The article starts, "Think your Brown, Cornell or MIT degree carries weight in the professional world?" But what on earth is the "professional" world? "Top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks."
In other words, what is being said here is that employers that emphasize pedigree and polish like to hire from schools that emphasize pedigree and polish.
Next week, somebody can publish a study saying that employers of, say, computer programmers, actuaries, and petroleum engineers actually love to hire from MIT, Caltech, Cornell, or CMU. And that would surprise me equally little.
In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white-shoe" firms – in apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:
"lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and ‘clean-cut’ appearances, are graduates of the ‘right schools’, have the ‘right’ social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture. ‘To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.’"
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. At least nowadays you don't necessarily have to be white, male, or non-Jewish, and the definition of Ivy League has broadened a bit, but this clubbishness is how it's been for a century and more. What, you thought people battled each other to get into Harvard because Harvard's graduate TAs were such talented and dedicated teachers relative to the competition?
Agreed. And it seems like "professional world" only involves the United States. Last I heard, we have more than 1 country in this world. Pretty sure many other actual world-class firms would take these grads.
And its not even true for all top consulting agencies and investment banks (I can't speak for law firms). I know that Goldman Sachs recruits pretty heavily at MIT.
There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
Would you count Google in that statement -- with their notoriously discriminating hiring practices with respect to schooling?
I graduated from a community college, heh. College is a way for me to maintain social approval* while I learn, and I will then use my knowledge to build my own company & fortune. Working for other people is a guaranteed way to stay middle class.
If you're worried about who is going to hire you, you're worrying about the wrong thing. Jobs are a way to obtain money, but not the best way to obtain it, if you're smart.
*You can be in college and not doing much and people think it's respectable, but if you're at home not working, hacking all day, people think you're lazy and "spending all day on the computer", despite laying the foundation for future wealth.
There is a subtle sense of superiority in this comment over people who simply want a job. Which is ironic given your identification of the disrespect people have toward the full-time hacker.
The study (which strangely isn't available on SSRN or the author's website) appears to be about recruiting law and b-school grads.
I wouldn't be that surprised if her results are true. Whenever there are lots of applicants and lots of employer uncertainty about applicant quality, screening on things like credentials that correlate (however weakly) with average ability can still be "rational."
To give an example, assume that GMAT score is a) unobservable by employers and b) perfectly predictive of future performance in the firm. If HBS grads have a mean 1 point advantage over Sloan grads, it makes sense to lexically prefer HBS to Sloan grads, even though slightly less than half the time the employer will make the wrong (ex post) hiring choice.
This dynamic also tends to be self-reinforcing. If credentials are all that matter to future employers (and all schools cost the same), then all students will try to attend the most prestigious school they can. If admissions committees are not pure coin flips, then it makes sense for employers to believe that the HBS/Sloan "distinction" means something.
Although a robust literature in sociology and economics has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic rewards remains less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the economic and social returns to formal schooling. Yet, little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions.
In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits.
I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.
Key points:
* she looked at top-tier "professional service firms"
* separated out the "super-elite" schools
* found that just going to a super-elite school didn't mean much; you needed to have done something there
The abstract of the paper the article quotes is here: http://tinyurl.com/6bgtwu4 [sciencedirect.com link; too long to put here]
There's no real mention of any university names. This line caught my eye:
"However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits."
So it sounds like these 'recruiters' don't just look at what school you come from, but also look at what else you've done outside school during your years. Sounds about fair to me. HuffingtonPost article sounds like it was written in a rather sensational manner.
The recruiters in this article are hiring for "top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks." In those jobs, your number one priority is selling to the wealthy and/or powerful, so this sort of selection makes perfect sense. The recruiters are looking for a set of social skills and connections, not hard skills.
This has been going on forever, and there really isn't any way to "fix the problem." People - including the wealthy - are simply more comfortable with others who share a cultural background. Sales jobs have always sought people with preexisting connections to potential clients.
I signed up for this. Having just completed the recruiting process as a senior engineering student at Cornell trying to go into some of the industries listed I call BS.
I could expound for a while on this but to make it brief:
1) Undergrad recruiting for finance and consulting out of Cornell is not as good as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton but it is very easy to break into these industries coming from Cornell compared to coming from any state level schools.
2) It is not an old boys club, anyone can break into the industry from any background. A number of people I spoke with in industry failed to get a job out of college in the area they wanted. Persistence and networking can land you an analyst level banking job in less than three years after graduation. If you want to be a banker you'll do it.
3) A number of programmers I knew wanted to go into the financial sector, partially because of pay, partially because they got tired of geek.
4) I had a lab partner that played on the football team. His day started at 6am with videos (for the team), then breakfast, then weight lifting, then classes/lab, then practice. He didn't settle down until 9pm at which time he could actually start on his homework. His GPA was crap but I find it pretty ignorant for a bunch of hackers to diminish those who pursue athletics in college based upon their own personal bias. Athletics indicates someone willing to work 15+ hours a day, and mind you standard industry work weeks vary from 80 to 130 hours (looking into Moelis and UBS LA if you doubt the 130 hours).
