Silicon Valley is NOT Impressed By Stanford Engineering Graduates?
A university's current reputation is not a guarantee of its future reputation
In the past few weeks, I have heard two separate podcasts discuss the declining quality of Stanford engineering graduates, a reminder that schools’ reputations are fluid.
In late January podcast, Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz discussed how Silicon Valley firms no longer hire Stanford engineering graduates sight unseen.
Google, Horowitz says, used to “take any Stanford engineer,” but no longer does that.
For the first time in my career…, you hear CEOs going “Wow, the kids coming out of college this year are not what I’m used to.”
I’m getting kids from weird places, you know, not Harvard, not MIT, like it used to be in Silicon Valley. I think Facebook. You’re on the board of Meta. They used to only hire people from Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. They had strict rules on it. Nobody has that rule anymore.
That rule is gone. I don’t know any company that you have to be Stanford, Harvard, or MIT to be an engineer there. More and more people are not finishing school, coming straight out of high school, so I would say the aperture, which is really great by the way, has opened up.
The other thing is that I am hearing a lot just anecdotally is that Stanford students aren’t what they were. You know like, “I got an engineer from Stanford but they’re not ready steady, they’re not ready to go in the way they were before.”
And so I think that it’s already, there’s definitely a credential degrading that’s already occurring. First time thought with this class that just came out. So it’s pretty nascent. I don’t think it’s really changed hiring practices much other than people are casting a wider net, but there’s not like a Stanford degree is very powerful, very powerful. But you could kind of see it’s like a glimpse of the future for the first time. I’ve never, never heard that before.