Not intended as a proof, dtbdfb. If there were definitive proof of either side, we wouldn’t have to debate it countless times on CC, year after year. But even if there were a national study that “proved” that the school from which a student received his degree didn’t matter, but you saw the opposite occurring in your own small region, wouldn’t you take that into consideration? When people who hire tell you this stuff, wouldn’t it be stupid to plug your ears and say, “It doesn’t prove anything, it doesn’t prove anything”? Aren’t some of you saying that a wider reality (eg. certain schools are overall better/there is no appreciable difference in opportunities, etc.) can be irrelevant to a particular individual?
@TheGFG What’s your point here? Very few companies hire in such an extreme manner, and I would argue that hiring with such a fine-toothed comb is a lousy way to run a business IMO. Academic/alma mater diversity is a good thing.
My point is that some of us who feel that an elite school does matter for hiring, and not just for certain business, aren’t pulling that idea out of thin air. It may not reflect a wider reality, but it reflects a reality that’s real and pertinent to us because of where we live and what the trend is here. And it has nothing to do with being a prestige hound or being unsophisticated.
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What confuses me about TheGFG’s story is its irony: There’s no Canadian university, with the possible exception of Waterloo’s computer science program, that is remotely selective enough to qualify as an “elite” college in U.S. terms. That’s just not how they roll. The best Canadian universities are excellent, world-class institutions, but they’re excellent, world-class institutions in about the same way the University of Wisconsin is. There’s a big range in the quality of their undergraduates.
So why would a Canadian university graduate limit his interviewing to a class that would exclude anyone like him?
When you go to a school, you go to the area, too. You’re not only paying for an education, but paying for immediate access to a nexus of potential internships and interconnectedness/experiences with that area. If you want to work in Georgia, particularly Atlanta, it’d be prudent to go to school there. If you want to work on Wall Street, perhaps an education nearby would behoove you. I’ve known some fools that have aspirations to work in hedge funds etc. in a particular area and have chosen to go way off into the doldrums elsewhere in apparent pursuit of their dreams, despite the area not being relevant to their career aspirations at all. If you desire to work in environmental law, particular in regards to Everglades restoration, why in the world would you want to go to school in Michigan or Massachusetts? In that respect, doors will close, because the graduate from an irrelevant area likely will not have an edge over the fellow who went to a school intrinsic to their desired area of work, physically and otherwise.
That’s pretty much the point that most people have been making, though. That this matters in only a very few professions, and in a relative small geographic region. But the US is a really big place, so if you are not interested in those very few careers in a very small region, then what you’ve said above is largely irrelevant to those people. The fact remains that for the majority of college grads who are ambitious, intelligent, have a good work ethic, and perhaps have good local connections, “skipping the elite school” doesn’t really close many doors at all. There are still a lot of professions open to them and a lot companies willing to consider them in the vast majority of the states in the US. And there is nothing about that sentence that states or implies that elite schools are not great places to get an education.
This is some kind of joke, right?
If you want to work in environmental law, in the Everglades or anywhere else, there isn’t a law school within 500 miles of the Everglades you should think about attending if you have been accepted at Michigan or Harvard. There’s lots of legitimate debate in this thread, but you will have a hard time finding any knowledgeable person to take the other side of that one. If it’s a choice between Wayne State or Northeastern and Florida A&M, then there’s something to talk about.
This Ivy League worship is part of the northeast culture.
We don’t want that culture out west. 
We have Stanford. I will make an exception for Columbia. Columbia is cool. 
Maybe the west coast can buy Brown and Penn. The northeast can keep the rest.
You guys are implying that GFG is not repeating the facts as explained to her- and I think that’s unfair. I have worked at (and have colleagues who run global talent organizations) which have some operations or business units that hire from a narrow band of colleges. That’s reality. You may not like it, but claiming that Waterloo isn’t elite as if this undercuts GFG’s credibility is irrelevant. Some companies in Boston will hire from MIT and not Harvard, BC and not BU, Tuft but not Brandeis. Most of the time this is not a knock on the quality of the “other college”- it reflects the fact that time is money, and if you are company which needs three new grads for your Boston subsidiary, and for the last ten years you’ve done a recruiting day at MIT and had the luxury of trying to pick your three new hires from 100 fantastic candidates… then hey, why complicate your life and add expense by adding Harvard? You don’t need to. And your boss (or your shareholders) aren’t exactly going to complain if you’ve got three great MIT kids showing up on July 1.
