I am told by people who are part of the hiring process. MIT kids are organized in terms of sharing interview questions etc. they are 20% of the intern class at some of the quant firms. After being held to a somewhat higher standard.
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I can confirm this as well. The MIT kids are far more organized and efficient in how early they start prep, what resources they have at disposal, and how they use their collective resources for greater success - heard this from my son as well as his other quant friends who are from and outside MIT. Most schools have some quant focused club and may be a couple of informal resources et al but MIT has a whole ecosystem that other schools simply don’t have to the same degree.
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This sounds like a relatively niche thing, perhaps more common with kids who target these places deliberately, within the larger culture of problem solving permeating MIT that manifests itself in a number of IMO/IOI winners MIT recruits globally, and in their students performance in collegiate competitions such as Putnam and ICPC.
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And that’s the big thing here—in which direction does the causality (primarily) flow?
The tendency on CC is to assume that the causality flows from the college, but what if the causality flows from the students?
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The school serves as the shortcut to identifying those already talented students, and then builds them up for even greater challenges. That is the power of a school such as MIT or Princeton for quant - the school makes the employers job super simple and helps them get predictable roi on campus recruiting investments.
These schools also create an environment where similarly talented students will be pushed towards a much higher ceiling - courses, research, competition etc. and that is incredibly causative.
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Always from the students first - everything else is second-order effects.
Hence, what one primarily chooses in selecting college is the peer group.
Birds of a feather and all that.
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My POV, though? I agree with your first paragraph, but not with your second one.
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The key is that the companies actually believe in the assertion that the schools do indeed contribute. Here’s a list of campuses my son’s firm is visiting this fall. There is a TON of effort being put into these visits and based on prior hiring experience the firm has had outsized success hiring from these schools. Clearly there are likely even more talented students outside of those schools but these hiring teams are very well seasoned and they understand the outsized ROI of concentrating within a specific subset of schools.
- University of Chicago
- Carnegie Mellon
- MIT
- Berkeley
- Stanford
- Most Ivies
- Caltech
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Oh, I’m not saying that companies don’t believe it.
I’m just suggesting that they’ve bought in to a (very widespread) false narrative about higher education.
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Many many students believe in network effects , meeting similarly minded people if they went to MIT etc. At that point it becomes self fulfilling. Especially in majors like Math. An example is the kid that got written about in the NYT. She would have had her pick of schools. She went to Princeton. Not some other random school. Because she expected to meet stellar peers and stellar faculty. She is probably not eveN the top of class at Princeton.
As an example, of the 4 fields medals awarded this year in math, one is a Princeton undergrad alum (and subsequent faculty for a time), two are Princeton grad school alums, and one was a Princeton post doc at some point. These are networking effects. Not easily replicable anywhere else except the top 3-4 schools.
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As has, apparently, everyone who went to those schools instead of their local state college.
My Ivy-degreed self begs to differ.
Are you saying you know better now?
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Well, yes.
But also, that I’m not alone in that—plenty of people who went to highly rejective colleges will happily acknowledge that they aren’t as superior as conventional wisdom tends to hold.
This ties to a larger problem, of course, and one that has a direct bearing on the topic of this thread—the idea that there actually are clean, objective meritocratic sorting systems, and all we have to do is choose from the correct set of markers and we get the best people for the right positions. And so if society decides that the prestige level of the university on your degree is a valid sorting mechanism, then it gets treated as one even if it isn’t actually valid.
(This is where keeping research economists around is fun, because you get to hear them nerd out about information asymmetries and impression management and artificial scarcity and so on, and nerding-out research economists are just kind of cute.)
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More than one thing can be true at once.
As a life-long, committed adherent of Plutarch’s “it is not the places that grace men, but men the places” maxim I will nonetheless unreservedly tell anyone reading these lines in the future: if your kids get into MIT, and they want to go to MIT, do them a huge favor and pay for them to grace MIT.
