Or maybe for some of the top rated programs, some award winning professors, to use their Boetcher or Daniel scholarships (full), or a number of other reasons?
But if they are all the druggies people paint them as and they manage to graduate with a resume that impresses you, wouldn’t that make them more talented than a non-druggie from another school? It takes a special skill to graduate while in a drug induced haze 24/7/365.
I’m not usually one to pile on, but the idea that some especially significant proportion of CU Boulder (Not “UC”) students are into drugs, compared to other state flagships, so much that they are unwise to hire, is ridiculous. I don’t have a student there, but I know several.
There is far more weed smell on the streets of Manhattan and DC than on the Pearl Street Mall.
The ones doing the most conspicuous consumption are presumably going into family business or using family connections to get hired anyway.
RFK Jr/Heroin, Cocaine/Harvard ring any bells?
Exactly. I think the reputation of the CU campus as drug-infested dates from an age before pot was legal almost everywhere (including in Colorado) and the city of Boulder was a counterculture mecca. These days, the city of Boulder might still have a tinge of that hippie vibe, but you have to be pretty well-off to live there, and the student population at CU was always more mainstream than the surrounding town.
The real issue here is the sweeping stereotype. Dismissing an entire university of 38,000 students because they chose CU ignores the reality of higher education everywhere. Every campus, whether it’s a prep school, small liberal arts college, highly selective Ivy, or even a music conservatory, has drugs available to those who seek them. To suggest CU students attend only for “the outdoors or drugs” unfairly erases the wide range of serious, talented students who go there for academics, research, and opportunity.
“I would be hesitant to hire a Boulder grad, yes, unless I could tell they were very into the outdoors and seemed “goody goody.””
Curious who else you’d be hesitant to hire, and on what basis. Affinity group members? Athletes from sports that historically field gay players? How far does your bias extend?
Boulder is a hotbed of Venture Capital and I suspect bright CU kids end up there through proximity. Good thing you’re not a hiring manager in this space.
The hostility is interesting. I don’t dispute that CU has some strong programs. I don’t dispute that other universities and locales have as much marijuana and other drug use as CU. However, students are not targeting these other schools because of a permissive drug culture. I’ve known young people from various states outside CO who move to CO or want to attend CU because of the permissive drug culture. The school is not so highly ranked overall as to be a target for most out of state students for other reasons, besides its natural environment/outdoor activities.
The students I’ve known (from outside CO) who have been excited about CU have been pampered, rich White kids. So yes, I suppose I am biased against pampered, rich White kids. How horrible I must be!
I asked another person, someone fairly high up in a large multinational corporation, who has had a hand in hiring probably hundreds of people for professional jobs, what she thought when she heard CU or had applicants with degrees from there. Without any prompting from me, she made a gesture of smoking pot and implied it would be a disadvantage for the applicant. That can’t be good for these students when applying for jobs, especially outside CO.
I appreciate your perspective. I disagree with it - but I appreciate it.
You are not the only person who discriminates against a certain school. Some industries discriminate against lots of schools.
So I’m sorry people dismiss your thought. If you are a hiring manager, and you are discriminating against a school, then it’s good info for someone to have.
Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
And yet, 88% of graduates are in employment or grad school 6 months after graduation, which is comparable to many schools in the top 100. Seems pampered rich white kids can get jobs too.
As the parent of a CU student who is neither the outdoorsy type or a drug addict/pot head, this is certainly disappointing. Our D chose CU because she wanted a big school outside the midwest but closer than the West Coast, with strong school spirit without the intense Greek culture of some of the SEC schools. She also happens to love that there are 300+ days of sunshine in CO, and she absolutely loves the mountains. She’s happy to hike occasionally and skis about once a year. She happens to be white but isn’t rich or pampered, and when she graduates, she will be an exceptional hire for the right position. She has gotten rave reviews from her employers during the past several years of full-time summer work, and I firmly believe that it’s your loss (and your friend’s) that you would miss out on someone like her based on your misconceptions and outdated stereotypes.
We could staff a Fortune 100 company with all the grads that folks on here claim (third hand, fourth hand, “I’ve heard”) can’t get hired.
Let’s see- engineers from MIT are too entitled to do REAL engineering. Physicists from Cal Tech are too theoretical- better to hire from Eastern overshoe college where they do REAL physics. U Michigan is overrated. Tufts just admits the kids who can’t get into Harvard so who’d want to hire them? U Mass has a world class linguistics department, but linguistics is a social science- practically sociology for god’s sakes, so who’d hire those people? And area studies- who needs to understand China, India, Russia, Korea anyway? It’s not like anyone in the US is ever going to need to do business with anyone outside of Alabama or Kentucky.
