Given the state of college recruiting today, your chances of interacting with companies on campus are slim - unless your campus is a top school. It’s not fair, and it sucks, but that's the way it is. But does it have to be? Does where you went to school really affect your performance in technical interviews? Turns out: it doesn't. Written by Sam Jordan: sam@interviewing.io Recorded by Abbey Rennemeyer: https://twitter.com/abbeyrenn Original article: https://fcc.im/2Dg3HJA Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Intro music by Vangough: https://fcc.im/2APOG02 Transcript: interviewing.io is a platform where engineers practice technical interviewing anonymously. If things go well, they can unlock the ability to participate in real, but still anonymous, interviews with top companies like Twitch, Lyft and more. Earlier this year, we launched an offering specifically for university students. It was intended to help level the playing field right at the start of people’s careers. The problem Here’s the sad truth: given the state of college recruiting today, if you haven’t attended one of a very few top schools, your chances of interacting with companies on campus are slim. It’s not fair, and it sucks, but university recruiting is still dominated by career fairs. Companies pragmatically choose to visit the same few schools every year. Despite the fact that the career fair is one of the most antiquated, biased forms of recruiting that there is, the format persists. This is likely because there doesn’t seem to be a better way to quickly connect with students at scale. So, despite the increasingly loud conversation about diversity, campus recruiting marches on, and companies keep doing the same thing expecting different results. In a previous blog post, we explained why companies should stop courting students from the same five schools. Regardless of how important you think this idea is (for altruistic reasons, perhaps), you may still be skeptical about the value and practicality of broadening the college recruiting effort. You probably concede that it’s rational to visit top schools, given limited resources. Society is often willing to agree that there are perfectly qualified students coming out of non-top colleges, but they maintain that they’re relatively rare. We’re here to show you, with some nifty data from our university platform, that this is simply not true. To be fair, this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at whether where you went to school matters. In a previous post, we found that taking Udacity and Coursera programming classes mattered way more than where you went to school. And way back in the day, one of our founders figured out that where you went to school didn’t matter at all — but that the number of typos and grammatical errors on your resume did. So, what’s different this time? The big, exciting difference is that these prior analyses were focused mostly on engineers who had been working for at least a few years already. This made it possible to argue that a few years of work experience smoothes out any performance disparity that comes from having attended (or not attended) a top school. In fact, the good people at Google found that while GPA didn’t really matter after a few years of work, it did matter for college students. So, we wanted to face this question head-on and look specifically at college juniors and seniors while they were still in school. Even more pragmatically, we wanted to see if companies limiting their hiring efforts to just top schools were getting higher caliber candidates. Before delving into the numbers, here’s a quick rundown of how our university platform works and what kind of data we collect. The setup For students who want to practice on interviewing.io, the first step is a brief (~15-minute) coding assessment on Qualified to test basic programming competency. Students who pass this assessment (that is, those who are ready to code while another human being breathes down the