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How Important is a Well-Known CS Degree?
syynnapse asks: "I've been interested in computer science since my mother taught me how to program in QBASIC when I was eleven, and I've wanted to be a developer ever since I learned C++ in AP Computer Science while in high-school. Now I'm in my sophomore year of college studying CS at a state university that isn't particularly known for its CS program, but I'm quite happy and personally think I'm learning plenty. My father thinks otherwise, and the deadline for transferring successfully is approaching quickly. What chance do I have in the real world with a not-so-prestigious degree? Am I likely to be learning what's important? Am I looking at a series of awful jobs if I don't transfer?"
Here's my general rule on quality of college:
Unless you want to go for an ivy league type of degree (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, etc.), as long as the college offers a strong program, where you go to school has ZERO effect on your life after your first job. I went to a average school (Cal State University, Chico), and got average grades. (3.0 average). I found a good starter job when I gradiuated, and started progressing on *merit* after that. Now, I am in a top design position at a huge networking company, and no one looks at my degree. When I interview people, I never look at the college, other than to verify that they got a degree.
The only caveat is if you want to get a high profile degree from a top of the line college. All the Phds I work with come from top drawer schools, and went to top schools from the bachlor stage on. It is more of a pedigree at that point, and it clearly matters.
Go to a school that has a good CS program, has energetic professors, is fun to live in (you can't beat Chico), and just do your best. Once you get a job, your accomplishments will distinguish you from the rest.
I am sure to be flamed by people who went to well known schools and swear by it, but none of the people I work with who have BS desgrees went anywhere recognizable. It is all about how you perform.
Good luck!
Todd
I have a CS degree from a state university that's not especially known for it's CS department.
I graduated in 2000 and didn't find the degree to be a hinderance at all. Granted this was at the tail of the bubble, but I was hired ahead of a Purdue and a U-Wisconsin graduate, both of which I'd consider to have far superior programs.
Why? First, because I interviewed well. I was able to interact with my future bosses and coworkers, I didn't lie on my resume, and I was eager to learn. Second, because I had relevent experience gained while I was a student. I found that working as a programmer for the campus IT department 15 hours/week and volunteering as a lead sysadmin for a student government / organization webserver to be far more relevent to the job then anything I learned in class.
Since that first job, I've found references and contacts to be the key to getting other interviews and offers. I don't feel like a state-U degree hurt me at all; college is what you make of it so learn to socialize, volunteer or take a part time job relevent to the field you want to work in, and concentrate on getting a good broad education. Take liberal arts classes and business classes, etc.
If you are learning, stay exactly where you are. You don't want to discover how horrible it is to attend class after class, year after year, and be learning nothing. I'm currently studying at a well-known university that's crashed a probe into Mars. But reputation and content are two very different things. As long as you're learning, stay where you are.
Besides, your university credentials are mainly useful in getting your first job. After that they are more interested in your previous jobs. So at worst an unknown university will just add one stepping stone on your career path.
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Remember: *Learning* is what's important here, especially when we're talking about an undergrad degree -- I went to a small state school where there were 10-20 people in my classes and I recieved a much, much better education than my peers who went to large universities. Why? Because I could walk into my professor's office and spend an hour talking to him about class material, advances in computing or the state of the industry or whatever.
In my experience, the sort of jobs you'll get with an undergrad degree tend to value understanding and skill over who your degree is from -- if you can do the work, you're their person. If you're going to a job that requires a graduate degree, well, you can go to a high-profile school for your grad work, eh?
Aside from all of that, I've learned the hard way that you should follow your instincts. Follow yours on this one and stay put.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
well i mean if you go to podunk community college, then year it may. but any major college, you will be fine.
i had one of the worst graduating GPA's in my CS class, but i managed to get one of the best jobs out of college. why? becuase of what i knew and what i did on my own time.
college simply teaches you how to teach yourself. if you are basing how you will do off how you do in class, then you are in for a suprise.
if you can teach yourself the new technologies and get your name out there somehow, you will be set.
but then again i am planning on getting out of the tech field in 2 years so take it for what it is worth.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Seriously, take a look at my resume (http://www.codesweep.com/about.cfm) you will see that there are plenty of interesting jobs on it (and I haven't throughly revised it in awhile, I could state more). While my college degree is a footnote at the bottom. While Cal Poly Pomona is a good school, it doesn't matter based on what's more attractive, the work or the school.
