Does Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft care? I know Microsoft targeted specific schools for specific areas. Google is biased towards PhDs from certain schools according to many articles. All that may have changed, but the big corps have their influence on the majority of hires.

Most of the companies which target specific schools do so only for new grads. Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did.

> Most of the companies which target specific schools do so only for new grads.

Ok, so their new hires go through a filter that has some serious diversity problems. This means that the culture of the company skews towards the demographic they are hiring.

> Once you have a decent résumé in the industry, it doesn't really matter where you went to school, or even if you did.

How exactly does one get that decent resume when the bigger players are off limits? How does the culture of the company favor more new hires from selected institutions versus these upstarts. Let's also remember that our industry has a rather large ageist streak. A person who starts at Google is going to have a lot better prospects than someone working their way through smaller, probably local to their state, players.

You don't need to work for the big players to get a good resume. I know plenty of people who are in very high demand who have never worked for any of the big companies.