Just popping in to share that my state school graduate starts his new job next week. He graduated with a degree in CS in May. It’s a small local company. He applied via Indeed and had a very in depth interview. He is thrilled and I’m very happy for him! I know a lot of his friends are struggling.
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That’s great news! Congratulations, and best wishes to him.
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Counterpoint: I would suggest that all of those features that you list as characteristics of (some) students graduating from non-rejectives are also found among (some) students graduating from rejectives.
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If every school is as good as every other school, then we may as well go to the local community college, and shut down this website right?
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But likely less of them. I think that’s the point.
You need to find the gems at any school. Some are a lump of coal.
But you have better odds of optimizing your time as a recruiter at U Chicago than UIC or at Columbia than Fordham or Dartmouth vs UNH or UVM.
Of course, less and less interview on campus today. And more jobs seem to have advanced tests or personality profiles.
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Community colleges don’t generally offer baccalaureate degrees.
But entirely seriously, if what you’re after is educational quality? That’s seriously pretty even across the “top” five hundred to one thousand colleges in the country. The idea that USNWR rankings have any meaningful, granular relationship to educational quality is one of the most toxic things to happen to American middle class culture in my lifetime.
This is far from true — as we sent two kids to college, and have their experience to learn from — that some 500 or a 1000 colleges offer the same quality of education. Your claim is unsupported by data.
I’ve sent four to college, and have worked at several.
And are you claiming that your counterclaim is supported by data?
Personal and family experience, which is good enough for me.
As I usually do these days, I fed the list of campuses I shared and asked Claude what the employer is optimizing for, and asked it to guess the industry the employer is in. It was amazingly spot on and perhaps illustrates how deeply these patterns are ingrained if an AI trained on all of the internet’s wisdom is able to eerily predict with this level of accuracy.
A few real patterns jump out once you look past “these are all prestigious”:
Themes
- Small, curated list — not a “recruit everywhere” strategy. This is a company deliberately narrowing its top-of-funnel rather than doing broad state-school outreach.
- Quant/technical heavy-hitters are core, not incidental: MIT, Caltech, CMU, Berkeley are all here. Caltech and CMU in particular are unusual picks for a “prestige-only”
- 6 of 8 Ivies, Penn and Dartmouth are missing. Penn’s absence is the bigger tell, since Penn = Wharton = the classic investment-banking/traditional-finance pipeline. Skipping it suggests this employer isn’t chasing IB-track finance kids.
- Geographic hub coverage: This isn’t regional — it’s “wherever the smartest math/CS/econ kids in the country happen to be.”
- Overlap of “elite liberal arts” and “elite STEM” — UChicago econ, Princeton math, Yale — sit next to pure STEM schools. That combination (strong quant theory + strong applied CS/eng) is a specific signature, not a generic “Ivy League” signature.
What the employer is optimizing for
Raw analytical horsepower and pedigree-as-filter — using admissions selectivity (test scores, math olympiad kids, etc.) as a proxy for trainability, rather than recruiting for a specific vocational skill set taught in a business or pre-professional program. They’re optimizing for:
- Extremely high quantitative/problem-solving ceiling
- Willingness to relocate to a handful of major metro hubs
- A brand-name screen that lets them be selective without casting a wide net
- Likely small headcount per school, high pay, high competition among offers (they’re competing with each other’s peer firms for the same 200 kids)
Industry guess
This is the classic signature of a quantitative trading firm or hedge fund (think Jane Street, Citadel, Two Sigma, DE Shaw, Hudson River Trading). Wharton’s absence is the key clue: traditional IB/PE recruits obsess over Wharton; quant trading shops care more about who won Putnam or built something in a CS 6.006-type course.
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N of 1, but I recently spoke to a student at a T20 university studying engineering. He was a transfer student as part of a 3-2 program and his previous “3” school was a relatively low ranked college (say top 500 per USNews). I asked him how his new T20 experience was going, and he said it was kicking his butt. He noted that the hardest class he had taken at his previous college was organic chemistry and it was the hardest by a lot. His pre-engineering calc/physics/etc. were all pretty straightforward. However, at the T20, he noted that the average class difficulty there was basically the equivalent of orgo. For him, it was a noticeable step up in rigor.
