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Last edited by brandonc204; 11-10-2018 at 07:55.
On your top point, that's the biggest reason I attended my university over Ohio state University. It would have been great to attend and have that prestigious university behind my name (I know it's not Harvard or anything, but it's a fairly prestigious school), and I've been a fan of OSU sports my whole life, but the cost just didn't match what I would have been getting.
On your second point, I know that at least a few highly prestigious schools will offer free rides to students that are good enough to be there but live in a household below a certain income. They really want you to be there if it's at all possible
This is a relatively unique feature of the IT industry, to an extent. The top IT companies are looking for excellence. One of the best ways of showing excellence is to have performed well in a top IT program - and no, an IT degree from the University of Wyoming will probably NOT get you a foot in the door in silicon valley.
My brother - a graduate from inarguably Canada's premier school for computer science - works for Google, and used to work for Research in Motion (BlackBerry) as a manager. He once remarked to me that his team included people with post-doctoral degrees in computers and mathematics, and high school drop-outs, doing essentially the same job. These are the genius types.
But yes, if you're not some kind of genius, then teaching yourself to code in your basement won't only fail to get you a job at Google, but also won't really help you land the less-than-premier IT jobs - which the computer degree from the University of Wyoming might.
Quality of program is important, too, and goes a bit beyond just 'ivy league'. There are certain schools which will garner name recognition within a specific industry, even if they don't have the 'prestige' of the ivy league. Strangely enough, the relationship of cost to quality in the US appears to be parabolic in some cases. If you go to an 'okay' school, you're probably not paying a whole lot. If you go to a top school, you're probably paying through the nose (unless you can get scholarships or bursaries). But if you go to the worst schools, some of them charge tuition close to the scale of the Ivy League. I've seen this in law schools, at least - the schools who take the absolute bottom students (i.e. who can't get in anywhere else) charge a massive amount of money...because hey, we know if you had options, you wouldn't be coming here, so we charge what we want. (I've occasionally come across lawyers from these schools. It shows. Quickly. But then again, there are only two reasons a Canadian goes to the US for law school - because they got into a really great school there, or because they couldn't get into Canadian law schools at all.)
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Last edited by brandonc204; 11-10-2018 at 07:59.
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