Bottom line: Find a good (even if cheap) job NOW. Failing that, grab an open source project at http://www.sourceforge.net and contribute something to get your name on the developers list. Something, anything for your resume besides a degree (whether Ivy League or State U) is paramount to a good job. If you can accomplish this, it won't matter if your degree says "WTF Coding University".
...in bed
It does matter for your first job.
Unless you know somebody, it's hard to get in to the truly cool jobs. Most companies only recruit at a relatively defined set of universities, generally where the founders and a few of the early employees came from. Which means you have to seek out companies more if you want to avoid being a coding grunt.
Once you are out for a bit, it matters far less.
Oh yeah, and a good CS degree is not about being taught. It's about being tortured into learning because your professor is really bright but can't teach. So he gives you hard tests and you have to teach stuff to yourself in order to pass. At least, that's the shared experience amongst most of the grads from top-10 CS schools that I've talked to.
Gentoo Sucks
If your dad's willing to pay the application fee,why not apply to a few top-tier schools? If you don't get in, you get to stay and continue enjoying yourself. If you do get in, you've already got everything you've learned already, plus you get to put the shiny new school on your resume.
The question of whether you should transfer or not is one you make AFTER you get accepted.
I would recommend you don't transfer to a slightly better school. If it's not top 5, I'd stay where you are.
I've been interested in computer science since my mother taught me how to program in QBASIC when I was eleven
No you haven't. You may have been interested in computer programming since age 11, but you didn't even know what computer science was, let alone have any interest in it.
Not that there's anything wrong with this; the world needs plumbers and electricians (and computer programmers) as much as it needs writers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. But this is one way the well-recognized undergraduate computer science distinguish themselves from the programs at the College of Upper Podunk. A good university will teach computer science, and expect you to work out how to write code on your own; a bad university will teach you how to program, and not even admit that there is anything more to learn.
Decide what you want from your years at university, and pick your university accordingly.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Asking a questions like this on slashdot is pointless.
People who have a CS degree from a well known school will say "most definitely!" so they can justify their own.
People who have a CS degree from Arkansas Community College will say "not really" because they got a job just fine with theirs.
People who have a computer-related degree from DeVry will say "nope" because they have a bottom-rung tech job.
People without a degree will say "most definitely not" because they have a job based on experience.
I'm trying to hire three developers, a project manager, and a business analyst where I work. We ignore the degrees they put down, unless it's for the pm spot where a MBA from anywhere will work. Some of the applicants have a BS in CS from places like Berkeley, but it doesn't really matter because they got it ten years ago...with an emphasis in cobol.
Having a degree on your resume will just help it get through the automated resume grabbing filters big companies use when fielding hundreds of applicants.
Oh, and I don't have a degree.
Degrees can also make you more flexible. If you're, say, a Perl programmer without a degree, the only jobs people will hire you for is Perl programming. If you're a Perl programmer with a CS degree, you are far more likely to get hired for jobs using, say, C++ if the Perl market is dry where you are. You are also more likely to be considered as a candidate for management, if that's what you want, if you have a degree behind you.
Getting a job that matches your particular skillset is easy if you're good at what you do, degree or not. But getting a job that may deviate from your skillset, but still exists in the same general area, will be impossible without the degree, but may be reachable with it.
As for schools, in my experience, the only schools that have been looked at with derision are the known degree-factory schools, particularly online and "nationally accredited" schools like the University of Phoenix. If the school sounds like a traditional university, it probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference which one it is.
I agree whole-heartedly. IMO, one of the most important things you should look for in a CS program is that they have a co-op program. This is a good way to get your foot in the door with a company before you graduate (and earn money.) Even if you don't stay with that company after graduation, recent graduate with 1 year of co-op experience will be looked on much more favorably that one without.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
If I had 2 job candidates with equivalent experience, I would take the one with the CS degree.
In my experience, developers with a CS degree have a much better handle on the underlying concepts; however, I'm not sure that a degree from a big school makes that much of a difference.
http://www.askthevoid.com
If you have a rich relative offering to pay, and you can go to MIT without going into debt, then yeah, of course you should transfer. But if, like most of us, you're going to pay for college, you should choose the best accredited undergraduate education that will leave you financially stable (read: debt-free) afterward.
You'll hear lots of people telling you about the value of name schools, the need for "networking" and other such hoo-hah. And often, they'll try to convince you that it's worth $30,000 in debt to get a top-tier undergraduate education. Don't buy it.
