The 15 Best Colleges To Attend If You Want A Job As A Startup Software Developer

Working at a startup can be both incredibly draining and risky — after all, most new companies fail.

There are many benefits to startup life though, too. The environment is fast-paced, and employees tend to have more responsibility and opportunities.

A software developer job at a big tech company like Google might be well-paid with a lot of perks, but at a smaller company there’s the tantalizing ability to build a product completely from scratch. 

Plus, startup employees often get paid in stock options, giving them the potential of a huge windfall if the company does indeed make it. 

Interested?

LinkedIn recently ranked the best colleges to attend if you want to work at a startup as a software developer. Software developers are some of the best paid tech positions out there. 

To create the list, LinkedIn identified the top startups where software developers are choosing to work, then found people who worked there and noted where they went to school. For each school, LinkedIn then found the percentage of alumni who landed software development jobs at desirable startups, then ranked the colleges by the greatest percentages. 

Based on that data, here are the best schools for aspiring startup software developers: 

1. Stanford University

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

3. Brown University

4. Princeton University

5. University of California, Berkeley

6. Carnegie Mellon University

7. Harvard University

8. Cornell University

9. Columbia University 

9. University of Virginia

11. University of Maryland, College Park

12. University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

13. Rochester Institute of Technology

14. (tie) University of California, San Diego

14. (tie) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

SEE ALSO: Google’s Former CEO Explains How Arrogance Cost Potential Google Employees Half A Billion Dollars

SEE ALSO: 25 Entrepreneurs Reveal What They Wish They’d Known Before Their First Startup

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The 15 Best Colleges To Attend If You Want A Job As A Startup Software Developer