My sources are purely anecdotal and based on personal experience. I would argue that the students at MIT and Stanford are much more skilled as prospective software engineers than those elsewhere, but part of that has a lot to do with both self-selection and the filtering done by admissions officers to the school. The only impact I see is peer effects: If your friends have been coding since the age of 5 and applying for internships at top tech firms rather starting out in middle school a just barely getting by, then you'll likely push yourself quite a bit more and be able to learn more from them.
So there's no difference in the quality of education between attending MIT compared to say, Bowling Green? What about things like class sizes? Quality of professors? Access to professors? If all of that doesn't matter and it truly is "easy" to gain research experience, why bother with college at all if there's no difference between any school other than peer effects? If it's easy to find research opportunities (is it truly???), then why go through the whole college charade?
Do you believe that most companies do not recruit more heavily at certain schools? I know you can get a job from a fuck-nowhere school, but you really haven't addressed the fact that it might easier to get that same job if you go to a more prestigious university. Don't more prestigious schools have better connections to these sort of companies then fuck-nowhere schools that would better facilitate actually getting those jobs? Won't certain companies recruit more at more prestigious universities?
No, the most important factor for admissions to graduate school is quality of research and the strength letters of recommendation from the faculty known to people on the admissions board. Schools with larger, more reputable computer science departments are more likely to have more people working on problems of interest to the student, have faculty who know how to train students to become effective researchers and are more likely to have better connections to top graduate schools. The skills needed to become a good PhD student require reporting on a more personal level and can only be evaluated by a small set of people working in the field for an extended time. Software engineering skills, on the other hand, can be judged by much less. Actual engineering fields have dedicated degree programs to ensure that students have the needed skills to solve this problem.
But even though certain schools have better connections to top graduate schools, those sort of connections are easily replaceable right?
The only reason I'm challenging you on this considering I don't know anything about software engineering is because I don't think your advice is particularly good because it's too black/white and probably too specific. It's never as easy as "to maximize income, don't go to Stanford," unless you're the type of person who has been coding since 5 and has been preparing their entire life to be a software engineer, which, I doubt there are too many people who are like that. But for certain people (and maybe even most), the cost of Stanford will 100% be worth it. I personally think you're underplaying the effect that going to a school such as Stanford has on a student (given literature that has shown that going to prestigious university does matter). It's definitely more than just peer effects. I think there's also the quality of education received and the connections that a school has. But at the end of the day, I think you are right: you can attend a fuck-nowhere school for 0 cost and be successful if you are driven and take advantage of all the opportunities you are given. But how many people are truly brilliant enough to go to Ball State and still get that job at google? Maybe software engineering is a huge anomaly and it truly doesn't matter where you go. But in general, the type of school you go to definitely does matter in terms of income post-undergrad.
Out of curiosity, are you a grad student? Why did you decide to apply to MIT/Harvard given what you've said? Would you go to those schools if you were admitted knowing what you know now?
As an aside, I just want to say that SAT/ACT scores won't get you into top schools, but bad ones will get you eliminated.