So it’s not just about elite vs. non elite. As long as a company is not breaking the law by systematically developing a hiring strategy which excludes all women or all African Americans or any disabled people, that company has a right to recruit wherever it wishes. You can look at the graveyard of once great companies (Kodak comes to mind) and observe that an excessive reliance on local talent probably didn’t help them anticipate the digital revolution. Or look at a company like Sears and observe that if you’re putting more emphasis on hiring great finance and real estate talent at the expense of your merchandising talent, you might be running a lot of really big empty stores one day.
But to claim that there isn’t a high degree of picking and choosing that goes on in the market for new grads is to argue a ridiculous point.
Can a kid from Santa Clara get a job at a Boston based asset management company? Probably. Will it be as easy as it would be for that identical kid if he/she went to Harvard or Tufts? Absolutely not. But the same applies in reverse- the kid from Clark is going to be at a distinct disadvantage if the goal is an asset management company on the West coast. Geography, reputation, familiarity with the curriculum and who gets honors-- this becomes harder to translate at great distance, EXCEPT if the company in question has been recruiting there for years. You don’t need to explain Georgia Tech or RPI to recruiters at Boeing despite the distance. You may have a harder time with Bucknell or Lehigh (I don’t have time to check- perhaps Boeing recruits at Bucknell or Lehigh in which case substitute your own version of a Northeast engineering program at a mid sized college).
No we do not.
I sometimes feel like a I’m looking into a fish bowl when reading these threads…
Nobody is saying that various employers DON’T discriminate in degrees. Of course they do. What we are saying is that no one employee is soooooo important that it’s meaningful to be “shut out” of them.
Did anybody say this…
Nobody is arguing that there aren’t regional biases, are they?
San Jose State and Santa Clara grads, who are so inclined, probably do well on the job front in silicon valley.
People are tribal. They like to choose people from their own tribe.
My tribe is better than your tribe. These arguments remind me of little league. My 6 year old is a better baseball player than your 6 year old. He is on a better team. 
Some people are arguing you can have a very successful life and never set foot on an ivy campus…and that is true.
Whenever we have to make a decision, we are opening and closing a door. Maybe opening and closing multiple doors. We don’t get everything.
I love my wife. She may be the best person, for me, I could have married on this planet. I don’t know. When I married her I closed a few doors. Probably not many. Lol
If you want to work on wall street, you may want to look at certain schools. Because that is where the tribes are.
Completely OT, but are any of you having difficulty with CC today? I am having a hell of a time today. It’s the only website I having trouble with. Everything else I try to access pulls up immediately.
Completely OT, but are any of you having difficulty with CC today? I am having a hell of a time today. It’s the only website I having trouble with. Everything else I try to access pulls up immediately.
Duplicate.
I had dinner last night with a psychiatrist who graduated from Stanford and a money manager who graduated from Yale. I didn’t drool or anything. I did spill some ice tea on the the front of my shirt. Everything is ok. The ice tea dried.
During our conversation, the wife, the psychiatrist, said a word I did not understand. I said to her, “I don’t know what that word means. I did not go to Stanford”.
This couple must be getting something out of our relationship. Otherwise, there would not be a relationship.
Maybe after dinner the couple went home and they reread Ulysses.
People see examples and think they apply universally when they really don’t. Yes, companies generally recruit where they have had success, but that varies by region and field.
Example1: Cargill is one of the biggest players in commodity markets. One guy I talked to who was a strategist on Wall Street said he not only would work for free as a junior person on their trading floor, but he would pay them for the opportunity, because the education in commodity trading there would be better than at any bank (much less any university). They recruit mostly in the Midwest. No Ivies. In fact, the only non-Midwestern elite I saw on their recruitment list was Cal.
Example2: My first job was at a company that recruited only at what it considered the top schools. That list include UChicago, Northwestern, UMich, but also MiamiU and again no Ivies (except maybe Cornell).
People see examples and think they apply universally when they really don’t. Yes, companies generally recruit where they have had success, but that varies by region and field.
Example1: Cargill is one of the biggest players in commodity markets. One guy I talked to who was a strategist on Wall Street said he not only would work for free as a junior person on their trading floor, but he would pay them for the opportunity, because the education in commodity trading there would be better than at any bank (much less any university). They recruit mostly in the Midwest. No Ivies. In fact, the only non-Midwestern elite I saw on their recruitment list was Cal.
Example2: My first job was at a company that recruited only at what it considered the top schools. That list include UChicago, Northwestern, UMich, but also MiamiU and again no Ivies (except maybe Cornell).
Actually, not to correct you, but the preferred reading for a couple from Stanford and Yale, is “The Castle of Otranto” obscure enough to make you scratch your noggin, and important enough to question your own intelligence–lol.