JHS’s & Hanna’s comments reminded me of something else. I can’t speak about law firms but I can comment on so-called elite firms in other sectors.
Most of the (non law firm) discussion here has been about entry-level hiring at the undergraduate level. It’s true this is dominated by on-campus recruiting at the “elite” schools. But at many (not all) firms, a lot more of the effort is spent on lateral hiring of experienced people. Most of these firms work on an “up-or-out” model, and well over 1/2 of the hires made out of school will be asked to leave within 5 years. Maybe < 3% will make it to the truly senior ranks. The human resource model relies heavily on hiring experienced people from competitors once they’ve proven themselves so you can identify them and scoop them up. It’s a little more expensive, but on the other hand it’s more sure than trying to figure out if some 21 year old will end up having real potential 10 years from now.
Consequently, if you look at the middle and upper ranks of these firms (i.e. the people who are making the money and doing the hiring) and where these people went to college, you see a lot more diversity of schools and the list isn’t nearly as dominated by the “elite” universities as when you look at the entry-level ranks. I think a lot of people who are overly focused on school prestige miss this key fact. I also think some of Rivera’s speculations in her original article were so off-base because she only looked at the 21 year old’s and forgot to look at the people running the firms and how they got there !
Either path - starting at an elite school, getting hired directly, then battling your way up, or getting recruited at a less prestigious firm and working your way up and then laterally over to a so-called elite firm - isn’t going to be easy. My opinion though is that if you’re actually truly talented then either path will work equally well. (And there’s the whole post-graduate degree thing too.)
Yep. On another thread, someone from Lockheed said they found no difference on average between the engineers they hired from Purdue and the ones they hired from Cornell. Of course, the engineering majors at Cornell would have more opportunities in other fields.
This brings up another point, which is that prestige is in the eye of the beholder and so opportunities are dependent on industry and geography. Lockheed’s target school list is very state-school-heavy. One poster in that thread expressed frustration that, while he and his brother went to a couple of prestigious smaller engineering schools, they had to work harder to get noticed (and evidently didn’t get the offers that they wanted), so they both went to grad school. After the masters from a big engineering powerhouse, they got gobs of offers; offers that they didn’t get while at prestigious smaller schools for undergrad. He thought that that was unfair as he thought his small school had as many top students as the bigger engineeering powerhouse, but the Lockheed person explained that Lockheed recruits and forms relationships where they get the biggest bang for their buck. At the big university, they know that they have access to significant numbers of hires at all levels of expertise, from bachelors to PhD and there are a ton of profs doing all sorts of research so Lockheed would want to form relationships with them. A school where they may get only 1 hire every other year and has 1 prof doing research in an area they care about isn’t worth their time and commitment.
^^^Because Lockheed isn’t a prestigious enough firm or because top engineering students at Cornell head into finance or some other more prestigious career?
@al2simon, that is definitely true in VC, where the handful of peon-level positions is dominated by H&S (being VC, they still have impressive titles, and it actually is a really sweet opportunity) but people at the senior levels come from all over with heavy representation of STEM majors from schools known for engineering/STEM (in large part because operational experience is valued in a VC).
Senior folks in PE (other than a handful with an accounting background) come almost exclusively from Street targets that IB’s hire from, however.
Its not clear to me why this “research” is particularly valuable, except possibly to qualified lower income kids who want these jobs. Far too much is made of the idea that squash or crew is somehow the tipping point for decisions (which I believe is completely false). And its easy to gloss over the fact that her “research” shows that there is plenty of gender and racial balance in the hiring decisions.
If you wanted to criticize these types of firms, a better starting place would be the assertion that by setting their academic metrics too high they were excluding candidates who might be more productive hires in the long run. The world is full of successful people who were rejected for something at some point. The problem for hiring processes is figuring out how to identify the talents that they have before they become apparent through experience. And no one knows the answer to that. (The comments above about lateral hires are on point.)
To a large degree, her research actually undercuts some of her thesis. There are numerous instances where she acknowledges that the firms she considers are not homogenous among themselves, and that some are more scrappy, some are highly polished, and some are “boring” in terms of the personalities they are seeking in their recruits. (see page 1009).
