I worked at a startup where we had a few people from MIT and Stanford.
When investors came visiting they would be introduced "this is Mike from MIT" where other people who were at least as qualified as the ivy leaguers would get ignored. The VCs seemed impressed. They didn't even need a network. The name of the school was enough to stand out.
Result is that the Stanford and MIT guys would often start their own VC funded companies.
Elite institutions are a very powerful brand. And their reputation gets amplified in the media with headlines "Yale researchers discover...", "MIT develops..."
I went to MIT and that's about the least impressive and least relevant thing I can think of to what I did/do for the company I work for. Yet, in investor/VC/pitch/roadshow decks, I usually see "this is how many MIT and how many Stanford grads we have"...
Trust me, it's not nearly as relevant as people think, but it must work.
> Yet, in investor/VC/pitch/roadshow decks, I usually see "this is how many MIT and how many Stanford grads we have"...
Trust me, it's not nearly as relevant as people think, but it must work.
VCs are risk-averse pattern matchers. Their training patterns include knowing that startups with a high percentage of MIT and Stanford grads do well. Despite the fact that correlation isn't causation, they live off of that fallacy, so they would rather invest in a bunch of MIT and Stanford grads than not.
It actually makes a lot of sense for a VC to do that. They have a huge incentive to have a lot of false negatives and avoid false positives, so it's much better for them to use criteria that will eliminate good companies than allow bad ones.
The Ivy League specifically are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. The Ivy League is actually an athletic conference, but the term also refers to those schools as a group in general.
There is only one ivy, Cornell, in the top 10 (though Princeton does clock in at 11). Like I said, I'm not a huge fan of these rakings, and using them to the digit (4th place vs 6th place) is genuinely absurd. But overall, you'll see here that large public research universities, none of which crack the top 20 for US News undergraduate college rankings, are much more prominent where it comes to engineering.
There are reasons in the methodology for this as well - I think that the algorithm used to create the general rankings isn't similar to this one, which (like the ranking for grad programs) is more academic and research focused (not considering average SAT, admission rates, funding, and so forth).
But overall, the Ivies actually aren't highly notable where it comes to computer science and engineering. Large public research universities, as well as elite non-ivy privates, tend to predominate here.
This does make a certain amount of sense. If a STEM major is an "equalizer", where smart people who went to less prestigious schools can compete on (more) equal footing, it would make sense that students at highly selective undergraduate programs might eschew engineering or CS in favor of fields where their undergrad school might provide a stronger differentiator. And, conversely, if a super smart undergrad at San Jose state will have trouble overcoming the pedigree disadvantage in international relations, but can get a more equal crack through engineering, it would make more sense to study STEM.
I'm definitely guilty of some "just-so" reasoning here, but it does fit.
I'm going to apply to like...Missouri Institute of Technology and start telling people I went to MIT.
It's called MUST.[1]
[1] Well, all right, they prefer the term "Missouri S&T," which abbreviates "Missouri University of Science and Technology." Oddly, the Institute of Technology, one division of the University of Minnesota, is no longer called that, because in this part of the Midwest, "Institute of Technology" sounded too much like a for-profit vocational school, so now the same unit of Minnesota is called the College of Science and Engineering, or C.S.E. for short. When I heard about the name change proposal, I thought, "Hasn't anyone heard of the California Institute of Technology [now Caltech is the preferred name] or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [which is usually called MIT by anyone who knows of it]?"
When investors came visiting they would be introduced "this is Mike from MIT" where other people who were at least as qualified as the ivy leaguers would get ignored. The VCs seemed impressed. They didn't even need a network. The name of the school was enough to stand out.
Result is that the Stanford and MIT guys would often start their own VC funded companies.
Elite institutions are a very powerful brand. And their reputation gets amplified in the media with headlines "Yale researchers discover...", "MIT develops..."