5) My understanding and experience implies that "recruiters" are less involved with the process than they let on. Cornell, and most other high ranked schools, have career services offices that coordinate with a staffing member at the hiring firm. That staffing member will take resumes from the school and send them to employees working the position that is being hired for. While this may generate an element of bias based upon existing employees it is not one to be faulted too heavily when taking a pragmatic standpoint (look at the biases displayed in this thread regarding community college and athletes)
7) I have ~18 resume drafts saved on my computer completed over a 3 months period, ~50 cover letter drafts from a 1 month period, I applied to a total of 49 positions, and it took me a total of 4 months from start (beginning of last summer) to finding a job. I beat my target base salary by 30%, I beat my target max potential bonus by 30%, my promotion schedule works out to be twice as fast as I anticipated, and I will have a much more reasonable work week than those listed above. I am an average to below average applicant (from a resume only perspective) in a down job market, recognizing this I put in a great more effort than my peers that are just starting to look.
@PostOnce: I worked two jobs to support myself through community college. We acted as a feeder college for a Top 10 engineering school. It eventually trickled back from transfer students that the courses at my community college were harder than the equivalents at the Top 10 school. EVERY course in math, science, physics, and engineering transferred completely to the top engineering school and I received FULL credit upon arrival at Cornell for my previous coursework. In response to your lack of respect for community college I offer this: to discount an institution, firm, or individual based upon a potentially baseless or anecdotal prejudice is naive at best and moronic at worst. Maybe you simply wouldn't have been able to take advantage of community college and it is truly a lack of respect for yourself?
Luckily this is a self-correcting problem. When the grads from all the "second tier" schools, ranging from MIT to the various community colleges, start their own firms and ultimately eat these guys' lunch, it'll become a moot point.
There arent many schools, aside from maybe stanford, that can rival the combination of top notch talent and culture of innovation MIT has nurtured (and I never went there). Any company worth working for would be stupid to ignore this.
I've always had a problem with articles citing the famous "some people" (in this case "some recruiters"). Yea, there are "some (really stupid) people" out there in the world that behave in incoherent, irrational ways and make stupid business decisions. We dont need to write articles about these people and their stupid prejudices.
Why is MIT so underrated against Harvard? I thought the MIT would teach top computer skills that are so valuable today in banking. Is the CS program in Harvard so much better?
These are companies that hire out their employees as powerpoint-generating consultants for x00 dollars an hour and need to be able to say that they all went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. I'm pretty sure it's the kind of racket MIT students aren't very interested in anyway.
From the article: "According to a forthcoming paper written by Northwestern assistant professor Lauren Rivera, recruiters at top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks" ...
Of course, it has been like that for years. I'm not sure what the news is, everybody who goes looking for these jobs (and knows what they're talking about) knows it, too.
For what it's worth, crew and student government have always been the two most-valued extracurriculars. If you're a good rower then you can get pretty much any job regardless of which college you attended.
What a troll...I can't believe Northwestern gave her grant money to write about schools better than hers and how they do not get into the top consulting and law firms by looking at...ENGINEERING STUDENTS. News flash - software engineers aren't trying to get into consulting and law firms.
When a list of engineering schools ranked by recruiters does not have Caltech in the top 25 (or even on the "next 20"), but does have Cal Poly, something is seriously screwed up.
[+] [-] weel|15 years ago|reply
In other words, what is being said here is that employers that emphasize pedigree and polish like to hire from schools that emphasize pedigree and polish.
Next week, somebody can publish a study saying that employers of, say, computer programmers, actuaries, and petroleum engineers actually love to hire from MIT, Caltech, Cornell, or CMU. And that would surprise me equally little.
[+] [-] mechanical_fish|15 years ago|reply
In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white-shoe" firms – in apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:
"lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and ‘clean-cut’ appearances, are graduates of the ‘right schools’, have the ‘right’ social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture. ‘To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.’"
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. At least nowadays you don't necessarily have to be white, male, or non-Jewish, and the definition of Ivy League has broadened a bit, but this clubbishness is how it's been for a century and more. What, you thought people battled each other to get into Harvard because Harvard's graduate TAs were such talented and dedicated teachers relative to the competition?
[+] [-] gawker|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tonydev|15 years ago|reply
There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.
That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.
[+] [-] davidw|15 years ago|reply
Trolling for page views.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
Would you count Google in that statement -- with their notoriously discriminating hiring practices with respect to schooling?
[+] [-] PostOnce|15 years ago|reply
If you're worried about who is going to hire you, you're worrying about the wrong thing. Jobs are a way to obtain money, but not the best way to obtain it, if you're smart.
*You can be in college and not doing much and people think it's respectable, but if you're at home not working, hacking all day, people think you're lazy and "spending all day on the computer", despite laying the foundation for future wealth.
[+] [-] m0th87|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] john_horton|15 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be that surprised if her results are true. Whenever there are lots of applicants and lots of employer uncertainty about applicant quality, screening on things like credentials that correlate (however weakly) with average ability can still be "rational."