Here’s the link to what seems to be her original paper on the subject. The online supplement link is short and interesting since its more factually based, and seems (to me) to exist because it contains some important facts/statistics that muddy some of the conclusions.
I looked at one VC firm, Perkins in particular after the Eileen Chao sexual harassment lawsuit. I noticed they do hire people graduated from Cal Poly. In fact the guy that was the chief harasser to Eileen Chao went to Michigan State for undergraduate, he was much higher ranked than Eileen Chao, who went to so many prestigious schools. IIRC, Princeton, Harvard, etc…
Sure, there are some. But social scientists study averages, and on average, wealthy kids of high-class backgrounds are much more likely to develop this polish and sophistication to a level that identifies them as “insiders” than poor kids. The learning curve is steep if you come from a working-class background, even if you are fairly intelligent. I remember being somewhat baffled by my first wine-and-cheese party in graduate school, much less which fork to use at a fancy banquet.
As to sociology professors - like the members of any profession, there’s probably a non-zero level of correlation between their beliefs and ideals, but as anyone who has ever been to a social science conference can attest, sociologists disagree about a LOT of things. They’re not a hive mind. They are definitely not remotely comparable to a “Soviet ruling class after repeated Stalinist purges.” The other thing to remember is that sociologists are researchers; they are rigorously trained in a method of research designed to uncover trends in social behavior. Lauren Rivera didn’t just go into these settings to make things up; she may have had her hypotheses, but the fact that she’s a sociologist is no reason to assume that she twisted the findings to say what she wanted to say.
I would say that this bears either unfamiliarity or a misunderstanding of the tenets and training in sociology, honestly - and yes, even at the undergraduate level. First of all, rigorous analysis doesn’t always mean quantitatively, and sociologists are indeed trained in rigorous theoretical analysis (I daresay that many physics majors couldn’t handle the theory in a sociology major, just like many sociology majors couldn’t parse the theory in astrophysics). Secondly, I also want to mention that some social scientist mights actually have stronger quantitative skills than some students in STEM fields. I’m a PhD-trained quantitative psychologist and I was chatting with a PhD-level chemical physicist the other day; I use a lot of advanced statistical methods in my research in a daily basis and can use four different statistical packages. She uses no statistics and very little math in her analysis. It all depends on what people are doing. I probably know more statistics than most biologists, unless they are computational biologists.
You seemed to have missed my point. I’m speaking about students from any background (not necessarily “working class” as some stereotype but perhaps simply not wealthy – there is a difference) for whom “a learning curve” is unnecessary because of their native traits. In fact, they often teach others. Obviously you haven’t met such people; I have.
I work in Investment Banking. My colleagues thought I was born on Park Ave/silver spoon and all…But I am the D of a janitor and a grocery store clerk from podunk nowhere Ohio…My mother says I was dropped there by aliens.
As for not knowing which fork, wines, etc., clever people can adapt quickly. Monkey see, monkey do. You simply wait for someone else to “start”.
I don’t know how to sail, and I wasn’t well travelled then, but people didn’t really ask me about those things.
after 25 years, I get a kick out of it, and sometimes will purposely shock people with stories of food we ate as kids (squirrel anyone?) or telling them my house had no heat. In fact, I think I am more midwestern now than I was then! (no, I’m not saying squirrel is a midwestern staple, just that we were pretty low income!)
Upbringing is more than knowing which fork or wine, it has more to do with knowing what to say and what not to say.
My kids didn’t grow up in a very wealthy family, but they were fortunate to have gone to a private school, traveled around the world since they were very young (because my love of travel). At their school, they had to do presentations and work with administrators since they were very young. They were included at many of our adult dinners and parties growing up. Through their travel, they felt comfortable in meeting strangers and connect with them in short period of time. I think all of that gave them a lot of confidence when interviewing for jobs. By that, I don’t mean bragging about where they have been and where they went to school, but to know what to say to get the interviewer to like them (connect with them).