Of course, engineering classes get more challenging as you progress. But I thought it was interesting that this student noticed the pretty dramatic change. Again, N of 1.
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Very interesting. I would say though that quant firms recruit at Penn (not necessarily Wharton, but math/CS). and these days they are also looking at a select list of the larger publics — UT Austin Turing, UIUC — not go to campus, but look at kids from there, if you are a big shop.
I would say that this is a generic CS good school list, with a few taken off this list. UMich, UCLA etc.
One of the most toxic? Wow, you’ve been really lucky.
I don’t disagree. My point is that commercial employers are not in the business of making every single decision as complicated and difficult as possible. When I hired in Aerospace it was no secret that IIT and other overseas universities were graduating absolutely world class Mech E’s and Aero engineers. But for many of the roles, eventually someone would need various levels of security clearances from the US government. And getting a security clearance for someone working in the US on an H1B was so difficult and so costly and so complex- heck, just easier to hire from Missouri S&T and UIUC and MIT and Cal Tech and RIT and CMU and the other usual suspects. What is wrong with that?
And if you are looking for entry level hires in Corporate Communications and Investor Relations and Government Relations… is it efficient to recruit at a campus where you can find the analytical and writing skills you need in one out of every 50 applicants-- vs. finding them in one out of every 3???
A company I worked for documented the scores on every single editing and writing/reasoning test we administered. Yes, we had an applicant from an Ivy League school who flunked. Not just a point or two below the bar- but flunked. But it was so uncommon that the recruiting team talked about it for years. As in "Hey, this guy has a stellar resume but has three typos and doesn’t know the difference between “there and their”. Do you think he’ll score higher than “Ivy League Flunked the writing test?” So you plot the scores after every recruiting season when you’re developing next year’s campus strategy… and surprise surprise, Southern CT State isn’t producing the same level of writers as U Chicago. I’ve worked for companies which spend millions on corporate training, learning and development. None of them claim to be able to take an adult and teach them what they should have learned in Freshman Composition- let alone Mrs. Riley’s 5th grade English class.
I’m going to guess you’ve never tried to hire a cohort of 100 people at a time, all of whom needed highly skilled yet highly fungible competencies, weren’t all lacrosse playing bro’s from the same fraternity at three different U’s, all of whom were eligible for a security clearance, willing to transfer overseas at some point and were “near fluent” in a language other than English… right?
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Just coming to share a positive job hunting story for a kid that has zero interest or skill applicable to quant work (since that niche seems to be where this convo has roamed lately… 
)
My younger son, currently a sophomore at Clemson and a Construction Science and Management major (so far removed from the rarified air being discussed above) went to the job fair yesterday and has an updated and better offer for a job for next summer. Woo Hoo!
How he got there and his story for anyone interested (ie feel free to skip) 
The summer before he started college he worked as a laborer on an excavation crew. Basically he installed silt fences and cleaned up debris on sites where builders were preparing to build homes. That experience, plus his general HS summer work experience (camp counselor two years) and his Eagle Scout got him a job offer very early his freshman year of college (this same time last year) to work for a large construction company.
Last summer he got the job with ConstructionCo. He really wanted to be in the field and was very disappointed to instead get a gig in an office that focused on the Water projects, working as an estimator. He didn’t want to be behind a desk all day, really wanted to focus on heavy civil projects, and it was far away from where all the other interns were, so he couldn’t take advantage of intern after work or during the day activities. It was a bummer, but he worked hard and at the end of the summer they offered him a return opportunity.
Yesterday was the Construction Science Management career fair. He went to talk to the recruiters from ConstructionCo and also possibly with OtherConstructionCo (disfavored because of the locations to which they would send summer interns, but still a good choice). He went up to the ConstructionCo table and was starting to talk to the two people there, when up walked the person who recruited him last year. She greeted him by name, and told him that they are very discerning when they hire freshmen, that they don’t hire many and it’s a huge gamble, but that she’d heard great things from his summer supervisor and so she was happy she had gambled on him. Then she asked what he was doing there since she knew he had a return offer.