Remember -- at the undergraduate level, most schools will teach you the same things (oftentimes, from the same books). So why pay out the nose for an education that can be obtained for a fraction of the cost of a top-tier university?
Save your money, keep yourself out of debt, and you'll have more options later on. That's doubly important today, where Punjab's willingness to work for 30 cents an hour will almost invariably trump an expensive diploma....
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
In most cases the degree does have significant weight, and given two people who are more or less equal, the guy with paper will win.
Not to mention the degree will get you past the HR department.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Very few people, employers or otherwise, care about where you got your degree. All they care about is that you have it. There are times when an MIT or Harvard degree will carry more weight, but they're the exception, not the rule.
Doubt it? Try this little experiment. Your post implies that you're somewhere in your teens, which probably means that you've had at least a few different doctors (pediatrician, dentist, and GP, at the least). Do you know where any of them got their degrees? Do you care? Probably not... all you care about is that they did get an education. And these are the people whom you entrust with your health, your well-being, and potentially even your life. For most of the rest of society, it's the same way.
And then there are the people who leave the military in a box and enter a hole in the ground.
Joining the military is a serious commitment. It is not a job training program.
While making an impression is important, having a "big name" degree is not as cracked up as it is made to be. Others here have suggested getting real experience in a co-op program. That is probably the most important thing to look for in a school. Schools with good partnerships can provide you with real-world experience which will open more doors.
Almost as important however is the which path within the IT world do you want to pursue. If you're looking to do more than code then finding a school with an IT department within a school of business might be helpful. If you want to specialize in graphics then look for a school with a good program involving fine arts or engineering.
So don't get downhearted about being at a so-called "second-tier" school if that school offers unique or interesting paths to follow.
I went to a small state school and my first job was at a Fortune 50 company! I've transformed that into a very good upper management job at a well-known international company in less than 10 years.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
Having a degree from a big-name school will help you in two cases: getting your first job, and if an employer ever has to choose between you and an equally-qualified and equally-likeable applicant with a degree from a less-prestigious school. The first hurdle is one you only have to go over once and which you will get over one way or another, and the second is not terribly likely to happen.
I don't have a degree, and I'm the most senior and highly paid developer at my company. I won't tell you that not having a degree hasn't hurt me -- it has, mostly by making it much harder for me to get that first "real" job, and obviously, there are some companies that won't consider me. But I also do a lot of the hiring around here, and I can tell you that I don't pay too much attention to where new hires got their degree; I pay a lot of attention to prior work experience, code samples, references, and demeanor during interviews. I've worked with some people with degrees from prestigious schools who were terrible programmers and horrible coworkers, and I've worked with great programmers who were fabulous to get along with who had two-year degrees from local community colleges.
If I were you, I'd stay put. Of course, if your dad is going to foot the bill for a fancy school, you might consider it. Otherwise, the massive burden of student loans for that sort of thing might be a lot more trouble than it's worth.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The most important thing in the market today is experience. Go look on Monster or any of the other sites right now, and you'll see one phrase quite a bit - ...or equivalent experience.
And Monster.com is where you find the -ahem- monster jobs.
DISCLAIMER: I'm an independent consultant.
In my experience, the good jobs, the real jobs, the ones that you really want to get don't come from job sites or the newspaper.
No, the good jobs are filled out on the golf course, or over fine wine at dinner, when two executives meet for business/pleasure.
The job interview really goes something like "Hey, one of my networking guys just got married and is leaving the state. Do you know anybody good?".
The words that follow that question are crucial. You should be ready to sacrifice animals to the higher gods to have your name follow such a question.
If the responding executive recommends you, you are almost guaranteed the position. You'll walk in with coveted status. You'll be appreciated for doing good work. And, you'll be paid decently without complaint.
It's OK to ask people you work with if there's anybody else who might need your services. If you're good, they'll actually mention your name prior to you meeting the referral, or meet with the referral with you.
And that's gold. Pure, and sweet.
Job? Newspaper? Website? There, you're guilty until proven innocent. You get no respect, as you are just a commodity easily compared to thousands of others. Every dollar you earn is "an expense". Yuck.
Referrals, baby. That's the ONLY way to fly. (and it's the ONLY way I've EVER promoted my myself!)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I disagree.
:) ) tends to be much more pragmatic and about ability rather than titles. But I've worked with recent immigrants from various places where that is not the case -- I saw an excellent potential employee turned down because his degree was from a "second-rate" university.