Some people maybe born with social grace, but for many it is through learning (or a lot of maturity). I was a first generation immigrant. It took me quite some time to master cocktail chit chat and not feel nervous when meeting new people.
My kids grew up with two engineers as parents so you know they didn’t learn social grace from us. My husband just wanted to make sure they at least say their Ps and Qs as he put it for please and thank you. Even though we do eat with knifes and forks, we are not particular about which position they are placed but kid #1 learned all the etiquette through her sorority. I think the sorority brought someone to come out and teach them how to do a proper handshake and table manners regarding which fork to pick up. I think kid #1 must have gained her social confidence from that experience. She has since met and sit on the same table negotiating or promoting her business to some of the top people, people that I saw on Oscar night, who are married to head honchos. No these people are not actresses.
So there are many ways to skin the cat.
My kid has missed many of these learning experiences when growing up with us. I hope he could manage to learn what he had missed by himself, albeit quite late in his life, starting from college (he did attend a private college but attended public schools before college.)
Re: Travel. We once joked with ourselves like this: the state we lived in is so large that, after we have moved into that state, we are not able to travel out of that state even once. Our kid was longing for a vacation trip so much that, at one time, we aborted a “planned” trip due to some reason (we could not find that place so we turned around and drove back home) and he was happy that we just chose to live in a hotel in our own city - at least on the other side of our not so large city! (Don’t laugh at this, but this is a true story.)
I heard he had met many classmates/sutemates in college who grew up from very different family backgrounds than his.
I also heard he now needs to have conversation with many “strangers” on a daily basis (most are not from the “upper class” backgrounds though.) – He once mentioned he needs to talk so much that it sometimes gets somewhat tiring (to have to talk so much.)
If Lauren Rivera is concerned about “low-class” people being denied access to top jobs, then she and her ilk need to find ways to help them develop the skills and the like needed to get those jobs.
I think we are all overthinking this.
In my experience, poor manner is an exception and not the norm.
I have had social functions with SV VC’s and Manhattan IB’s. They are just nice intelligent (like many on cc) people and a “lower class” guy like me has never felt “unpolished” around them. Oh, I am sure that their wealth is many order of magnitudes greater than mine. May be chatting with them at a party is the easy part - but trying to get a job from them is a whole new ball game. :o)
(I suspect that @al2simon is in that “ruling class”. However, it does not prevent us hoi polloi from having meaningful conversations with the guy.)
I only partly agree. My perspective is that if my company is rejecting highly qualified students from lower-income backgrounds for superficial reasons, then I want to know about it because we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot. I’m sure there’s lots of unconscious bias in hiring decisions, but if a company isn’t hiring a talented student because they lack 5 minutes of training about what fork to use or they played the wrong sport then their hiring processes are probably pretty screwed up. If you can’t look past this then how can you expect to guess how they’ll develop as a professional over the next 5 years?
I think a good many companies realize this - I know that as part of our intern and new-graduate training program we bring in people who talk about how to dress in the work place (always harder for women than for guys), etiquette, which fork to use etc. I believe they stage a mock fancy client dinner for the interns. There’s even some individualized coaching. This stuff is not rocket science. It’s very easy to pick up once someone spends an hour or two thinking about it, and it’s all 15 seconds away on Google anyway. The only hard part is developing a natural sense of ease. These kids are all young and as long as they’re willing to learn they’ll develop a mature professional presence in a few years. It’s all pretty easily fixable - the only real problem is if someone is just a natural jerk.
To be honest, I’m quite open to the idea that interviewers have some bias to prefer people with similar class backgrounds as themselves. My problem with the paper I read is that many of the underlying objectively verifiable facts were simply wrong and very clearly so. I can definitely see a possible flaw with one part of the research design that would cause some pretty skewed feedback.
Agree - as long as people are fundamentally decent it’ll all be fine. Besides, the first rule of good manners (what I believe epiphany meant by “grace”) is putting people from a mix of different backgrounds at ease and making them feel welcome. This should apply when interviewing students too. The other stuff is just superficial cr*p which people who really are well mannered can see beyond. QUOTE
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Ruling class?? I don’t even have the power to decide what brand of dog food we buy !