Also a note to reality check:
You first job is basically based off ‘where you attended college’.
This is because there is no ‘work experience’ related to industry for college students until they get a ‘legitimate work experience’.
GPA is worthless in college if you are not planning grad school.
Companies including Google, Microsoft, etc. DO NOT look at GPA. The only time GPA matters is when applying to places like Morgan Stanley but then again, those firms are very exclusive (you also have to attend basically a top 5 school/carnegie mellon univ).
Basically, as much as I hate to admit, the ‘first job’ is based off the college name.
And ‘Carnegie Mellon Univ’ does open doors in this area.
Then again, if you somehow have connections to the industry to break in and have interviews, then yes in terms of ROI, elite schools are most definitely not worth it in a financial perspective.
But then again, most of education is not worth it in a financial perspective. Why learn so much math (calculus, analysis, modern algebra, topology, number theory) to get a job that barely requires addition and subtraction? No idea. A student who learnt only addition and subtraction will do the job just as fine as a student who had to learn the proofs of addition and subtraction and far more trivial topics (and advanced coursework). Education in that perspective is indeed highly overrated.
That stated, other than your first or second job, college degrees generally do not help much. And the education in college is again like I stated in the real world more or less ‘useless’ for the majority.
So if that’s something to consider, please do consider it.
@2sunny
If your child is a serious aspiring CS major, then there won’t be ‘college experience’ anyways (not in a traditional sense). Unless the ‘college experience’ includes staying up until 6 or 7 am trying to debug or figuring out what on earth ‘Blum–Shub–Smale machine’ is or having your program use a bhattacharyya kernel variant of some restraint which you cannot google at all (since most of upper level cs courses… are legitimately not on google. Especially the variants as there are only like one or two research papers -and those aren’t really “guides”-).
But then again, your child can also avoid all those courseworks but still, CS majors do not generally have a ‘college experience’.