I'm not saying your wrong about your experience, obviously, but I have been on both sides of the process and have seen degrees make a big difference. I've seen people with great experience lose out to people from the "right institution."
Here're a few reasons:
- Some institutions, particularly service-related companies, are vain about the statistics they can cite. I worked with a Big Consulting Company once who had a VP who would frequently state that over 25% of their employees had PhDs from Berkeley, Stanford, or MIT. I asked him what their GPAs were as a joke, but he took it entirely seriously, and told me he could find out. For companies and people like that, the image is as important as the education. Their product is design audits, system reviews, etc, so they're essentially selling confidence to other companies. They sell to upper management, not the engineers, so easily-recognized indications of quality (i.e., reputation) are important.
- Insecure hiring/HR people. It's like the old "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" mentality. It's a defensive mechanism.
- It's cultural, too. Certain cultures put more emphasis on titles and institutions than others. American culture (whatever that is
Also, people's prejudices come out in the hiring environment. University degrees are easily verified, while experience may or may not be.
And experience can be a slippery thing, too. I hired someone once who gave an outstanding interview and who had amazing knowledge of Unix development. This person turned out to be very talented, but unable to follow directions at all, or even perform the job requirements. It wasn't a lack of ability, it was an unwillingness to work with the requirements that our client had imposed. A university degree here would have been a good thing -- it indicates that someone is capable of, for want of a better phrase, being compliant and going along with the bullshit that jobs unfortunately often require. Being talented and knowledgable is not enough. You have to be able to deal with and compromise with people who are less talented, situations that are not ideal, and, as you call it, the real world.
Anyway, that's my take on it. Yes, experience is very important, but I wouldn't overlook a good degree as a tool for getting yourself hired.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
In practice, most jobs'll look for certifications and maybe a degree as an afterthought. They're not interested in your actual knowledge, they're only interested in not being held accountable if you don't work out.
Lastly, you're going to get rotten jobs, whatever education and certifications you have. Most jobs are rotten. Especially in IT, where most companies are plain stupid. Many IT specialists and generalists stick with getting a well-paid job, rather than a useful and/or productive one. There are exceptions (eg: my current employer, where a number of key people read Slashdot) but for the most part, if you want an intelligent job, you need to work for yourself.
Oh, and stay out of the military, if you possibly can, even if you sacrifice Government jobs, loans, etc. IT professionals are snobby in their own way and have far stronger ties with intellectual pursuits than grunt work (with the exception of hauling servers and running cables, though you'll notice most IT staff "let" other people do such stuff, especially in public). Also, whenever there's a call-up of reserves (as at present), businesses lose out big-time. You can't get useful work from a person fighting in another continent. Nobody is going to hire you, if they think you'll cost them more than you'll make for them.
Also, many intellectuals and many higher-end IT professionals tend to be left-of-center, non-conformist and don't follow rules (without a major internal struggle). Exactly the opposite of what most militaristic and Government-oriented organizations want. In IT, you're there to get the job done, and if the rule book gets in the way, too bad. In something like the military or the civil service, you're there to follow the rules to the letter, even if that means nothing gets done.
My advice: Get the degree (and if you can get sponsored for a Masters, even better) but don't go for a PhD. Even if (and it's a big if) you get paid more for it, the cost of the degree and the cost of not earning for those extra years will often make it pointless.
After you've got your degree, get a certification. The program itself is likely to be pretty useless, but the scrap of paper at the end of it is worth a lot of money and improved job opportunities.
Don't get a student loan, unless you absolutely have to. Sponsorship is generally a better bet, doesn't charge interest, and the demands aren't quite so obnoxious. Businesses looking for new graduates and looking to expand in the medium-term will very likely be willing to consider some sort of deal. (eg: internship over the summers, plus a guarantee that they get first-pick on whether to hire you, after you graduate, in exchange for contributing towards the costs.)
A more dangerous path - but it's worked for some - is to ignore the whole degree/certification approach. Become famous or infamous for something so spectacular that even the most dim-witted of Human Resource people will know you're in the news, even if they don't know why. Few can pull this kind of an approach off, and several of those have spent years or decades in prison (eg: Kevin Mitnick) but those who succeed often get the Really Big Money. Those who fail will never move beyond minimum-wage jobs and will eventually die in obscurity and poverty. It's about the same kind of risk as staking not only your entire life's earnings but all potential future earnings as well on the lottery.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In my opinion it depends entirely upon the type of job you're looking for. The computer field is rather messily divided between techies and intellectuals. It's a bit of an open system, with people migrating in both directions, and considerable overlap, which disguises the fact there there are, in fact, two camps.
