We recently received some questions about whether or not it "matters" to go to a "good" school for one's undergraduate education, so we thought it'd be a good idea to address this more generally. Please keep in mind that these are only the opinions of a few people, formed from their personal experience through various levels of the academic circuit. The following doesn't claim to be an exhaustive study of the relevant data or any such thing. Also please note that the following is likely most applicable to a high-school or undergraduate student who wants to pursue a technical field (like math, physics, computer science, etc.) and either go on to a technical job or to graduate study in those fields.
As a final disclaimer: if you're currently at (or went to) a "good" school, please don't take this as a diatribe against prestige. A number of us here did go to such schools, and we loved every bit of it. What we try to express here is the fact that this isn't the only way.
What does it mean to "matter"
Before addressing the question "does going to a good school matter?", we must define the words "matter" and "good." Let's start with "matter." Why something "matters" typically has to do with what you want to get from that thing. If you only care about having a bachelor's diploma to hang on your wall upon graduation, then it quite literally doesn't matter at all which school you go to, so long as they're sufficiently accredited to hand out diplomas.
For the sake of this article we're going to assume that what we mean by "matter" here is some combination of
- being able to get into a "good" PhD (or more generally, graduate) program after one's undergrad, and/or
- being able to get a "good" job after one's undergrad.
These two points do not have as much overlap as you might think, and we'll try to address both as well as we can. You'll notice, though, that both these points also require us to define the word "good".
What does it mean to be "good"?
This is a really tough one, especially when it comes to schools. From the context of the questions we've received, it's clear that "good" is meant to imply "highly ranked by certain ranking committees, and/or prestigious." So we'll take that definition here. Schools to have in mind as examples are Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, etc.
On the jobs front (i.e., point #2 in the previous section), we'll take a similar definition — a "good" job will (by definition, for the sake of this article) be your investment banking, FAANG (or I guess it's now MAMAA) software engineering and/or AI researcher, big-name VC-firm type jobs. In other words, "prestigious" (please don't make us define "prestigious") and lucrative (especially for junior-level employees, relative to junior-level employees at other firms) jobs.
Not The Only Type Of "Good"
It's worth noting that these particular definitions of "good" are by no means the "correct" ones – they're certainly not the only ones. In particular, if you were to define a school as "good" solely by the quality of its education for math and science majors, and/or by the ratio of faculty members who truly care about teaching and developing (healthy) relationships with their students, then you'd probably get a pretty different basket of "good" schools. After all, most prestigious schools are that way because their professors are top-notch and/or famous researchers, and therefore their first priority is researching, not teaching.
In a similar way, on the jobs front, entry-level salary and prestige might not be the best way to define "good." Here's a thought-experiment for you. If you could make 50% less than a software engineer at Meta but have 80% less stress and 120% more free time, would you do it? Some would, some won't, and that's what makes defining "good" difficult here. Just something to keep in mind.
Actually Answering The Question (Jobs)
Let's start with some of the easier parts of the question. If your goal is to get one of those "good" jobs (high-salary, prestigious), and do so right out of undergrad, then yes, it matters if you go to one of those "good" schools. This is a simple consequence of finite resources. The Microsofts of the world may appear to be infinite in reach, but their resources are indeed finite and they focus their career fair appearances and resume-reading brain power on the prestigious schools. That's just how it is. But if you're reading this while at a school that doesn't rhyme with "Shmarvard" or "Blanford," don't despair, there's still (a lot!) of hope for you.
Namely, the key phrase in that last paragraph was "right out of undergrad." It might not feel like it to you now (as a 17 year old, or maybe even as a 28 year old), but careers are LONG things. Everyone always says "life is short," and since career-length is upper-bounded by life-length, the natural implication would be that "careers are short." But somehow that's not true.
The name of the company you work for at 23 does not have that much direct influence on the job you'll have at 33, and certainly not the job you'll have at 43. What influences those things are how much you're learning and growing on the job, your ability to stay abreast of modern technologies and trends in your industry (and other industries), and the network of genuine professional relationships that you cultivate over the years. Somewhat counter-intuitively, those things are often not optimized at the fancy, prestigious big names.
A lot of people arrive at a prestigious job and "coast," thinking that their learning days are behind them and it's now time to just collect their six-figure salaries. If you're not a coaster, and if you're willing to constantly work and grow and learn from people and take some (smart, calculated) risks and learn adjacent skill sets, then it really doesn't matter where you start your career (and therefore where you go to school). Time will be on your side and you will almost certainly have a long, lucrative, and most importantly, satisfying career.
In short, the most important thing to remember when you're an undergrad is that careers are long, and trying to optimize for your first job (which is what the concern about "good" schools really is), is not necessarily the right thing to optimize for. Optimize the chances that you do something you enjoy and want to spend a lifetime learning more about, and success will inevitably come. You'll also probably be less stressed out along the way.
