I think that generally outside of direct on-campus recruiting, HR and hiring managers view relevant work experience as more important than the source of the degree. Who-you-know is also an important foot in the door, as well as particular biases of whoever is reviewing the resume. I feel that my daughter probably got her first job out of college because of an internship she had done during school – not with the organization she was interviewing with, but in a setting where the person who hired her personally knew the people she had worked with. That is probably what stood out her resume. It was a small organization and at the time they routinely hired recent grads for short-term (2 year) positions. There were hirees who went to top schools like Stanford and hirees who came out of CUNY. Also, because of the nature of the position, a routine level of turnover – and my daughter had the responsibility of reviewing and screening incoming resumes as new positions opened, including finding a replacement for herself when she left.
One thing she remarked on during the process was how surprised she was at the poor quality of many of the applications from graduates of prestige schools-- I think based on cover letters and submitted writing samples. I’d assume that my daughter’s experiences are common-- and if so, it would quickly disabuse any experienced hiring manager of the notion that the source of the degree is all that important.
It was also fairly rare for my DD to see an application from her own alma mater, but when she did she definitely gave the application an extra look out of the overall sense of alumni-network / school loyalty. Doesn’t mean that the person got hired… but it helped. I don’t think that it matters what the school is – I think that’s normal human behavior which probably happens quite regularly. Sometimes instead of a school the applicant could benefit from a shared home town, former employer, or fraternity/sorority or other organization or club. Anything that happens to pique the interest of humans with a hand in the hiring process. Doesn’t get any one person hired over another, but it can improve chances and certainly be just as significant as the name of the school. In that respect, a prestige school can sometimes work against the applicant, if the person doing the hiring has some sort of bias against the school, for whatever reason.
From the viewpoint of someone who has been a hiring manager in IT for many years (note: I have never hired people at Google or Facebook, so I cannot speak to their practices. I have hired in companies ranging from 4 to 35,000 people).
From my perspective, if name recognition matters, it can be due to strength in a particular field (for example, employers in NC like NC State grads for STEM jobs). Beyond that, the particular school an applicant went to may come up in conversation if there’s an athletic rivalry or some other commonality as @calmom mentioned. What matters more (at least in CS which I am familiar with) is what real-world experience an applicant has, and how they convey that in an interview. There are certain jobs where prestige of degree matters.There are many other jobs where, after you get your first job, what you’ve done in your job experience matters far more than your degree. And it is possible to completely change your career with relation to your degree - some folks are fortunate to gain on the job experience that allows them to do so, others go for certification programs or additional training. What your undergraduate degree is and where you obtained it does not need to define you for your entire professional career.
I live in a city that attracts newly-minted college graduates like moths to a flame (Austin). I tried to be active in my children’s lives by prioritizing family over work in their early years and thus, found myself periodically working odd or temp jobs such as census work & standardized test scoring–not glamorous work, nor work with a future. Sometimes, though…,I worked with people who seemed grossly overqualified. I worked with an MIT grad at the census, and a Stanford graduate applied (but I do not know if she was hired) to the testing center. I can say that her resume was viewed with some degree of suspicion vis a vis “there must be something really wrong with her if she graduated from there and can’t get a better job than this.” Don’t underestimate the possibility of a prestigious degree actually working against you if you plan to live in a small town or pursue work among mere mortals. Some people will feel intimidated–perhaps a boss who was rejected from an ivy or holds a less prestigious degree. I think it depends on the field, the student’s ambition, to what degree the student intends to make use of the school’s network, and the part of the country where a job search will be conducted. My city does not have enough glamorous, “important” jobs to employ all of the young, highly educated people who want to live here.
There’s some companies, Facebook being an extreme example of this, which hire a very high percentage of their employees, from schools in the top 20-30 range. Whether that’s because of the brand name on the resume, the alumni network, the added value of the education at the elite college, or the students admitted to elite colleges being exceptional, is a subject of endless debate.
