Berkeley Prestige=Perception of Selectivity?

sakky · March 12, 2012, 1:30pm

Actually, where GPA is the most useful is for admission to America’s two great ‘professional guilds’: law and medicine. A high GPA, coupled with a sufficiently high standardized test score, is generally sufficient to gain admission to med-school or a top-ranked law school and from there, a clear pathway to a lucrative career. Nor do law and med-school adcoms care much about the difficulty of your major. In their eyes, a 3.8 GPA in some creampuff major is far preferable to a 3.0 in engineering, as many engineering students have realized to their great dismay.

Actually, I believe you have defined ‘industry’ in a manner quite different from mine. To wit: most top students at Harvard or Stanford who head for the workforce are not going to traditional industry, rather they’re going to consulting and investment banking. Before the crash, nearly half of all Harvard seniors entering the workforce took jobs in consulting or banking, and that’s the figure for all such Harvard seniors. The figure is clearly far higher for the top-performing seniors. {Let’s face it, if you have straight C’s at Harvard, you’re not going to get a job in consulting or banking.}

Consulting and banking firms are not only notoriously GPA-driven, but also care little about your specific major, which is why a Harvard/Stanford humanities student can become a Wall Street investment banker. While they do somewhat care about relevant experience through prior summer internships, those internships are themselves open to any major. What those firms care about -first and foremost- is the brand-name of your school, because that is what they are selling to clients. You can have straight A+'s in economics/finance courses with extensive finance experience from a no-name school…yet Goldman would still rather hire the art major with the Harvard brand.

I’m not so sure about that - those elite overseas employers seem to be very familiar with American grading practices. Part of the reason is that those elite overseas employers are themselves divisions of elite US firms. For example, the McKinsey Shanghai, McKinsey Beijing, and McKinsey Hong Kong offices are heavily populated by people with degrees from elite Western schools (Ivies, Stanford, Ox-bridge, etc.). In fact, it seems to be a highly common pathway that a Chinese national who wants to be hired to a McKinsey China office first needs to leave China to obtain an elite Western degree. The same seems to be true of elite non-US investment banks. UBS, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, HSBC and the like all heavily recruit from elite US colleges to populate their European analyst pool. I can think of numerous Ivy/Stanford graduates who were hired into finance jobs into Europe (mostly London).

Granted, this discussion has been highly consulting/finance-centric, which does not seem to be the types of industries that you were discussing. But the reason why they are relevant is because - whether we like it or not - consulting and finance are the premiere industries that tend to attract the top students from the brand-name colleges. Indeed, they’ve been doing so for years, which has led numerous observers to decry the brain-drain from other industries.

I was shocked—and upset—when the majority of my students became investment bankers or management consultants after they graduated. Hardly any became engineers. Why would they, when they had huge student loans, and Goldman Sachs was offering them twice as much as engineering companies did?

[Friends</a> Don?t Let Friends Get Into Finance | TechCrunch](<a href=“http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don’t-let-friends-get-into-finance/]Friends”>Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance | TechCrunch)

But be that as it may, the fact is, that’s not going to change. As long as elite Western universities offer entree to consulting and finance employers that are seen as prestigious and lucrative, then students around the world are going to rightfully view those universities as gateways to those employers.

So I reiterate my former quote, the ingenuity of the Harvard/Stanford package is that it bundles a world-class brand and alumni network access along with a ‘GPA-enhanced’ transcript and ample free time with which to devote to extracurricular activities that places you in prime position to compete for the top employers or professional schools(e.g. law/business/med schools). Those top employers would be those the elite consulting and banking firms that college students prefer so strongly.

Fair enough, good point. The question that is to be answered though, how many people are actually attracted by that? I know that many Chinese students come to Berkeley with the goal of bringing their knowledge back to China, not necessarily with the goal of staying in the US. Sames goes for many Koreans, who often are expected to enter the military or marry in Korea. Now, that attitude may or may not change over the course of their studies, but that’s another topic.

Actually, in my experience, it’s the Europeans that come to the US who are most likely to want to stay. The fact that a European student comes to the US often suggests that he has done so out of free will and an affinity towards the US, not because of university rankings or family expectations. Thus, I would say you have your argument backwards. Europeans will be more attracted by the increased chance of obtaining a US visa than most Asian students.

I’m afraid I have to strongly disagree, at least with respect to China (albeit perhaps less so with Korea). The overwhelming attraction of the US vs. China is that China is still a poor and politically repressive country. The average Chinese worker makes a small fraction of what the average American worker does, and even the average college-educated Chinese worker makes significantly less than his American counterpart. Americans (and foreigners with work permits) are also free to have as many children as they want without government sanction, and are also free to legally move throughout the US whenever they want - a far cry from the rigid Chinese hukou system. They may also worship religion freely, to make political statements, and to read to their heart’s content about, say, the ‘events’ of June 4 1989. {Heck, I can think of some Chinese nationals who knew practically nothing about those events until they came to the US.}

Granted, I can certainly agree that if you’re politically well-connected within China, you will do far better by returning to China than staying in the US. Xi Jinping’s daughter certainly will return to China after she graduates from Harvard. And certainly China also offers tremendous entrepreneurial opportunities which has recently attracted numerous Chinese nationals and Chinese-Americans back to China.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that a US work permit would represent a life-changing upgrade in their economic and political status. Europeans feel little such attraction because they already enjoy high living standards and extensive political freedoms at home. But as my Chinese friends have told me, the reason that the US is great is that in the US, even a poor person can own a car. Even a poor person with no political connections can read and discuss political controversies without fear of arrest.

Berkeley Prestige=Perception of Selectivity?

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