Degree or no, fine school or barely adequate, you're going to start life as a techie. Welcome to the help desk, cubeville, or low-end development. Your geek-badge and a love of white-collar slavery is your passport to this world. And thus begins the journey. . .
You will gain experience, confidence and skill, and begin to be promoted. You will (hopefully) gain a reputation in your chosen fields, and garner the laurals of a job well done. You begin to plan a career path. Somewhere around Sr. programmer (substitute DBA, Network Admin. or Sys Admin as appropriate) something unexpected happens.
You see, at the upper end of "applied technical knowlege" there is a fork in the upward path. The broad road leads to middle management, and God help the poor souls who venture there. The narrow path leads to "think tank" positions.
It's true, most large companies have one or more senior geeks doing funded research, planning strategy, or generally dispensing wisdom on demand. They really do exist, but you don't see them because they live in the nice office building in corporate headquarters not in the programming shack.
Here's the important bit. These guys are hired for their brains, and to join the club you need to have the sort of broad-based understanding the almost inevitably comes from a top-notch college education. A B.S. gets a distainful sniff, but the doors gape wide for the ivy-league Ph.D's, and may open for an M.S from a solid school with a bit of persistance.
The self-taught crowd will howl and cry that it's not fair. They can program as well or better than their pedigreed peers, they have probably built an open-source terminal emulator, and they've labored in the same trenches, side by side for years. However, in reality, very few people teach themselves calculus, computer theory, materials science, economics (and don't forget ettiquite) with the level of rigor demanded by these positions. This is where the four, six or eight years of studying that "useless theory" becomes useful, even necessary.
I'm a self-taught techie with several certifications, facing this division. I'm 40 years old, and a Sr. DBA for a large firm, making a good salary -- end of the techie line. I've been courted for managment positions, which I don't want. I've got three B.S. and one M.S. degrees in various sciences, all from good schools, but no C.S. degree.
Over the past two years I've taken several C.S. classes from a good school - algorithm analysis, advanced data structures, automata, etc. I'll probably get an M.S in a few years, and maybe a Ph.D. after that, but more importantly, I'm learning all the little details that differentiate a computer scientist from a competent techie. There IS a differance, after all.
I would take the one without...in my experience, the one without usually has more drive, motivation and enthusiasm for programming...and I always hire for attitude, everything else can be taught.
We have a winner. Where you go to school matters! The better the school you go to the better chance you have of getting a good entry-level job in your field which, in turn, jump-starts your career IF, and ONLY IF, you take advantage of this opportunity. Where you go to school is NOT a permit to rest on your laurels for the rest of your life. (Unless, of course, you dropped out of Harvard and started a small software company in Redmond, WA...or whereeverthehellmicrosoft was founded.)
Also, college is not a vocational school. College is an evironment where people hone their skills at critical thinking and reasoning (and socializing, but that's a different discussion.) You choose your vehicle to do this by picking a major that INTERESTS you. I know quite a few English and History majors that were pulling in $100,000+ per year two years out of college as analysts for Wall Street firms.
Where did I go? The College of William and Mary.
What did I major in? Chemistry.
What do I do now? Not Chemistry. I'm in IT and do project management for large, global infrastructure projects.
While where you went to school won't necessarily get you the job, it will improve your chances of getting your resume looked at.
Granted, I never really leveraged where I went to school, even for my first job.
--Mike
As a software developer that doesn't have a degree I think I slightly disagree with you.
I'm totally self-taught. I've had to do a LOT of catching up on my own to learn the underlying theories behind good software design. If I had stuck with CS in school and stayed in school I'd have learned more about CS theory and would have more of a foundation to build upon.
Having gone through a good CS program that covers actual computer science and not just how to code is a big advantage. The hard part of software is designing it and fitting it all together and a good CS program teaches you that.
However, so many CS degrees are just coding certificates, more or less. the guy opposite the wall from me is an idiot. He cuts and pastes all of his code, not even paying attention to what it's doing, has singlehandedly brought down many production systems and broken almost every build he's been involved with, and is just generally an unpleasant person aside from that. He also has a bachelors degree in CS.
