Comment by ActorNightly

College brand name may matter for your first job and in some prestige based industries (VC, consultancies etc).

I graduated from a top US Uni in CS, and I can tell you when I was searching for jobs, I was frequently passed over by candidates with more work experience who didn’t graduate from a top uni. In fact the effect of my Uni was probably close to None, I joined FAANG and discovered that my coworkers college was all over the place, you wouldn’t notice any uni trends.

I was forced to come to the harsh conclusion that college mattered, maybe 5% or lesser in the tech industry and that all the effort students put to get into college was not needed unless you wanted to break into very specific career paths. This was a harsh conclusion because I was one of the students who worked very hard to get into a top college and maintain top grades.

>I'm actually finding it's going the other way.

Whats your data source?

Across like 10 or so jobs I have applied including ones I took across engineering and computer science, he only time I had any questions about my academic record is when working for a government contract (which required me to request official record from university).

> Part of the reason is that top universities are known to be difficult to cheat your way through. Not impossible, but it's not easy either.

I wonder if that will dethrone the Ivies. They're known for being difficult to earn entry to and even harder to flunk out from. However, a rigorous State U that doesn't care that Undergrad 32768 just dropped out should have an easier time maintaining standards.

I had a wonderful philosophy professor in a 100-level class I was taking to fulfill a gen ed req, he was some old retired guy and he had no mandatory attendance and only one assignment for the whole semester: a single, 15 page final paper.

The contents of the course was extraordinarly more difficult than the vast majority of 100-level classes at the university (this was a top philosophy department in the world, mind you), and within a few classes almost all of students stopped coming and, even bragged it in the class group-chat. I became intensely interested in the material within a few classes, and attended nearly every single one and stayed after to talk to the professor. Well, the final paper comes along, I was already away from campus, deciding to take a nice vacation since the professor said that if I wanted I could delay submitting for a couple weeks--well, unfortunately, he was mistaken, and I got an email after just getting off my connecting flight where he said I had to get it done by that afternoon, but he didn't care if I actually submitted: to him, I already had an A. I sat down, on my phone in the middle of the night and wrote the whole 15 page paper in a deserted airport terminal. I got an A. Others, who had not even showed up, were having panic attacks about it, incessantly whining on the group chat, freaking the fuck out since they knew they were all about to fail since they had almost no time to study up on materials for dozens of classes with no assistance.

This was all before the advent of ChatGPT. I have no idea if that 15-page paper would be such a killer today. Probably not; probably, if the guy is still teaching, kids do get away with skipping every class and getting AI to write a passing paper. But, the principle is still there: you just need a paper test now!

This is fairly incorrect.

>The better you do and the more you learn in college, the better you can speak and the more you can show off in an interview for your desired position

For undergrad degrees, you have nothing to show off except maybe a project that you were required to do. Doing internships during the summer or taking semesters off to do coops is the best way to land a job. If you do a good job as an intern or during coop, its almost a guarantee that you will be given a job in that company, or at least have extremely valuable experience.

Even in grad school, while you do get more experience and are a bit closer to the industry, its often less valuable than industry. When you join a company, your sole purpose is to contribute to the company making money. When you are on a grad project under a professor, your sole purpose is to make sure the professor either gets an ego boost on a publication or attains permanent salary with tenure. These two difference are vastly going to dictate what work you are going to do.

The better word to use instead of cheating would be hacking. Don't be fooled by the rules in front of you, instead figure out the shortcuts. Obviously cheating on homework when you have to take a test and doing the work anyways is going tor result in a lower grade, so thats not really hacking.

Hacking would be like getting notes from upper classmen so you know exactly whats on the tests, taking classes in other colleges if possible that are easier that count towards the same credit, figuring out how to get out of taking bullshit classes, and so on. Figure out the least amount of work you have to do to get that degree.

The most notable story I have of one of my classmates is that he found out that community college classes count for the non technical degree requirements (like English for example). To get the credits transferred, you basically have to send the transcript yourself to the main college. So he took one class in the summer, got the transcript, and added a class he never took, making sure that all the info was legit, and it went through cause the people entering the data never bother to call the office and check. Next year he just straight up forged the entire transcript to cover the rest of his electives, and it went through as well. Ended up saving money, and boosting his GPA.

I have to admit I wrote a few cheat sheets on tiny little notes. Maybe a handful of times in high school. But I never once had to use them. By painstakingly writing those little notes, I somehow managed to memorize is at the same time. And having a backup made me feel safer. Stupid - and I wouldn't recommend this strategy to anyone (besides being unethical to even consider cheating).