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Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue
Whilst I treasure my ignorance of the IT industry, I wonder if beyond the really obvious, do employers even care which university you go to?
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I think that your university plays a huge role in the sort of job you get, but it goes so much deeper than whether employers care about your institution when considering application forms. Its more about the sort of environment youre in, and the opportunities that are presented to you. For example, when I was at Strathclyde, students were vaguely aware of the existence of a 'careers service' but it was never a major deal and most students had a really relaxed attitude to job prospects. At Imperial its a completely different world - companies active target the university with various programs (eg talks about industries, CV workshops, internship opportunities, job fairs, whatever) and its pretty much impossible to walk over 20 foot around campus without seeing some poster for a careers related workshop/seminar. Although I do a math degree I'm also on the computer science student mailing list and my email account generally receives about 3-5 mails a week from various uni/student groups giving details about comp-sci related companies that are actively trying to recruit imperial students for various programming stuff and encouraging them to apply, whether its part time jobs/internships/post-uni work, or whatever. As well as this, theres more education about the sort of non-academic 'soft-skills' that companies look for and opportunities to develop them, as well as more access to things like CV design, mock interviews, etc etc. The level of exposure to industry here is just on a different planet and thats going to have a major effect on the way that people relate to their future career prospects.
I would guess that its like the difference between state schools and private schools - private students have a far higher chance of going to a good uni (eg Oxbridge) because its continually drilled into them that this is what they should be aiming for, whereas state school students often wont learn to view it as the sort of thing that 'people like them' do and hence will ingrain less ambitious attitudes which end up holding them back (theres probably many other ways that private school students ingrain more positive attitudes than state ones but thats the most relevant in this context).
edit: Even aside from the career aspects, you cant really underestimate the difference in attitude that comes from being surrounded by fairly (academically) bright people who tend to be relative high-achievers. Theres been some fairly
interesting studies done in about various manifestations of the placebo effect in an educational environment (although like a lot of social psychology its mainly just a restatement of common sense).