deluxe 2014-1-11 13:31
The top 10 colleges that fuel the Silicon Valley
It sometimes seems that, like wannabe actors in Los Angeles or wannabe novelists in New York, most of the people working in technology in Silicon Valley are here from somewhere else. It holds true when it comes to Silicon Valley’s most prominent alma maters — Stanford University and Cal Berkeley grads are well represented, but you’re just as likely to find people hailing from schools outside the Bay Area as within it. So what are the schools that are contributing the most to our local economy?
I asked Upstart — a startup that allows investors to put money toward others' college educations and keeps track of employment outcomes to help it gauge risk — to put together some data on which schools were contributing the most to the Silicon Valley work force.
They ran the numbers, figuring out which schools had the highest proportion of graduates going to work in Silicon Valley compared to the size of their total student population. The result was a value that correlates to the probability that a graduate from each school will end up working here.
There were some surprises. It might not exactly seem like a shocker that the No. 1 school was Stanford, with a value of .193. But the No. 2 school, with an almost identical score of .192, was Harvey Mudd, a small liberal arts school in Claremont.
It sort of makes sense, though. Harvey Mudd produces a huge amount of science and engineering PhDs, and the school has a reputation for turning out graduates who excel in the humanities as well as math and science, a uniquely broad skillset that is in high demand in technical-yet-creative Silicon Valley.
The rest of the list follows that trend — strong engineering schools that also have notable non-technical and business programs. The Ivy League is also particularly well-represented on the list, with five of the eight Ivy League schools appearing in the top 10.
Here’s the full list:
Stanford University: 0.193
Harvey Mudd College: 0.191
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): 0.133
Yale University: 0.112
Duke University: 0.083
Dartmouth College: 0.072
Princeton University: 0.066
Harvard University: 0.053
Brown University: 0.047
University of California, Berkeley: 0.035.