And honestly, in 5-10 years, with the experience you've obtained at your less-prestigious companies, you might move to a MAMAA company and be managing the fresh MIT grads ;)
Actually Answering The Question (PhDs)
Our answer to the PhD (which should be read synonymously as simply "graduate program") part of things is similar but different. By definition of how we phrased the question, a PhD program does come right after an undergrad program. It doesn't have to, but we're assuming that the question was asked with that as the plan.
Here agin, the short answer is yes, it matters. If you have a 4.0 GPA from Princeton, it's going to look better to graduate committees than a 4.0 GPA from The College of the Wizard of Oz. But this is not even close to the full story...
Imagine you're a professor at Princeton working on some really cool stuff and you need one or two more PhD students to help you in the lab and/or doing some calculations. Now suppose an application comes across your desk with a 4.0 GPA from Harvard, double major in two hard things, and president of the whatever club. But you've never heard of this person before.
Now imagine an application comes across your desk. 3.85 GPA from University of Timbucktoo. Ah, but the name – you know this name. This is the person that you've regularly seen at conferences in your field over the last 2-3 years. This is the person who, at those conferences, has asked a lot of good questions about your papers at coffee breaks. This person is obviously very interested in your specific problem, and is obviously keen to work hard to learn your specialty. You also enjoy talking to this person – they're humble, they know they have a lot to learn, and you've even shared a couple laughs.
Which of these two people would you prefer to spend 5 years mentoring in a PhD?
Again, some professors will always choose the Harvard person, and that just is what it is. But many will choose the Timbucktoo alum, for obvious reasons.
Hustle
Many people don't realize how personal the grad-school application process can be. People who are reading those applications are real, flesh-and-blood people, who have real needs in their labs and research groups. And also realize this: a PhD application is like selling a house – you only need one person to say "yes."
So if you're at a not-top-25-as-specified-by-certain-ranking-systems school, here's what I'd recommend doing. First, do well in your classes, obviously. Learn your field, and learn it well. You'll probably be able to do this better at a not-top-25 because there will probably be more professors at your school who actually love teaching. Go to their office hours. Ask follow up questions, dig deeper than the course material. And most importantly, do all of this because you want to learn, not because you know you'll eventually ask for a letter of recommendation (these latter types of people can be spotted from a mile away – don't be that person).
So, you're doing well in your classes, and you're learning as much as you can from all the professors and postdocs who give you the time of day (and some won't – don't take that personally). What next?
Find where the nearest conferences are in fields that you might be interested in. This is perhaps one of the main tangible benefits of the "good" schools — the big conferences usually happen at "good" schools. Email the organizers of those conferences and confirm that you can attend the talks even if you're not "on the list." They'll almost always say yes (academics are nice, generally, and they always love audiences when discussing their research).
Find a friend or two (or zero) and book the Motel 6 room that is closest to that conference, and go (this is not a paid advertisement for Motel 6). Importantly, go because you want to learn. I guarantee that 95% of every talk will be utter gibberish to you. That's okay. Ask people questions. Ask them what you need to learn/do to understand that field better. Ask them what they did to learn what they know. Ask them to tell you what they know.
Eventually, you'll start understanding more of the stuff and be able to ask better questions, and have better conversations about that stuff. Eventually, this will lead to genuine connections in your network. Eventually, you'll have a pretty good understanding of who is doing what, and at which universities. These are the universities you'll want to apply to for your PhD, and then by definition these will be the "good" schools for your PhD, and you'll have a very good chance of getting at least one of them, which is all you'll need.
"Good" Is Different for PhD Programs
I'll close here with an interesting fact about academia that was not at all obvious to me for most of my undergrad. The definition of "good school" for undergrad is very, very different than that for PhD programs. We probably all know what the "good" undergrad schools are. There are, however, literally hundreds of different definitions of "good school" for PhDs. Why is this?
A school is "good" for a PhD if it has talented researchers in the very, VERY specific field you're trying to get a PhD in. Sure, a school with a good math program is likely to have more good math researchers and therefore more sub-fields that they do good research in. Therefore, Princeton (which has a VERY good math program) will be considered "good" in a lot of math specialties. However, there are a lot of other good math PhD programs out there, and a "good" program for, say, topology, might not reside in the same university as a "good" program for, say, partial differential equations.
The landscape of "good" PhD programs for the field you want to pursue will become clearer to you as you go to more conferences and meet more researchers in that field. Importantly, people in those fields also understand that landscape. Therefore, if you get your PhD under the supervision of Professor X at University of Poppyseeds, and if Professor X is a total badass, people in your field will know that your PhD is badass too, regardless of their opinion of Poppyseeds Uni.
I was much too old before I learned most of this stuff, so I hope this will help accelerate your learning process, even just a little bit.
As always, this is by no means the whole story, and we'd love to hear from you about your opinions on and experiences with these matters. You know where to find us!