”) but I’m curious about the average Lemming, who might lie less often than Redditors and probably isn’t a hyper outlier. Though I still expect selection and response bias :3
Let me start with my own wall of anecdotes.
- An old American embedded systems mentor I once had had had like two master’s degrees, but in his words,
Just get a Bachelor’s and a good internship. If the company will let you do it on their dime, then get the Master’s.
So the college-then-job thing wasn’t quite cause-then-effect.
-
Another friend I had said “All of the higher-ups in the chip engineering dept I’m gunning for have a PhD. Wanna contribute meaningfully? Probably gotta have one too” (Somewhere in the entirety of Asia, exacts hidden for privacy). So grad school matters more in that case.
-
My old econ teacher told me that, if you want a job where undergrad is just a stepping stone, then your undergrad “prestige” mostly doesn’t matter (e.g. pre-law, pre-med). And saving 50k in undergrad student loans to then dump into matching the S&P is a cheat code at age 18, worth far more than “initial salary”. not financial advice lol In this case, the “get your job” isn’t even that important.
-
An acquaintance I once had pipelined from Cornell to DeepMind. There, prestige and its opportunities probably/definitely/maybe had an effect.
-
A second acquaintance says his Canadian public school (iirc) only mildly helped him, so he went all-in on making his own networks outside of school to get into AI (Is he a hustler bro or something?). So he dodged the idea of college choice mattering.
-
A Harvard acquaintance I knew says both their dad and granddad agreed that going to Harvard played into getting their positions. (No need to believe me. I forgot what position tho – finance/big business probably)
-
The managers and manager managers my parents knew often only had community/state school undergrads, sometimes with MBAs.
-
I don’t care about CEOs. All outliers anyway.
So what have you empirically found? And where? (inb4 “American elite school obsession bad” and “CS is skill-based, not school-based, thread over” – heard all of that already)
You can be vague if needed c:
I’m a structural engineer with a Masters degree. The degree has been useful to me on the job as the classes apply to what I’m working on.
There is a major debate in the civil engineering community as to whether a Bachelors degree is enough, with the American professional organization, ASCE, advocating for a Master’s equivalent for licensure. The argument against is that there aren’t enough licensed engineers anyway and requiring a Masters degree would reduce the number of engineers. There are also some disciplines in civil engineering that are really simple and don’t need the additional education.
Having worked with structural PhD’s, the additional education isn’t worth it. Most of the education in a doctorate is on higher level models while most codes don’t need anything that advanced.
A state school is usually good enough school to go to.
