40 Colleges & Universities Receive 5 Star Academic Rating
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Anonymous
Bryn Mawr gets four stars from the College transitions book "Colleges Worth Your Money", but Bryn Mawr received the highest academic rating from the Fiske Guide To Colleges. The final comment on Bryn Mawr addressing the question "Worth Your Money ?" is neutral. |
Anonymous
| The group of companies (11 total) surveyed was: Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Lyft, Amazon, Adobe, Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitter, & Linkedin. |
Anonymous
Many of these are absolute top of the top companies, and all of them are top tech companies. No refence is perfect, but you can get a good idea which schools get respect from the industry in general. More important than other rankings. |
Anonymous
I respectfully disagree with your last sentence. For starters, the survey focused on a small number (11? 12?) of companies. There are many tech companies. Like, half a million. Several of the biggest and most influential ones are omitted from the list, probably cause it was composed by someone with a narrow consumer-minded idea of tech. And many of the most exciting are small. Second, the search was further limited to entry level positions. That’s not defined, and some college students don’t start out at the most entry level position because of prior experience or other considerations. Third, from my own tech experience, when hiring it mattered more what someone had done than whether they had worked at one of most famous tech companies. I can’t emphasize this enough. My team at one company easily saw tens of thousands of resumes. What mattered most was whether their previous work experience involved the kind of skills we needed. The applicants were more likely to have had greater responsibility, done cutting-edge things, and exhibited the kind of confidence to learn and compete with other ambitious and fast growing companies if they had worked at smaller companies than ones a person of the street had heard of. That wasn’t always the case, but was more often than not. Those 11-12 companies are filled with great talent, but relatively few are steering the ship. If you start off with “an entry level position,” it’s very likely going to be a long while before you are doing the really innovative stuff in a meaningful way and/or have significant responsibility, even at a technical level (like deciding how to build something, let alone what should be built.) Candidates coming from large companies often would complain about how shackled by bureaucracy they had previously felt, but if hired seemed initially bewildered by the pace, engagement, and responsiveness expected at our company. I applaud an attempt to gauge how well colleges prepare for careers in tech. But this is not the way to do it. It’s a (near) first attempt and critically flawed. It would make more sense to survey a broader range of companies or recruiters and ask them to rate the schools they are familiar with, then report both the frequency of familiarity and the perceived quality of the school. That’s not unlike how USNWR gets their reputation scores, except the number of experts they have to survey is several orders of magnitude less than the number of tech companies. So it’s no surprise it hasn’t been done right yet: it’s very hard. I’m all for sharing interesting data points. But it’s important to understand the limitations of each. The one discussed here should not be referred to as “a ranking of the best schools for tech” but perhaps a “ranking of the best schools to get entry level jobs at these dozen companies.” It’s just too narrow to be called the first. Having worked at small, medium, and large tech companies, my advice for picking a college would be to go to the school you think best fits your personality, learning style, and financial situation. Some most value networking; maybe a private university is best. Some don’t want the stress of debt or a side job and don’t qualify for the financial aid they want; maybe go to a public uni. Some want small classes and relationships with their prof; maybe an LAC is best. My advice for working at one of those big 12 tech companies? Go to a smaller company that’s doing something cool that the big companies haven’t thought of, work very hard to get acquired by one so you can enter a large company as a more needed and financially secure employee, or switch companies after having acquired some meaningful experience so you don’t need to start at the bottom at the big one. Over my career I saw incredibly talented people from all of the above types of school. Also from vocational schools. Also self-educated. There was a path to success for each. I also saw top 10 cs school alumni who floundered or couldn’t play well with others. College reputation can be somewhat useful but, among the decisions I was involved with, I can’t think of a single time that a person got hired who wouldn’t have if they went to a different school. The path that brings out the best in one’s self is vastly more important than the name on the diploma. |