“Only on CC is the observable fact that sometimes talented people don’t get jobs because the company is hiring ABCD but they are MNOP a crisis.”
I don’t think anyone on here is saying that certain companies in certain fields may have preferences, whether it is a company that will hire only engineers from XYZ or a division or manager that will hire only people from schools ABC, no one is arguing that, it isn’t a crisis (though to be honest, when I hear things like “a manager I know hires only students from schools ABC, because only they seem to learn fast enough or be good enough”, my response to that person was that likely it was the way they recruited that had an issue, not the schools. Chances are, the kids from elite school ABC had things like internships and such, wheres the kids from DEF likely lacked them. Put it this way,a kid from an Ivy league school with no work experience compared to the kid from the flagship U who had done work in the field, likely the second kid will do better. BTW in grad school part of my program was technical management and had several units on recruiting, and one of the things that is a know fact with hiring managers is when they make claims like “people from school X or Y do better than the others”, there often is a kind of self created prophesy there, unconscious though it may be (much the same way hiring managers will claim to be color blind or wanting ‘a variety of types’, yet will hire people just like themselves), that what will happen is they believe school X or Y is better, and when they hire kids from there, they make an effort they aren’t aware of to make them succeed, act as mentor and so forth, whereas with kids from schools they perceive as from ‘lesser schools’, they may not make that effort. I also question whether someone from Canada wouldn’t have the view of the ‘elite schools’, kids from Canada apply to Elite schools, and schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton and so forth have a global brand, and have had for many years. If it didn’t, kids from overseas wouldn’t be trying in record numbers to get into elite colleges (according to an article I read recently, application from foreign students at all schools, especially the top ranked ones, is up almost 50% in the last 5 years or so)…so to say someone from Canada might not have ‘elite school syndrome’ doesn’t ring true.
The reality is companies have preferences, managers have preferences, I have interviewed kids some on here would probably go ga ga over, came from a top school, was active in this and that, looked really good in paper, but when interviewed showed they had little in the nature of pragmatic problem solving skills or ways of looking at things we were looking for, so it all depends.
What people are railing against are broad based claims that not going to an elite somehow dooms your future. Yep, if you wanted to work at firm XY,where they tend to hire from Stanford or MIT, and you went to Cal X or U of Y, you might not stand much of a chance, there is no doubt, or if you graduate from NYU and are applying for a job with some company in Iowa that loves to hire U of Iowa grads, might be tough…but those are normal biases that exist.But to say that if you don’t go to an elite school, that make it seem like a giant door will slam on you (rather than some smaller doors closed entirely, or others open very narrow), is the part people are questioning. It isn’t that the elite schools don’t give you special opportunities, they do (much as a local school to a specific employer might give grads there a big leg up), or that they aren’t great schools, they are, but it is just that, about relative advantages. If you want to go work for Goldman you better come out of an elite school, in fact I would say that door is slammed shut if you went to a ‘merely’ excellent school, or you wanted to work for McKimsey or wanted to work for Bane or wanted to work for (fill in the blank), yep, if you don’t go to an elite school, you might want to rethink your priorities, there is no doubt, if you wanted to work in the petroleum engineering field it might be better to go to a school down in Texas then one in Michigan (that is a hypothetical, folks, though I am sure there are grains of truth to that, in large part because of internships going to Texas schools). Likewise, if you plan on working in some relatively exotic field, like biogenetic engineering, you may want to find a top rated program…but those kind of jobs represent a small fraction of the total, where the bias is absolute (ie not in top X school? Don’t apply to Goldman), other biases are going to be a lot more subtle where trying to find a college to fit the bill might be a fools errand, that’s all. If a kid applies to Ivies or whatnot and gets in, that is great, and if the family can afford it and they like the school, I would encourage them to seriously think of going there. What I am saying is that if the kid applies to an ‘elite’ school and would, for example, have to go into serious debt or didn’t get in at all, their life isn’t over, and the obsession with an ‘elite school’ or bust is the problem, not the elite schools.
The other thing is, that has been mentioned here, that as you go on in your career going to an elite school will matter less and less, with some small exceptions (read, McKimsey, Goldman and other bastions of the old boy/girl networks, where they self select from those schools cause they went there, and it also looks great to some boob at a corporation hiring Mckimsey to say “Our kids are all from elite schools and are the best”), but those are exceptions as time goes on, after that it is what you do, who you work for and what you show. Yes, there are managers out there who will look at GPAs 10 years in, or who will look at someone’s resume, look at the college first and say “ooh, they went to Yale, must be great, let me interview them, to hell with the others”, but they are rare animals, it could be going to an elite university gives you an edge with some employers down the road, but it is not going to be much if anything at all, and certainly not worth agonizing over (again, with the caveat of some jobs, like investment banking and consulting and so forth).
