Many years ago, when I used to hire programmers, someone told me that a CS degree from an Ivy league was less of a reliable predictor of engineering talent than a CS degree from a University of California school (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB etc.)<p>The logic of this was that the engineering schools of UCs had a serious "weed out" process. If you went to an Ivy and made your major CS, because it was fashionable, you got through no matter what.<p>I don't have anecdotes to verify this-- much less data-- but I thought it was an interesting observation.