Interesting, @al2simon!
So, all things being equal (which they never are, of course, but assuming top standardized test scores and recommendations), would an engineering, math, or physics major at Tailgate U. be preferable to a sociology major at HYPS?
@anomander, in terms of interview skills, as various people have stated, it depends on the job. For a position on the trading floor, they’re not trying to ascertain whether you know which fork to use. And street-smarts are prized.
Who knows? The honest answer is - give me 2 actual resumes, tell me the type of job I’m hiring for and the corporate culture, and I’ll tell you which one I’d prefer to interview. But if I play along with your premise and attempt to answer your question - for the types of entry-level jobs I hire for, doing well at an engineering/math/physics major would be worth more to me than doing well at a sociology major. I don’t care whether someone attended HYPS other than for the “high density” reasons that blossom alluded to and because there’s a higher chance that the students will have the specific je ne sais quoi qualities that are useful indicia of future success, but I should also be able to find that out from the resume and from the interview.
On the other hand, I probably wouldn’t be making the trip to “Tailgate U.” in the first place to do interviews. And even though my company does do on-campus interviewing at HYPS, our interview slots are sufficiently in demand that we probably wouldn’t interview even a 4.0 sociology major unless they had something compelling on their resume - for example, did they make the finals of the World Series of Poker or do something cool and entrepreneurial? I could not care less about their golf game.
YES! Has anyone here ever dealt with the old-school London bookmakers? Many of them have high school educations at best, but put one of them alone in a room with a Harvard Ph.D. professor and 99% of the time the bookmaker will come out owning the Harvard prof’s house, car, and underwear.
Thanks, @al2simon. That was helpful.
Just to clarify, for entry-level positions, you only interview students on campus (at a handful of schools)? You wouldn’t consider an applicant, regardless of how outstanding the resume, if they applied for a job on their own?
For us, that’s not entirely true. Like most things, it’s nuanced.
For entry-level jobs in support functions (accounting for example), we cast a wide net but it’s mostly at schools that are within a couple hundred miles of the office.
For other entry-level jobs probably 95% of the undergraduates we interview come from on-campus interviewing at our target schools. But the target schools will be different for different functions and based on our needs. For example, the people who hire programmers will have their own set of target schools from the people who hire MBAs. It’s also based on what’s worked for us in the past - despite Stanford’s and MIT’s great CS departments, they aren’t on our list of target schools for programmers because among computer scientists working at our firm doesn’t have the same prestige as working at (say) Google, so the best people don’t want to work for us or don’t want our “work-a-day” programming jobs. And more graduates than you’d think don’t want to move too far from home, so going from California to NY is an uphill battle. For programmers, we don’t target HYPSM - it’s mainly public universities with the best CS departments.
Within our industry, we are a pretty prestigious employer, so we constantly get resumes from students from non-target schools who are begging for interviews. Of course we look at their resumes, and if they look outstanding we’ll do a phone interview. It helps if someone you trust can vouch for their abilities. But frankly, this only happens rarely. Most 21 year old’s simply haven’t had time to do something truly eye-catching, and most professors aren’t disciplined enough to only recommend their truly top students. It’s only worth allocating so many resources for new graduate recruiting and you have to draw the line somewhere - having some discipline in your process is also important.
Again, this is only for out-of-school hiring. No one cares that much where someone went to school after a few years of experience.
Apropos Rivera’s paper, a couple dozen times a year we get resumes passed along to us from friends or (say) a U.S. Senator looking to get a family member hired, etc. In that case, to avoid insulting the Senator you have to have a somewhat senior person do a phone interview. But we’d never take it further unless the person was actually a great candidate (and people who come in from those channels rarely are; it’s always a shock when they turn out to be good ). The goal is to have them walking away feeling really good about the phone call but working somewhere else ! Despite the obvious social/political benefits of hiring a politician’s child, we never do it unless they’re qualified because we’ve learned the downside is too great - once it’s clear that they’re an idiot, it ends up being unpleasant for everyone involved and ultimately does more damage. At least in our industry, the notion that “social class” or prestige is a major component of hiring is bizarre.
I’m sure some large companies with 50,000 employees who deal with a lot of government regulation are forced to allocate 25 spots for the offspring of the movers and shakers. But these kids aren’t being hired because they have a mean golf game or engage in the “right leisure pursuits” - it’s because of who Daddy (or occasionally Mommy) is. Trust me, I wish our competitors hired people the way the Rivera described - it would make things much easier for me !
^^^Very interesting. Thanks!
@al2simon, I think the Rivera article you were referring to in your original comment (#9) is linked to in this National Review blog post: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/285160/how-elite-business-recruiting-really-works-jim-manzi
@LucieTheLakie, it depends on which Tailgate U.