My experience years ago in the tech world was that smaller companies would hire a few prestigious graduates to get the company up and running. So, you would see HPM guys as the original employees and then a mix later on as the company grew (there simply aren’t enough elite people to fill all the needed positions). For example, I was at a 4000 person software company way back when and by that time many of the HPM types were leading the teams. My four man team: Princeton, CMU, Utah, and me (a UT-Austin dropout). Note that Utah was a well-respected CS school back then. Technical architects (read, big $$$) associated with the team were from MIT and Princeton. I was only there because I had a track record of producing actual software products at a tiny company in Austin (there’s the part other replies make about the importance of work experience, independent of education).
FYI: what’s funny is how things evolved later. The P/CMU guys stayed with big companies while the Utah guy left for a smaller company (which was later bought by the original company - he did this twice, I believe). I went off to do my own thing.
From that limited tech world experience, I’d say that going to a prestigious school gets your foot in the door earlier. After that it’s what you do that matters.
Edit: the guy with the most gravitas at the company was from a tiny Christian LAC in Michigan … but he had years of experience producing major software products at other companies.
Getting in earlier can be important. If you want to play the startup lottery, the people with any significant amount of equity or options left after dilution by the time an IPO or acquisition happens are often the first 20 employees.
My son’s first employer only interviewed at 6-8 colleges and while my daughter’s first employer was less exclusive, I doubt any of the new hires came from a college outside the top 30. It doesn’t mean the kids are necessarily smarter and it isn’t fair, but it’s the way things are in a lot of companies.
“My son’s first employer only interviewed at 6-8 colleges and while my daughter’s first employer was less exclusive, I doubt any of the new hires came from a college outside the top 30. It doesn’t mean the kids are necessarily smarter and it isn’t fair, but it’s the way things are in a lot of companies.”
I used to work at a larger management consulting firm in the strategy practice (e.g. Deloitte, Accenture, E&Y, etc.) and my husband worked at one of the more elite strategy firms (i.e. McKinsey, Bain, BCG) and in both cases, we hired undergrads and grads from a select group of colleges. I remember screening resumes for our analyst program and we had 500+ resumes that had been emailed in and we only interviewed one of those people. The rest of the candidates we interviewed were from our target schools where we did on campus interviewing. We knew we missed great candidates, but it was a matter of resources. If we could get enough top quality candidates from our on campus interviewing, it was more efficient.
Now, I own a custom software development firm. I hire super bright CS and hard science grads who love to code and generally get my best candidates from a local engineering school (Colorado School of Mines). We do have some experienced grads who came from other schools, but we’ve honestly had more luck with that Mines pipeline than any other source. We’re only 12-14 people right now, so as we grow, this might change, but this has been easier for now.
With software, we do pretty in-depth, hands on interviews and can typically get a pretty good feel for whether a candidate can actually code or not, so I’m sure we’ll eventually be casting a wider net as we continue to grow. With something like strategy consulting where the # of candidates far exceeds the # of positions, it’s often simpler to just target those top schools, assume the school itself has done a good job on that initial screen of admissions and choose applicants from that select pool. No doubt you miss great people, but it’s more efficient
Some companies (industry) only recruit on certain campuses, and which campus they recruit at is often “pushed” by their senior managers who are alums of those schools. This is especially true for IB, consulting, law jobs, and it applies for early career.
Well established/mature HR would also weigh in on which schools they have better experience with. We all have limited time, it is not possible to recruit at every school, therefore it is not surprising that companies use college’s admission process to help them with their recruitment.
Which is why I want my D18 to apply to Stanford … even though she’s more likely to be eaten by a shark while filling out the application than being admitted.
Students with large amount of student loans do not have such option of working at a startup. It is reserved for full pay students and students with parents who would bank roll them for the first few years when they are making no money.
Or students of any means who graduate debt free from the “prestigious” schools that meet full need without loans.
To set the record straight, working at a startup doesn’t mean “making no money”, it means taking a lower initial salary in hopes of significant future gain.
S1 interned for a business consulting firm with about 30 others. They came from Duke, Notre Dame, UNC, and BYU (and a couple of Industrial Engineering students from Ga Tech). He was the only one not from a top university.