To give an example, assume that GMAT score is a) unobservable by employers and b) perfectly predictive of future performance in the firm. If HBS grads have a mean 1 point advantage over Sloan grads, it makes sense to lexically prefer HBS to Sloan grads, even though slightly less than half the time the employer will make the wrong (ex post) hiring choice.
This dynamic also tends to be self-reinforcing. If credentials are all that matter to future employers (and all schools cost the same), then all students will try to attend the most prestigious school they can. If admissions committees are not pure coin flips, then it makes sense for employers to believe that the HBS/Sloan "distinction" means something.
[+] [-] jedc|15 years ago|reply
The following is the abstract:
Although a robust literature in sociology and economics has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic rewards remains less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the economic and social returns to formal schooling. Yet, little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions.
In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits.
I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.
Key points:
* she looked at top-tier "professional service firms"
* separated out the "super-elite" schools
* found that just going to a super-elite school didn't mean much; you needed to have done something there
[+] [-] gnok|15 years ago|reply
There's no real mention of any university names. This line caught my eye: "However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits."
So it sounds like these 'recruiters' don't just look at what school you come from, but also look at what else you've done outside school during your years. Sounds about fair to me. HuffingtonPost article sounds like it was written in a rather sensational manner.
[+] [-] tmorton|15 years ago|reply
This has been going on forever, and there really isn't any way to "fix the problem." People - including the wealthy - are simply more comfortable with others who share a cultural background. Sales jobs have always sought people with preexisting connections to potential clients.
[+] [-] ZeroComplete|15 years ago|reply
I could expound for a while on this but to make it brief:
1) Undergrad recruiting for finance and consulting out of Cornell is not as good as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton but it is very easy to break into these industries coming from Cornell compared to coming from any state level schools.
2) It is not an old boys club, anyone can break into the industry from any background. A number of people I spoke with in industry failed to get a job out of college in the area they wanted. Persistence and networking can land you an analyst level banking job in less than three years after graduation. If you want to be a banker you'll do it.
3) A number of programmers I knew wanted to go into the financial sector, partially because of pay, partially because they got tired of geek.
4) I had a lab partner that played on the football team. His day started at 6am with videos (for the team), then breakfast, then weight lifting, then classes/lab, then practice. He didn't settle down until 9pm at which time he could actually start on his homework. His GPA was crap but I find it pretty ignorant for a bunch of hackers to diminish those who pursue athletics in college based upon their own personal bias. Athletics indicates someone willing to work 15+ hours a day, and mind you standard industry work weeks vary from 80 to 130 hours (looking into Moelis and UBS LA if you doubt the 130 hours).
5) My understanding and experience implies that "recruiters" are less involved with the process than they let on. Cornell, and most other high ranked schools, have career services offices that coordinate with a staffing member at the hiring firm. That staffing member will take resumes from the school and send them to employees working the position that is being hired for. While this may generate an element of bias based upon existing employees it is not one to be faulted too heavily when taking a pragmatic standpoint (look at the biases displayed in this thread regarding community college and athletes)
7) I have ~18 resume drafts saved on my computer completed over a 3 months period, ~50 cover letter drafts from a 1 month period, I applied to a total of 49 positions, and it took me a total of 4 months from start (beginning of last summer) to finding a job. I beat my target base salary by 30%, I beat my target max potential bonus by 30%, my promotion schedule works out to be twice as fast as I anticipated, and I will have a much more reasonable work week than those listed above. I am an average to below average applicant (from a resume only perspective) in a down job market, recognizing this I put in a great more effort than my peers that are just starting to look.
@PostOnce: I worked two jobs to support myself through community college. We acted as a feeder college for a Top 10 engineering school. It eventually trickled back from transfer students that the courses at my community college were harder than the equivalents at the Top 10 school. EVERY course in math, science, physics, and engineering transferred completely to the top engineering school and I received FULL credit upon arrival at Cornell for my previous coursework. In response to your lack of respect for community college I offer this: to discount an institution, firm, or individual based upon a potentially baseless or anecdotal prejudice is naive at best and moronic at worst. Maybe you simply wouldn't have been able to take advantage of community college and it is truly a lack of respect for yourself?
Anywho, I've ranted enough.
[+] [-] mindcrime|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lefstathiou|15 years ago|reply
I've always had a problem with articles citing the famous "some people" (in this case "some recruiters"). Yea, there are "some (really stupid) people" out there in the world that behave in incoherent, irrational ways and make stupid business decisions. We dont need to write articles about these people and their stupid prejudices.
[+] [-] maigret|15 years ago|reply
Also looking at the alumni, MIT has produced quite a few successful people in banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute... . Of course there are much more Harvard alumni getting at this level also.
[+] [-] mynameishere|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reader5000|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|15 years ago|reply
Of course, it has been like that for years. I'm not sure what the news is, everybody who goes looking for these jobs (and knows what they're talking about) knows it, too.
[+] [-] bane|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
What possible benefit would being a rower bring to working in an investment bank? I can see student government, but rowing?
[+] [-] acconrad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkahn6|15 years ago|reply
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870455410457543...
MIT is on there, but the only Ivy on there is Cornell.
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply