Some thoughts...
I grew up in Minneapolis and considered doing pre-engineering at Augsberg College. My uncle, an upper executive officer in the Army (google ww2 Roy Rogers Raiders - - quite a read of a true hero) gave me a wake up and told me that was not a good decision. He said to go to the U of M (University of Minnesota). He said that when I would be applying for a job that getting a degree from the University of (fill in the blank) has good recognition and better than some expensive private college. I took his advice. I was the only one out of 400 people in my high school to be admitted into the University of Mn., Institute of technology. I have no idea how I was accepted because out of 17 high schools in Minneapolis, my school was number 16 academically. Trump may have referred to it as a "*bleep* hole" of a high school. (Side note: I grew up in an intercity area and grew up 5 blocks from the 3rd Police precinct that was burned down in the George Floyd (largely peaceful but devastating) protests. Businesses a block from my folks' home were burned to the ground. So, my education included growing up in an intercity area and learning how to exist in a challenging environment. (Like one time talking someone brandishing a switch blade from sticking me with it.. Or breaking someone's arm with a pipe who was part of a gang attacking me and my brother for no reason) One of my best friends was an American Indian and others were black or Asian. So, I guess that a grew up in a "culturally rich" environment.
I ended up in Engineering management and managed way too many people. Hundreds of engineers. Our local hiring included about 1 or 2 engineers per month for a decade. So, we were constantly recruiting and interviewing. Our retention rate way about 7 years per employee, which isn't bad for technology jobs in California.
So my take on all of this is that a name brand school is great, but people who went to decent non-name brand schools could also be very good and productive employees. So, while I would have loved to personally get a degree from MIT, (and would appreciate hiring candidates with that) my humble blue-collar background didn't permit that. (I washed dishes in college to pay my tuition and worked about 20 plus hours a week throughout). In my career, I was in the position of hiring engineers from a wide variety of schools. If the school had a name like University of "X", that usually was good enough to schedule an interview.
Another aside: Art and Science involve different hemispheres of the brain. Both are to be respected. I appreciate artists and I appreciate scientists. But it irritates me (I was going to use another word) that people having changed "STEM" to "STEAM" to include the field of arts. I take offense to including arts into the phrase STEM. One involves more creativity and one involves more discipline and analytics. Just my humble opinion.... It could only be worse if they changed it to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Music appreciation, Unemployment, Anthropology, Ancient Greek studies, and Social work. Yes, I am opinionated.
www.forbes.com