As an example, UIUC is known for having some of the top departments in engineering, CS, and the hard sciences, so many quantitative finance firms recruit from that pool. Mizzou, UIowa, and UK, in adjacent states, do not have such highly rated departments, so they don’t.
@al2simon , this is exactly why one should get into the most prestigious school possible.
I think this is good advice for some industries or for some students with certain specific goals. But as has been repeated ad infinitum here - in general, it all depends. I’m just relaying my own experience because it’s germane to the Rivera book, not to claim it applies to everyone. And even among so-called elite professional services firms, the job should be to identify talent, not pedigree.
Although my kids do attend schools that are considered “prestigious”, to be honest if I was able to make one magic wish it would have nothing to do with what schools they got into - it would be for them to marry good people and for their families to be healthy and safe. That plus hard work and talent will get them most anywhere they want to go.
I know this is very hard for some of you to imagine, but there really are some poor people who were simply born with polish and grace and seem to know instinctively how to behave. Some of those graduate from Ivies and bring that elegance to other environments as well.
Wonder of wonders.
“@al2simon , this is exactly why one should get into the most prestigious school possible.”
You really don’t get it, do you? That advice is good for SOME fields/ industries, not all.
And since when is the purpose of an education to get into a so-called “elite” field? (So called because the eliteness is mostly amongst themselves)
“even among so-called elite professional services firms, the job should be to identify talent, not pedigree.”
I agree that this is what they OUGHT to do, but it isn’t what law firms do. They’re looking for talent within the pool of well-pedigreed candidates, period. This became doubly true, at least in my market, post-2008. When the big firms were taking classes of 60-80 2Ls, many of them would have a handful of summer associates from the local third and fourth tier law schools. When classes shrank to 16, those star candidates from low-tier schools took the hit. There was talent there before, and there still is, but the firms aren’t looking for it any more.
Hanna’s absolutely right. In fact, the hiring process at each law firm is so completely set in stone, that there really isn’t even a way for someone to be considered outside of whatever that firm’s process is. For most, it involves OCI, clerk recruiting and diversity recruiting at specific schools for candidates meeting very specific criteria. Very occasionally someone known to a partner or a bona fide celebrity will come along and they will move to the head of the line.
If you asked my kids, though, neither of whom has a really fancy graduate degree, both I think would say that their elite (in some people’s minds) college degrees have been very important. One of them is working for an affiliate of his university, so that doesn’t exactly count . . . except he IS working there, and it’s a good job for him, and it’s not the sort of thing he could have found just anywhere. And his degree also mattered when he got his first, supremely non-elite job. He was hired with less than the minimum qualifications, in part because they figured he had to be really smart and a quick study (and in part because they needed someone desperately and he was there and available). The other works for a major foundation, and there’s no question that low- and mid-level professional jobs there are held only by graduates of institutions they see as elite. (At a more senior level, there are a couple of people who went to local Catholic colleges but who had really, really distinguished careers in the Real World.)
I am not talking about MDs, MBAs, engineers, or code writers here. The bottom line is that if you are going to major in the humanities or a non-lucrative social science, and not go to law school or business school, and you are not a gifted hustler, you may have better quality opportunities coming from an elite college.
Yes. Agree with this.
Re #34 #35
Probably also true for biology majors and other majors without major-specific job prospects in a field that is not highly school prestige conscious.
Probably part of why preprofessional majors are more popular at lower prestige schools.
“Signals of merit” can matter in many professions. As Malloy wrote years ago (and many sociologists concur today) there are blue collar markers (swinging arms while walking, loud laugh, overly firm handshake, subtle grammar mistakes, wearing bright colors or shiny things) that can spike an interview.
Post #30, haha, I’m surprised that mother of Yale freshman didn’t get it after reading the post by al2simon, even I get it, mom of a low life UC sophomore.
“when we hired one of those people it usually turned out to be a fabulous hire – a much better success rate than hiring people from the middle of the class at Harvard.”
I once heard the dean of (as I recall) Loyola Chicago say that they’d done a study of the cream of their class that had gone into large law firms over some period of decades. They found that their graduates made partner at a significantly higher rate than the firms’ UC/Northwestern/Harvard-heavy associate classes as a whole. It was in his interest to make this claim, but I can believe it. There are pro-Loyola reasons why that might be true: those straight-A Loyola grads were more able AND more motivated to prove themselves than the middle-of-the-class kids from Chicago and Harvard. But there are negative explanations, too: it’s possible that the elite school grads had better exit options and more of them jumped ship for something more compelling. I mean, my pedigree, and the clerkships I got as a result, have had everything to do with the opportunities and success I’ve found after jumping ship from the big firm.