The website Quartz just published a list of the universities that place the highest number of grads at tech firms in Silicon Valley.
“The most coveted jobs are in Silicon Valley, and most selective US universities are members of the Ivy League. So it stands to reason that tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook would scoop up best and brightest from those bastions of power and privilege.
“Think again. None of the eight Ivy League schools—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania—cracked the top 10 on a list of the universities sending the most graduates to tech firms, according to an analysis by HiringSolved, an online recruiting company. The company used data from more than 10,000 public profiles for tech workers hired or promoted into new positions in 2016 and the first two months of 2017.”
Editor’s note: The HiringSolve link also lists the 10 specific skills most in demand as of 2017, with changes from 2016. For example, the top four skills for entry level placement in 2017 are Python, C++, Java, and algorithms. The top job titles for entry placement in 2017 are Software Engineering Intern, Software Engineer, Business Development Consultant, and Research Intern.
Now let it be said that the 17 public universities in the top 25 are generally much larger than the private institutions on the list, so the sheer volume of highly-trained tech grads from the publics is much larger.
But the final message from Quartz was this:
“If the list tells us anything, it’s that admission to an elite university isn’t a prerequisite for a career in Silicon Valley, and what you know is more important than where you learn it.” [Emphasis added.]
Here are the top 25 universities for Silicon Valley tech placement, in numerical order:
UC Berkeley
Stanford
Carnegie Mellon
USC
UT Austin
Georgia Tech
Illinois
San Jose State
UC San Diego
Arizona State
Michigan
UCLA
NC State
Cal Poly
Cornell
Waterloo (Canada)
Texas A&M
Washington
Purdue
MIT
Santa Clara
Univ of Phoenix*
UC Santa Barbara
UC Davis
Penn State
*Hypothesis: hands-on experience and later degrees?
