<p>“The only places where I could see MSU grads being excluded from just because they graduated from MSU would be MBB and bulge brackets, but this would apply to students from nearly every college in the country.”</p>
<p>I assure you there are plenty more places that automatically disqualify MSU grads for good positions, elite hedge funds, asset managers and private equity firms come to mind.
And I guess I should more clear, I am talking about positions where you are gainfully employed with a good trajectory. Take your list for example, being employed as a salesperson in apple store, customer service at HP or amazon, and even operations/paper pushers at bulge brackets don’t really count.
On the flip side, just because people from non-targets like moo u get filtered doesn’t mean they can’t network their way for interviews, so you have a few that slip through the crack.</p>
<p>I make my living creating thesis and making decisions off statistics and probabilities. Do I think everyone from MSU is stupid? Absolutely not. But I am going to make my assumptions off general facts and statistics, until the person prove me otherwise. </p>
<p>That is how recruiting works, at least for prestigious high finance positions that thousands of grads would kill to have. I am not currently involved in recruiting because I just joined a different firm, but I used to be very actively involved in recruiting. When we interview kids from the Harvard, Princeton, Wharton etc, we assume the kid is smart until proven otherwise. When we interview kids from Michigan, UVA and the like, we are more cautious. When we interview the very ocassional kids who networked their way to interviews from less prestigious schools (still far superior than moo u), we just assume the kid is stupid until proven otherwise, and most of the time they don’t and it’s a complete waste of time. We definitely ask a lot of brainteasers and technicals for kids from lesser schools to gauge their ability, because we know that based on statistics they are far more likely to be inferior.</p>