[needacig]

Name matters far more than quality of education, which is hard (or currently impossible) to measure, and usually gleaned through your interviews. In fact, name is a proxy for the quality of education. This is true not just at companies, but in graduate programs. I've seen people in evaluating positions openly discriminate on the basis of school.

Also, you give Harvard and Yale as examples of the "good name" schools and UC Berkeley and CMU as examples of "quality education" schools, but it's not that simple. In my experience, schools with smaller programs tend to offer far better educational experiences than schools with very large programs. In this sense, Harvard is more likely to give you a better undergraduate education that UC Berkeley, where huge class sizes make for a very different classroom experience, and you will find it more difficult to get to know your professors than at a smaller school. If I were choosing, I would look for a school that had a good name, modest CS class sizes, high quality peers, and where undergraduates had many opportunities to work closely with faculty. The class size and faculty interaction is where schools like UC Berkeley lose out.

[needacig]

Also I agree with other commenters who point out that in CS, several schools outside the Ivy league are considered good names: MIT, Stanford, CMU, UC Berkeley, Caltech, UIUC, in that order. With the Ivy leagues I'd rank it somewhat like this:

- MIT

- Harvard, Princeton, Stanford

- CMU

- UC Berkeley, Yale, Caltech

- UIUC, rest of Ivy leagues

[FlyingLawnmower]

Out of curiosity: where does Georgia Tech fall on your list?

[needacig]

Oh, I forgot about that. Probably at least by UIUC if not a little higher actually.