It is quite possible that a portion of MIT applicants thought that the MIT name would enhance options. It is also quite possible that a portion of students who decided against MIT did not think the MIT name enhance options over alternatives. This is not particularly meaningful. What would be more telling, if you took half of MIT accepted kids and put them at a quality college that offered a similar list of tech/engineering majors, but did not have a reputation like MIT, then compared outcomes between the attended MIT group vs did not attend MIT group. I expect the MIT accepted kids would generally also have great outcomes, regardless of whether they attended MIT or not.
Tech hiring focuses on whether the applicant has the experience and skillset to be successful on the job, not whether the applicant attended a “top 10 STEM school.” For example, the most common engineering major at MIT is mechanical engineering. MIT mechanical engineers do not have their choice of 6-figure salary offers, so long as they do not bomb the interview since that’s not what mechanical engineering jobs typically pay, regardless of whether the student attended MIT or not. Instead the 6 figure starting salary tech positions are primarily in software engineering/CS and require moving to an extremely high cost of living area like Silicon Valley. 6-figures starting salary is often required to be competitive for Silicon Valley CS, but mechanical engineers are not eligible for a software engineering position like this because software engineering positions expect the applicant to have a CS skillset and will test for CS ability in the technical interviews.
Instead, the list of employers that hired MIT mechanical engineers in a recent year is below. There are a wide variety of different companies, most of which are not on your earlier list. Are there any tech companies on this list that you think would avoid well qualified mechanical engineer applicants who did not attend a “top 10 STEM school” like MIT?
AB InBev, Accenture, Amazon.com, Inc, Apple, Applied
Predictive Technologies, Aurora Flight Sciences, Bain &
Company, Boeing, Broadway Technology, LLC, Brooks
Automation, Creare Inc., Deloitte Consulting, Ford Motor
Company, Gaia-Elements, General Motors, Harvard University,
Hewlett Packard, Intuitive Surgical, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Kitty Hawk Corp, Kuchnir Dermatology and Dermatologic
Surgery, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, MathWorks,
Microsoft, MIT, Nest, Inc, Northrop Grumman, Oasis, Oliver
Wyman, Revive Solutions Inc., Self-employed, SharkNinja
Operating LLC, Shell Oil, Sistine Solar, Sonos, Space
Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), Starry Internet Service,
Tactile Inc., Tesla Motors, U.S. Navy, Verus Research, Wafer
LLC, Wolf, Greenfield, and Sacks, ZOLL Medical Corporation
The MIT mechanical engineering major (course 2) salary stats reported for this previous year were Median = $73k, Mean = $74k. This MIT mean/median is consistent with the previously reported CollegeScorecard earnings that are repeated below (from a few years ago, not inflation adjusted):
20 = non-Ivy, USNWR ranked 1 to 20
T50 = USNWR ranked 21 to 50
Major Ivies T20 T50 Pri T50 Pub All
Mechanical Engineering $71k $72k $66k $66k $63k
Engineering (All Majors) $70k $73k $69k $67k $63k