How commonly is college brand/prestige/selectivity an important "fit" factor?

Parents Forum
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But quite often these internship locations aren’t nationwide. How could they be when there are only 50-75 interns hired for a particular role, company-wide, which are then evaluated against each other? It might be in only one city, or perhaps two.

It’s very different than Google which used to hire thousands per year into entry level software roles, and had dozens of locations nationwide. In those cases, it made perfect sense to recruit from both Stanford and San Jose state, or MIT and WPI.

And some companies invest a great deal of time on each intern hire. I know one extremely selective firm that spends about 40+ hours interviewing each intern candidate that gets to the final stage, and even then only a fraction are hired. So collectively, hundreds of hours for each intern hired. Now this firm hires a lot of people from the usual suspects: MIT, Princeton, Harvard for math roles, and CMU, MIT Stanford, and Berkeley for the CS roles.

I also know of UT-Austin grads that have made it into both roles, but as far as I know, UT-Austin is not a recruiting target. So it’s possible, just not that common.

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Your analogy falls apart. There are no “shareholders” at Princeton. Stakeholders galore…but that’s not the same thing. The people who buy shares in Goldman Sachs expect a modicum of efficiency in how they operate. And if that means hiring 5 smart kids from Princeton, instead of hiring one from University of Montana, one from Beloit, one from Oral Roberts, one from Rollins and one from Humboldt than that’s what they’re going to do.

They can’t ONLY hire white men from prep schools when they interview at Princeton, because some of their clients expect and demand a diverse team to work on their deals. So that’s a change in the last 25 years. But that favors the kid at Howard and the president of the “Latinx” Association at Amherst more than it favors the Black woman at Oral Roberts. Is it right? Is it fair? But that’s how it works.

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It’s only our reality if we let it be. The question @AustenNut asked is should we?

I’d only caution against using only that metric. This site is littered with students who got into their “dream school” only to find the experience wasn’t anything like they’d built it up to be.

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People have unsatisfactory experiences at universities for many reasons. I don’t work in higher education, so all I have is anecdotal evidence. The small number of times where kids I know got into their “dream schools” only to have an unpleasant experience, it was students who got into rigorous universities and/or rigorous majors they weren’t prepared to handle.

As for if we ‘should’ be trusting US News, as long as any ranking closely aligns with selectivity & admission rates, we are probably within the realms of common sense. The other day, someone posted a ranking that had Penn State well ahead of Princeton. And people wonder why most rankings are just ignored by the general public.

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So survey data I have seen indicates far fewer prospective college students actually use the US News rankings, or indeed even know much about how the US News ranks various colleges, than some seem to assume.

Of course Vanderbilt might have reason to be worried about decisions at the margins of its particular potential demand pool–I would have no way to know differently. But the margins of Vanderbilt’s potential demand pool are not necessarily representative of a large portion of prospective college students overall.

And then among the general public, I suspect very few people who have not been recently involved in applying for colleges would know anything about the US News rankings in any detail. Again, surveys I have seen about which colleges people actually know about quickly depart from the US News rankings. Like, obviously people know about Harvard and maybe a handful of others. But after that, large public universities, and not necessarily the ones US News ranks highest, start dominating, which I think is probably related to sports.

I note people I encounter sometimes basically talk about the US News rankings as if they were a popular survey. This is one of those things that basically has a methodology answer: there is no popular survey component to the US News rankings. And I again think if you actually tried such a thing, it would quickly reveal most people don’t have any sort of opinion at all about most colleges.

But in any event, in that post I was describing what I hoped I could sometimes do for some individuals with whom I was having direct conversations. I recognize that is not going to change the entire landscape of how people make college choices, but perhaps it will help those specific individuals better understand their options.

And in fact, I agree that most prospective college students don’t need that particular sort of discussion since they are not starting from that perspective in the first place. It is only in certain online communities that I find a lot of kids and sometimes parents who might, say, find it a relief to learn that some of the most globally prominent research universities in the US are not “Reach for everyone” sorts of colleges.

Based on my own experiences at a fancy college and then hearing lots of stories over the years, I would guess the most common factors include:

  1. some form of homesickness/culture shock;

  2. lack of adequate preparation; and

  3. general scholastic burnout.

Obviously all those can happen at any sort of college, but I do think “dream schools” based on things like generic rankings, trying to impress peers, and so on can increase the odds of any of those for a given kid.

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So when my S applied for consulting and IB internships, it was through a portal that anyone could access, but before he got to a stage where he interviewed with a live person, there were 2 screenings at most shops (after the first screen, you were asked to do a virtual interview with a computer). At the end of the day, in his class at his division, the vast majority of interns were from the usual target schools. I suspect that in the initial screen, coming from a target school carried some/a lot of weight along with major and GPA. I wonder if @blossom or others are aware of the components in the computerized initial screen for various industries. At my S bulge bracket, they do selectively make campus visit to only target schools.

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There are indeed paths of study where Penn State would be a superior option to Princeton. That’s the problem with generic rankings.

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A lot of students are looking for some combo of smart classmates + college brand in career of interest + recruiting pipeline with companies of interest + career outcomes + other. The Other bucket could vary drastically depending on finances and personal preferences.

There are many seemingly random collections of colleges that can fit this criteria.

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I saw this in action recently. There was a company that invested an average of 10+ hours interviewing each candidate with probably double that time for candidates who made it through the initial stages. The process involved the CIO and COO looped in and highly involved in the latter stages of the process. Now, I cant imagine any company would want to spend executive time for such an involved process in a scattershot way. This company posts their role in a select group of may be 15 schools and goes to may be 5 campuses each year for even more dedicated talent search. No AI or automation will allow them to scale the process confidently. At the top of the funnel may be but even there companies like this see no need for all that incremental effort for very very minor marginal impact.