He told her that he did have a return offer, and was grateful, but that he wanted to try out other aspects of the business to really get a feel for it. She said “sure, what are you looking at?” He named three of their subunits and she said (1) doesn’t recruit through this process; (2) does recruit this way, but for next year they won’t have any jobs in the locale he was in, does he want that or (3) the other would be in the locale he wanted. He said great, #3, the ConstructionCo Civil Division was what he really wanted, that would be wonderful. And she said “sounds great, let me make a note of that, we’ll send you a new offer letter within the week.”
So! He doesn’t have it yet, so don’t want to count those chickens just yet, but for anyone reading this whose kids didn’t go to MIT or an Ivy or who don’t have perfect resumes and activities (notice I didn’t say anything about his freshman year grades or clubs - that’s because his grades weren’t great and, while he took classes in his major, he wasn’t in any relevant clubs or organizations), I wanted to point out that there are other types of jobs and people are hiring.
He got this job the old fashioned way - first he took a lowest level entry thing, then last year he hustled hard at the career fair, then this most recent summer he worked hard at a job he didn’t particularly like to try to get a foot in the door, and now it sounds like he’s going to get another opportunity to see if he can find the right thing.
I get that construction management is a career field that is hiring more than many others, and that it doesn’t have a lot of the benefits of some of the other things discussed here, but it also may be more achievable and attainable for people, so if anyone here has a kid who could be interested, I wanted to lay out how it’s worked for us.
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Congratulations to your son! It is good information on how to bootstrap into the industry. I know some people who are looking in this space, and I will share this information with them. Thank you, and good luck to your son.
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Such an inspiring story!!!
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My S22 who graduated college in May had an interesting turn of events in his job search. A few months ago (I think on the Parents of class of 2022 board) I posted that he would be working for the Fortune 500 company where he did his 12 week summer internship in 2025. Discussions began in March with his boss from the internship and he really wanted my son there. The guy pushed and pushed corporate to open the line to bring him on, but they dragged their feet. Weeks of dragging turned into months with nothing in writing. The boss was in regular contact with my son, and in June asked him if he would consider a role as an independent contractor for a few months while corporate got their act together. He could work remotely for most of the time. My son said he would be open to that, and the boss tried to get the upper levels to agree, but weeks went by with nothing in writing.
Thankfully my son wasn’t putting all his faith in one company and continued to apply for other jobs. As much as he enjoyed working at the company, the location wasn’t ideal and he thought the pay would likely fall a little below what he hoped to be making. He had a couple of interviews with other companies, including final rounds between March and May, but nothing materialized.
June was a frustrating month. More apps completed, but nothing but crickets for those few weeks. Then suddenly after July 4, companies woke up and he suddenly had interviews with 3 different companies! All 3 in more desirable locations than Fortune 500 company. He ended up getting to final round interviews with all 3, but only attended one final round. The week before he was scheduled for the other 2 final round interviews he was offered a great opportunity at his first choice of the 3! Fantastic location (small city with young professional vibe), a salary high enough to afford a nice downtown apartment 2 miles away, and a start date of 10 days after the offer! It was bit of a scramble since it required relocation, but we made it work.
I’m so thrilled with this company- he’s got a fantastic opportunity with an engineering and manufacturing firm that has its hands in a variety of in demand industries- including military and aerospace projects. (He’s not an engineer- he’s working on the corporate side). The exposure he’s going to get working here is going to be so valuable. He’s now been there for a month and I think I’m still in shock that they hired my newly minted college grad. His internship at the Fortune 500 was instrumental in giving him the experience they wanted for this role, not to mention his data analytics major that gave him the foundation he needed for both of these roles.
For reference he applied to most jobs though Indeed and ended up with interviews for about 6 or 7 companies. He did reach out to an alum via LinkedIn (that he did not know) about one opportunity, and that did land him one of the interviews in July.
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I love these stories of persistence. It’s not easy. It may not be efficient. But in the end, they are getting the outcomes needed.
Congrats to @OctoberKate son for being straight up with last summer’s employer and chasing the dream and to @dramakid2 for their child’s persistence.
Good luck is often created through hard work.
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Which, very seriously is one of the things LLMs (at least the ones trained on the internet as the data source) are pretty fabulous at: churning through massive amounts of input and returning the general conventional wisdom. That’s a useful thing, and one I wish was mentioned more often.