I used to think that nursing school prestige wasn’t that important until I saw the list of jobs where Penn grads were going. They may not be better nurses but their first jobs out of college were among the most sought after in the country.
Where I work (research institution in environmental science), a masters is required for the lowest level work unless you are talking true grunt work (filing or low level field work) but really a PhD is required for our work. Your undergrad is unimportant; no one would consider that. My colleagues have undergrad degrees from Stanford/Harvard/MIT etc and CA State Chico/Univ of Wisc/Univ of MN etc, etc. What matters is how productive (papers) you were during your PhD and who your letter writers are.
In my field, it is fairly common to drop your undergrad institution from your CV – at least your ‘mini-CV’. The emphasis is on your PhD institution (and sometime masters). I have an undergrad from an elite university and I avoid advertising that. It’s just awkward. My colleagues who got their undergrads from Univ of Wisc or Univ of WA can advertise their alma mater when its football season, say, or that they are going to an alumni event. But those of us from say Stanford/Harvard/Princeton/Yale…, NEVER. You do not do that because it will make you seem elitist.
For networking purposes, my elite undergrad is fairly useless. It would be much better to have an undergrad from my local big flagship. Think about it. The alumni network of a big flagship with a football team is huge. And it kind of extends to alumni of other flagships.
Of course, yes, my spiffy undergrad did open doors at certain stages of my career. You get a second look or you get the interview. Whether you are hired/selected however depends entirely on your past productivity in the metric relevant to whatever you are applying for. If you have an elite degree, lack of productivity would likely be viewed more harshly.
I will also say that when I look at applicants (with masters or PhDs), the strength of the grad program is very important. I know where 100s of my colleagues did their grad work, and I will use that info when I hire. If your grad school is not a powerhouse in my field (among other things, powerhouse = means lots of my colleagues got their graduate degrees from there), then even with a strong publication record, I’m going look hard at your coursework and the background of your advisors. I’m going to be concerned that you don’t have the quantitative modeling and statistical training that you need. You come from Montana State with so-and-so on your committee. That’s a powerhouse school in my field. I’m fairly confident that you have the needed technical skills. You come from Yale. Hmm, let me look at your transcript—that’s not a powerhouse in my field.
@carlsbadbruin I too work for one of the Big 4 and the key is having a way to get your resume seen (not just in the pile)-- if you have that, you don’t HAVE to be in one of the name schools and honestly I tend to like a lot of the kids who had to work their way through and will say I went to this school because … (scholarship, sports, affordability, taking care of my parents… whatever) - I have found SOME of the big name school grads to feel fairly entitled and know it all ish
What colleges will be considered prestigious varies by field. Carnegie Mellon isn’t prestigious if you majored in history and are applying to law firms (who will in any event care about your law school), but it’s plenty prestigious if you are in computer science.
I majored in Visual and Environmental Studies (basically art with some architectural history thrown in) at Harvard and then got a professional masters degree from Columbia. In the US, it was the Columbia degree that counted. (Reasonably prestigious on the East Coast worth almost nothing on the West Coast.) However when I was job hunting in Germany I got hired solely based on that Harvard degree.
IME and my kids the contacts you make in school make the biggest difference in who takes a look at you.
The big 4 make up less than 1% of the Accounting firms the other 99% are medium size to small firms. Firms that size usually don’t have the resources to globe hop from college campus to campus recruiting students. Most firms just recruit from the best closest school where they can could the biggest bang for their buck.
It would be great to work for a Big 4, Facebook, Google, Apple etc. but keep in mind again they make up a very small % of employers and no matter what school you go to they don’t have enough jobs for everyone. So it’s best to cast a wide net. My advice to all potentially college students is to choose a college in a location you don’t mind living after graduation. There is a good chance your 1st job will be in that area.
@sensation723 Agreed and not only that you can MOVE to one of the big firms later-- happens all the time. Develop relationships and work hard and it can be done. I did not start at one of the Big 4- I went to my states flagship U