But for students more attuned to technology, “there’s a sense that they have a direct pipeline to Silicon Valley and money that doesn’t exist here,” said Nicholas P. Fandos, the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson, who just finished his junior year.

About 5 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate degrees are awarded in computer science or engineering, compared with about 27 percent at Stanford. At Stanford, about 90 percent of undergraduate students take at least one computer programming class, compared with about half at Harvard.

The disparity has deep cultural roots at many liberal arts institutions: Anything that looked like practical career preparation was seen as something less than real undergraduate education. Stanford, which established an engineering school in the 1920s, was never like that. In fact, it has become one of many universities that worry about how far the pendulum has swung away from the humanities.

Harvard administrators have worked for years to expand offerings in computer science and engineering, but the going has been slow. Harvard created its School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2007, and it is planning a new campus across the Charles River, in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, largely for those studies.

In short, which college you are coming from is not that important as long as you prove your knowledge of coding at the interview. In the interview, nobody gets threated differently just because they are from Stanford vs MIT vs University of Washington etc.

As a computer scientist at Microsoft (14+ years) who interviewed many, I would say that the most important part (over which good college you are from)is how much you know about the theory of computer science , coding algorithms etc.

Interview process at Microsoft is very through including 7-8 hours of interviewing at the white board answering many algorithm questions. Interviewers start with saying that answer to the coding problem can be implemented in any coding language chosen. So starting learning JavaScript vs C is irrelevant (though C is much more respected coding language than any scripting language)

In short, which college you are coming from is not that important as long as you prove your knowledge of coding at the interview. In the interview, nobody gets threated differently just because they are from Stanford vs MIT vs University of Washington etc.

Stanford is one of the college that has also been in the news lately for innovating its computer science program in ways that have greatly increased the number of women taking CS classes. It's clearly going to be much easier to produce more CS graduates qualified to work in technology fields when you develop attitudes and environments that more strongly appeal to both genders.

BTW where you went to school can help GET the interview in the first place.

Harvey Mudd is another great school for women and engineering. Saw an article just a few days about about this. Harvey Mudd's President is awesome and really takes this seriously. Of course Mudd is even harder to get into than Standford.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcon...e-College-Is-Closing-The-Tech-Gender-Gap

It's not, actually.

(Harder to get into, I mean)

Stanford's acceptances were lower this year than (gulp) MIT's.

Mudd runs about 15-20% acceptance, which is easily double what Stanford and MIT accept.

BTW where you went to school can help GET the interview in the first place.