[brent]

I cannot let comments like this stand. I have seen little difference between students from the top few schools and the rest. If you are only doing an undergrad I see little reason to hold these top 4 on such a pedestal. Any school in the top 20 or even probably 40 are more than a java school at the undergraduate level. The differences are marginal. However, if you plan to go to graduate school I would certainly try to attend one of the top 4 schools.

[hga]

Perhaps ... but that's not been my experience.

A previous HN discussion where there was not merely no agreement but no strong opinions on what school ranked as #5 suggested to me that there's really something to this.

At the very least they deserve their pedestal. On the question of whether it's not worth going to a school that ranks below them, I'm not so sure.

[madmanslitany]

Dude, the normal career path of pretty much everyone is over by 35-40. Lawyers that haven't made partner, traders that haven't made been made head of their desk, engineers in general that haven't made it to management, teachers that haven't moved into administration.

It's not like they take all the programmers over 40 out behind the cubicle farm and shoot them or something. I also feel compelled to point out that "programmer" as a career is a fairly new option and information technology is still growing rapidly, so the field in general will indeed look a bit younger.

And, finally, I think your real point is just that going to a school with a worthless Java-lego-blocks program for CS is well..worthless. Dismissing everything but the top 4 schools is just inflammatory and obscures the real point..and, admittedly, I couldn't keep down my gut reaction of inflammation as an alum of one of the schools usually mentioned as a contender for #5.

[hga]

That's not been my observation for engineers outside of software (there's some truth to it, certainly GM plays that game) and certainly not for teachers. Nor is it true for scientists. Don't know about mathematicians. Certainly not true for doctors.

They may not "shoot them or something" but they do stop hiring them. I have some interesting personal anecdotal experience here:

I look much younger than I am (at 49, until a few months ago when I started getting a few gray hairs, I was routinely mistaken for an early '20s college student (this is a family trait, no one thinks my 77 year old father is beyond his early '60s)), so it's trivial for me to not let on to my age until I slip and e.g. mention working on PDP-11s (had one interviewer exclaim "How old are you?!?!!!" that time :-).

Starting about when I turned 35 I found it increasingly difficult to find work in the D.C. area ... until in the middle of one job search I scrubbed my resume of all the info that signaled my age, most especially when I attended college. Bam, it was like night and day, in that job search and in future ones.

Anyway, I believe that the nature of the field of software development rewards experience in terms of quality ... but we all know that most suits are interested in playing as little as possible, even if this results in technical debt or outright project failure that kills the company (one problem is that non-programmers just don't understand the field and its constraints and so on).

To finish, I'm not dismissing all but the top 4 schools, I'm saying that if your goal is to continue programming past age 35-40 attending any other is going to put one more obstacle in your path and by no means will attending 1 of these 4 make it easy anyway. Since you don't believe in that goal I'm not addressing you or your career or whatever.

[hga]

CORRECTION: but we all know that most suits are interested in paying as little as possible