If I were building a house today I'd seriously look at a solar install, and (when they are available) enough of the recently announced Tesla Home batteries to keep me basically power independent.

Nope. You can probabaly get an 80K a year job in CS with a degree someplace else. However using the 2013 survey numbers ( http://www.cmu.edu/career/sala... ) Undergard CS majors had a mean salary of $94,544 . Grads data is a bit more sporadic because of the multiple majors, but VLIS was $107,333 and Software Engineering was $94,125. Considering your starting salary out of college has a major impact on your long-term earnings there is a compelling argument to be made that it has a major impact on your long-term $ earned: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Wow must be a different company named Google that I'm competing against when I hire at CMU. Looking at the info for 2013 Google hired 19 CS undergrads from CMU. http://www.cmu.edu/career/sala... In fact, in 2013 Google was the number one employer or CS undergrads that responded to the survey outpacing Microsoft by 50%. (19 to 13). I know this is the grad program but to say Google doesn't care about "where you went to school" shows complete ignorance of the hyper competitive environment for recruiting CS grads from top CS schools.