I think we can all safely ignore the “so and so won’t even read resumes from those colleges” posts! Except there seems to be evidence that certain football rivalries follow you to the grave- those appear to be real!
However, it does seem that prestige matters to employers, in that attending a prestigious college is “preserving optionality down the road”.
If CU Boulder has negative prestige due to a reputation for recreational drug use (regardless of how true it is or how specific to CU Boulder it is), then wouldn’t that be the same thing in the opposite direction – i.e. limiting optionality down the road because employers have a negative impression of the school?
Are there not industries who share this theme ? Wall Street ? MBB consultants? After all we’ve heard from many experts, go to so and do school or unless you have an uncle, no chance.
I know there are jobs and interns set aside for certain colleges. I’ve seen the listings. For example, this position is only for a Michigan Tech grad. So they discriminate against all other schools
So this likely really does happen, whether people agree or not.
Yep, this one can go in the trash along with things like “USC is for rich kids who can’t get in anywhere else” and “UC Santa Cruz is a safety”.
The wholesale dismissal of an entire student body on some random stereotype still leaves me taken aback. C26 has it on their list because of a program that is almost unique in the country and because they loved the campus. It’s also a program with both good placement after undergrad and admits into top graduate schools, so clearly not everyone is laboring under such misconceptions.
(Question: is a graduate degree from an ivy enough to offset the stereotype of Boulder for undergrad, or do you decide that the student who was apparently smoking pot through college but still did well enough to get into an ivy/SM for grad school has suddenly come a different person? Or maybe you were just wrong all along?)
Do you really think that telling someone that majoring in Mech E at MIT “preserves optionality down the road” is the same thing as telling someone that if they go to CU Boulder they won’t get a job because “everyone” will think they’re a drug addict?
Also, “optionality down the road” is far more dependent on what you achieve as an individual after that first foot in the door. As we often say here on CC, right? We have, for example, UCF, Arizona and SJSU graduates working alongside the Stanford, ivy, Notre Dame grads in my team in the financial industry.
I live in a Bay Area town that sends a bunch of kids to Boulder every year. They are almost always white and wealthy (because that’s who lives in my town for the most part). And then they are often some mix of skiers, mountain bikers, hikers, and, yes, partiers. Sometimes they are, gasp! all of these things. Sometimes they are attracted to an OOS experience that’s just a 2 hour flight from home. Sometimes they get into the very top rated aerospace engineering program. Sometimes they are grateful for a thoughtful Exploratory Studies program because they don’t yet know what they want to do.
I think it’s a ridiculous–and in this case, successful–bit of tro-lling when a single individual says they don’t look at resumes from Boulder. Whatever. Plenty of other hiring managers in the sea.
It is only different in terms of one being positive prestige and the other being negative prestige.
Slightly off topic- but this conversation reminds me of many conversations that I had when I was moving to Colorado. We moved within a year of legalization.
My job required random drug testing (even for cannabis), and everyone believed (to their core!!) that I was hired out of state because that is the only way that they could find people to pass drug tests. People who lived in Colorado could not be relied on to pass anymore! (this was from out of state people)
They could not understand the folly of the logic in that as soon as I moved there- that I to would ‘live’ here and by their logic would not be able to pass a random drug test.
(I also had many people ask if I was moving here because it was now legalized- lol 
)
That’s neither what I said or what I meant.
Mechanical engineers from MIT don’t have career “optionality” because the school is prestigious. They have optionality because they’ve already completed most (if not all) of the pre-requisites for med school without even trying- the combination of the institute requirements AND the HASS requirements does that for them. They have optionality because most financial institutions know that even without a “finance course” or a finance track, they already can do the quant basics, and can do the advance stuff with minimal training. They won’t need a GMAT prep course– the math they’ve taken is significantly more difficult than what is tested on the GMAT. And they won’t need (some may want, but they won’t need) a Masters in Engineering to confirm their interest in the subject before entering a doctorate program. They’ll either have enough exposure to key issues to want to do a dissertation, or have decided that they don’t want a PhD because their interests lie elsewhere.
This isn’t prestige- this is the curriculum and the pedagogy.
And CU Boulder doesn’t have “reverse prestige.” Just one anonymous poster on an anonymous message board who claims that someone, somewhere claimed that they wouldn’t hire someone from CU Boulder unless they could prove that they were there for the sunshine and not the weed.
What is your agenda here by conflating these two issues?