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I can’t speak for society. Above my paygrade. But I’ve been hiring people for a living for 35+ years (hurts to type that), and for many of those years, for companies which fall under the “most desirable” type, i.e. highly rejective for almost every role in every function and in every geography.
We NEVER claimed that the “prestige level” of the universities were “valid” sorting mechanism. We HAVE claimed- and the results bear that out- that they are “highly efficient” sorting mechanisms. When I worked for a public company, we were reminded that the shareholders weren’t paying for us to fly a team to Iowa to scout for talent when Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown and Penn were a quick and cheap Amtrak ride away. Did we have broader hiring targets? Sure. Did they pay out? Sometimes. I’ve written before about a very niche role I needed to hire for-- and we ended up with a world class hire from Rutgers. World class. Very narrow skillset for this particular function; we didn’t have time to just hire a “best athlete type” and train him or her. Absolutely perfect candidate ready to go on day 1.
Some roles are like that. Many are not. I have no doubt that I’ve helped hire new grads coming out of Columbia who for sure would be considered B players when compared with the best of the best coming out of U North Dakota or U Montana. But it’s inefficient to be looking for a hidden gem in North Dakota when you can hire a perfectly good, smart, literate and numerate new grad from Columbia- after you’ve interviewed 30 of his or her classmates and picked the two of three best of them. Especially for “generic” type roles in corporate rotations-- you don’t need the world’s best accounting student. You need someone smart with a good work ethic who can be productive during a three month rotation on a finance team, surrounded by “subject matter experts” who live and breathe FASB updates.
I would never claim that the smartest people in the world go to Princeton. But I would claim that even though occasionally you will interview the nepo baby/rich kid/grandpa bought my seat here kid, who is both lazy AND dumb-- it’s occasional, not every day. And the same resume read which allows you to discern who the potential star is at U Montana-- after reading a few hundred-- can help you filter out “lazy and dumb” before an interview at Princeton.
My biggest bang for the buck? Swarthmore. Nobody’s heard of it outside of higher ed, Philly and it’s suburbs, or if you are a Quaker. So claiming it’s high in prestige is really “inside baseball”. I don’t know where they hide their “lazy, dumb and rich kids” but I’ve never met one.
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Tell that to all the kids that just go top 20…or the 3.0 not happy with their state school. Or all the people that will change their list after US NEWS results come.
But! Is the sorting the result of the education (and/or networks) provided by the schools, or is it from letting the schools do the dirty work at the level of college admissions?
Again, the issue for me is the (as I would argue) misplaced causation.
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Even if a college were highly selective on only student-earned meritocratic criteria (the definition of which is not universally agreed on), without such unearned factors like legacy and donor preferences and the fact that some potential students are unable to afford the college, there is still the question of whether the criteria of merit when selecting high school students for college admission (what one uses when judging applicants by the college they attended) are same as for selecting college students for a particular kind of job, and whether merit displayed while in high school should be used at all for those who have significant college records.
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It is both. Swarthmore isn’t admitting HS students who read at a 7th grade level, but the courses across the board appear to be of sufficient rigor that they are able to take the already strong freshman and turn them into educated graduates …regardless of their major.
I have interviewed “International Business” majors from "non- rejective schools " who do not speak any language besides English, have never read the Economist, and don’t know what the IMF is or what it does. I have interviewed finance majors from some of these same schools who don’t know that the Euro is a recent invention and wasn’t around during WW2. And I am not playing “gotcha” here…just asking a followup question to something on the kid’s resume and was on the front page of the WSJ yesterday.
There are outstanding kids at every college in the country. You can meet your hiring targets the hard way, or do it the easy way. I have done both, depending on the industry and geography ( I fell in love with U Iowa and UIUC and every branch of U Minnesota when staffing a facility in Duluth). But pretending that classes at University of New Haven are taught with the same depth and rigor as at Yale since they are one exit apart on the Interstate…nah. I’ve interviewed at both.
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