[gems]

About point 2 and point 3: the quality of the undergraduate education is considered in applicants to top schools. Like I said before, there is definitely a standard of rigor that you don't experience at every school. As soon as you decide to optimize for financial cost (picking the cheapest school, doing community college), you've already placed on a burden on yourself.

[munin]

pretty quick to dismiss community college. I took lower division classes at one, my math classes were taught by PhDs or people with three decades of math and statistics experience. The rigor was pretty good, I transferred to a very good school from the community college and was well prepared.

[gems]

1. The point was "there is a standard of rigor that you don't experience at every school". I could have used anything as an example. It doesn't matter that I picked community college. If you agree with that statement, then do you disagree with the conclusion: that once you go down that path, you the student, have a burden to explain to everyone how the quality of education compares with the best?

Technically, yeah, I made a generalization: cheaper schooling means shittier quality education (not bad, just worse). Of course, I haven't stepped into every community college classroom. But this is the psychology of the people looking at your application.

Technically technically, what actually matters is all the things that go along with going to a cheaper school, not really the fact that it's cheap.

2. "The rigor was pretty good" - does that mean you kept taking math classes (real analysis, etc)? If not, then how can you make that claim?

[graycat]

A graduate school will be eager to forgive the first two years in a community college given what else I assumed: A four year college for the last two years, glowing recommendations from professors, and excellent GRE scores.

That a guy started at a community college and ended up with excellent GRE scores is an impressive 'trajectory', and mostly good graduate schools will be sufficiently impressed. The graduate schools are hungry for highly motivated, good students and will want to grab what I described.

[gems]

I reread this branch and thought it sounded awful. What I meant to say is that if you optimize for low cost, you're limiting your choices to schools that lack the reputation. I don't know very many schools that have both (maybe some state schools). And yeah, this results in having a burden to defend yourself.

I wish I could delete the rest of this branch.

[bane]

In the job market, reputation of your undergrad generally doesn't much doesn't matter after the first 5 years. Multiple studies show that students from different schooling backgrounds reach employment parity in most every situation.

Anecdotally, in my own case, I hit employment parity with my Ivy League/Top-10 school peers at 6 years, and have long since surpassed most of them in the job market and standard of living (due to an unbelievably smaller debt load).

The only people I know from my starting peer group who I could comfortably say have a higher standard of living than I do also went to regular 'ol state schools but just worked harder/smarter than I did.

I get fairly regular recruitment pitches from the Google's, Amazon's and Facebook's, and have worked for some of the biggest and best companies in their industries. (I've noticed an uptick in Google courtships over the last couple years as they finally brought their data crunching prowress to analyze hiring success and found that their traditional hiring pools did not necessarily provide the best employees)

All that being said, if I were so inclined, there are positions (high end consulting, finance, high-level politics) that I'm less likely to ever end up in due to fierce protectionism by "old guard". But I'm finding those hard kernels of school fashionistas are rapidly disappearing now as well.

[hef19898]

Nice discussion, at least for me. So don't worry. Because you're right, having a big name like MIT on your CV opens doors that otherwise keep closed. That doesn't necessarily mean the education is really better, but the fact remains.

On the other hand, if you don't have the money there are not a lot of opportunities left. And I for my part prefer some who showed that kind of ambition over everyone else who hand it "the easy way" (not meaning an MIT degree is easy at all, just saying there are roads with more rocks than others).