The academic CS culture seems to devalue things like communications and, well, anything that's not geeky, so you get a lot of recent CS grads that still have the social skills of a retarded goat, even if they could rewrite the Quake engine from scratch in 48 hours. That's useless in the real world. A good programmer has to be able to communicate as well as code and design software. There's a backlash growing against offshoring because of this (if the backlash hasn't made it to where you are, I'm sorry)
Furthermore, pure CS programs teach you nothing about business or how to survive in the corporate environment. If you don't understand the business of your employer, you're not going to be very good at solving its problems. The corporate environment has to be experienced to learn to navigate it.
If I had a resume from a recent MIT graduate and a 25-year self-taught veteran, it would come down to what the task is, if I were hiring. I'd take the MIT guy for buzzword compliant work and the vet for mission-critical stuff that has to be near-100% reliable. I've found that veteran programmers make an effort to cover the bases more thoroughly.
While the source of the degree (and sometimes the degree itself) likely matters little, a college with an excellent CS program is more likely to prepare you and teach you useful things you didn't know you needed/wanted to know.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
I do not have a degree.
I have been working without interruption for 15 years now.
And I have interviewed and be part of interview processes in many occassions.
The reaity is that the context is king. In some places they could not care less about your university degree or the school you come from.
In other places they did actively filter people from well known universities. In yet other places it was the other way around.
The only thing in common is that people had to demonstrate they knew their field, and the only case in which many places got really punctillious was in assesing skills (ridiculously complicated tests).
Very rarely you have two guys that, once properly assesed, score equally (if you are assesing the candidates properly that is, if you are just fooling around, then yes, paper may win, but I have seen in several occasions managers that lived to regret such carelessness).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Computer Science is a very young discipline compared to other engineering disciplines. This explains why there are so many computer scientists / software engineers who do not have a degree, did not go to college and yet have highly successful careers. This is characteristic(sp?) of young disciplines. Ignore it.
CS itself is getting older, more mature. People are starting to understand that just knowing how to hack doesn't quite cut it (always). In short, going to a college and getting a degree in CS never hurts (as opposed to not getting one, not opposed to getting one in some other engineering field).
If we agree to the above - ie we must get a degree in CS or EE or math or something related, we question where we must get it from. College degrees are not pieces of paper that open the door to getting a fat job. This is one of the perks for sure, but there are others. They open the door to contributing something for the betterment of humanity (by doing original research), they open up your mind by forcing you to interact with peers who are often better than you. No matter what your job, you will fall into a mental rut as compared to school. A school is only as good as the students that study there. The students are what makes the MITs and Stanfords of today - not the professors. If the professors were getting sub-par graduate students to work with or sub-par peers they'd leave.
This is why it is absolutely essential to try to go to the best possible school you can go to. You will get exposed to things that you never were exposed to. You will learn new things from both professors and students alike. You will take part in activities that will challenge your mind in multiple dimensions - something quite unparalleled in the "real" world.
And you never know - you may want to do research for life. You may want to go on for a higher degree. In all these cases, the better school always wins. You can get by with going to a lower school - in fact you can "get by" with not going to school at all. But our purpose in life is not to just "get by". The whole point is to do something great - something that you can point your finger to 50 yrs down the line and say "I did that and changed they way people think / do something". Always strive for the best.
That's little dick syndrome. The "real worlders" always think that experience is the only teacher. I'm not a huge fan of the non-degree folks I've worked with. Some are very good. The majority have wacked out egos because they don't have a concept of the field as a whole, just their little piece, which makes them overestimate their knowledge and ability. The ego thing is also because of the inferiority complex they have because they didn't go to school. So they sit around and poo-poo school and all that book learning that the kids have, slap themselves on the back for not going that dead end route.
I've also worked with fresh faced grads that couldn't think their way out of a paper bag. Or have the first job ego: "I produced something that actually works, I'm awesome!" And anyone who uses goto in anything but the most brain dead of situations gets a swift kick in the junk. I don't give a shit who the person is, someone is going to have to read that code, goto generally doesn't help.
But This can all be learned through books, and without college. Always remember this when you belive college is neccesary. At one point, the field did not exist, and the degree was not even a thought. This is not devine information given only to Professors. Some people are capable of learning this on their own. It is nice to have background in the subject, and to be brought up to current date, but if students stoped at what they learned in college, we would not have any advances. There are inventors, and tinkerers that have discoverd countless things without the help of college, or a degree. Look at gates. He did attend stanford, but not 4 years.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.