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I think you misunderstood. This was not about a particular path of study. This was about the university as a whole. You may not care about this particular ranking. Most of the universities themselves care about it very much.

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I agree, the Universities care, because we’ve convinced their buyers to care. Ranking a whole university however is quite specious. Yet, that’s what we have. That’s what some choose to believe.

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add bad roommates, bad food, and perceived bad professors (which might be they give too much work or go to fast…not, i’m afraid to ask for help).

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I think AI will be pretty unhelpful in this context since if an AI parses resumes it’s going to likely over index for rankings and prestige the same factors you want to deprioritize in the talent pipeline.

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Exactly.

At a high-level, US higher education institutions function as nodes in multi-sided networks, with the sides including private donors, governmental entities, faculty, students, alums, and so on. They typically have competitors in all those markets, and so they are typically engaged in all sorts of marketing and public relations efforts.

In that context, if they think a US News ranking is good for them, they may use it in their marketing. You can see that quite a bit, in fact. But they may also just see it as free advertising.

And then if they don’t like such a ranking, or perhaps a change in such a ranking, they may see that as adverse. Of course most such institutions do not react publicly, as that could backfire. But famously, Vanderbilt did react publicly recently–and I think that might well have backfired.

In any event, none of this really proves much about the scale at which US News rankings matter, just the directionality. Meaning US News rankings they like may be useful for their marketing plans, and rankings they don’t like might be adverse to their marketing plans. Which is not exactly a particularly profound insight, but is almost surely true.

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I think this basically becomes an AI training and testing issue.

You want your AI to quickly do what it would take experienced human evaluators acting on your internal evaluation policies a lot longer to do. With careful training and testing, you might be able to get it to the point that at least in the vast majority of cases, it is doing what an experienced human using your policies would do.

And then when you are satisfied, you start using it.

I note people who promote AI use in contexts like this tend to suggest what you get can be more consistent. Like, different humans might do different things, and not always in ways really consistent with your policies. So a well-trained and tested AI might more consistently follow your policies as you intend them to be followed.

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that thing is most HR teams are not going to do a dedicated data labeling and training effort. they’ll use whatever AI features their ATS offers. And as seen from this lawsuit that’s another whole can of worms

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However, would AI be more or less vulnerable to “gaming the system” than human readers?

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AI will represent the prompts of the humans. AI isn’t magic. It’s just fast. The prompt will be based on the biases of the prompters, and those biases are different.

It’s anecdotal, but my son experienced this twice.

He was the first new grad hired at a startup. His interview process extended up to one of the founders, a Cal/Stanford grad. They didn’t recruit at either, but they did recruit at my son’s alma mater.

Before that, he had the option of staying at his undergraduate institution for his MS or going to Stanford. Multiple engineers on this forum messaged me that they had worked for companies that preferred one or the other, but it was split 50-50.

AI or human, those biases will be reflected forward. They won’t be the same from company to company.

Now no one cares about where he went to school. They care about where he’s worked, who he’s associated with and the gravitas those two things convey.

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“No AI or automation will allow them to scale the process confidently. At the top of the funnel may be but even there companies like this see no need for all that incremental effort for very very minor marginal impact.”

You make an excellent point.

Do you know what scales efficiently? Targeting your on-campus recruitment to places which have already screened for you. Is it possible that there is a Swarthmore history grad out there that cannot write a coherent 2 page executive summary by reading and analyzing a 50 page report on “Why our market share in Brazil has declined this year”? Of course it’s possible. But it is much less likely than hiring marketing analysts from rando college down the street, so the odds of a good hire go up and the probability of a bad hire goes down. Yes, even if the “rando college” grad majored in marketing and knows a lot more about “how to calculate market share” than the Swarthmore grad who wrote a research paper on Winston Churchill’s reactions to the invasion of Poland.

As much as folks on CC hate to admit- companies rely on colleges to build a highly scalable and repeatable recruitment model for them. Is there a U Chicago applied math major out there who doesn’t know what a standard deviation is?

I’ve had college grads working for me who don’t know. I had one who was a member of her college’s Honor Society (from a math adjacent field). A data point she trotted out regularly every time her lack of analytical capability became apparent.

Contrary to what you read on CC- companies do not want to boil the ocean when they have a limited number of seats they need to fill. They want to increase the odds of great hires, lower the risk of bad hires, and do so while complying with the law and minimizing their costs.

In the CC fantasy world, middle management is flying around the country hunting for the “diamond in the rough”. And truth be told- these diamonds do exist. But I ran a “diamond mining” campaign for my then-company back in the early 2000’s and we made a not-shocking discovery- these diamonds were not interested in what we had to offer. The top student in physics at a midwestern flagship (not one of the famous ones…) wanted a PhD in physics. The top student in chemistry at that same university was heading to medical school. The top student in math at a different U was in ROTC and was heading to the military with the hopes of doing something cyber related. Etc.

These students don’t lack for opportunity, even if the CC folks think they should be clamoring for jobs in PE or hedge funds. Many of them don’t want to live in Hong Kong, NY or London; many of them didn’t decide to major in physics because they heard it was a shortcut to getting hired at DE Shaw or Citadel. They did it because they love physics.

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The opposite can also be true.
Badass kid from rando college who does want to work with us now has the means to do their homework, prepare, seek us out and fight their way onto our desks. It happens all the time. I’m not even talking LinkedIn: Go to any conference and you get more elevator pitches than you can eat. And some of them are good and merit consideration. Even if they’re from Rando U.

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