@Archer1415, of course.
I thought I did mention that. The surgeon’s patients have a 1 percent complication rate compared to 4 to 5 percent.
It’s silly to consider recruiting across all entry-level positions. You can’t major in accounting at Harvard, for example.
http://www.ocs.fas.harvard.edu/next_steps.htm
Seems that fewer than 1 in 5 Harvard grads plan to immediately enter graduate or professional school. In every year listed, more students plan to go into finance & consulting than plan to go to graduate or professional school.
Looking at the map at the link, they love the coasts, Texas and Illinois. Some midwest states are blank, especially the Dakotas.
@Hunt: “It’s silly to consider recruiting across all entry-level positions. You can’t major in accounting at Harvard, for example.”
I agree it’s an overly simplistic metric, but really, what else are you going to do? I mean, fine, Harvard produces no accounting grads—and Purdue produces no fire protection engineers. This is simply a side effect of all institutions having gaps in their coverage of fields, so: So what?
^^^Many work for a year or two, then head back to school. What they say they plan to do and what they end up doing are often very different. My D graduated from Brown in May - is working this year and headed to law school next year. She was still undecided this time last year.
Many of her friends are doing the same - City Year, TFA, etc., then on to something else. I can’t think of anyone who took an operations job at a big company. I suppose there are a few, but not enough for those companies to make a big recruiting effort.
For newcomers yes.
Veterans, no.
Read the threads about being in debt for elite schools, or if elites open more doors.
I happen to think if you can afford to pay out of pocket, you should consider all schools, including elites.
One doesn’t always need to major in accounting to become an accountant.
One HS classmate was recruited out of the blue as an East Asian Lit major at Columbia by one of the Big 4 and they not only encouraged her to work for them from junior year onwards, but also paid for her MS in accounting and CPA prep. She’s been an accountant for 15+ years now.
Have another friend who went into accounting after majoring in Philosophy from a private college ranked somewhere between 60-90 in USNWR.
JoanneB
You said that Google wasn’t focusing on elite grads BECAUSE they are not humble. But that article does not give that cause/effect. ‘Reading between the lines’ is just another way to say you are making things up.
Reading between the lines, the Navy Seals don’t recruit from West Point because their officers aren’t humble. Oh- the Seals need people who are actually in the Navy?
My bad.
Really people- Penn State never admits kids who are arrogant and lack humility?
I think attending an elite school is a humbling experience for most kids. They may enter with some arrogance due to high school success or admissions results, but arrogance is hard to sustain in such a challenging environment. Daily they encounter peers who have accomplished more and achieved higher than they have. They take difficult classes in which they may score an abysmal 50% on the exams. Furthermore, they go on job interviews at the career center and find out that the student interviewing immediately before has had more relevant internships than they’ve had. So they feel their inferiority on a regular basis. Meanwhile, the kid who was #40 in the high school class and was not even a commended NM scholar, can go on to the flagship and be the top student in the department and think they’re all that. Happened to my friend’s kid, and no, it’s not as if she suddenly woke up and started working harder. Her mom says she found it pretty easy.
To sum up 830+ posts, if you highly value elite education, it opens doors. If you don’t highly value elite education, you don’t disgree that it opens doors, but you don’t believe that most doors are shut if you follow an alternative route. Individuality, motivation, and energy for reaching goals matter.
skrlvr - they’ve been teaching kids how to read between the lines and draw inferences since elementary school, reinforced over and over again in MS and HS. Are you saying our schools are teaching kids how to “make things up”?
Nice try, JoanneB. Google is actively working to increase diversity at many levels. Maybe you are thinking they need to diversify so as to hire fewer pompous blowhards from the elites.
@Pizzagirl, yes, no way would I have been allowed to attend the #9 school instead of the #3 school. I was not even allowed to attend a school a much shorter distance down the rankings list, actually.
I see nothing wrong with my parents’ (and grandparents’ and other relatives’) approach:
- Work as hard as you can when you're young and have the energy.
- Go to the best school possible.
- Get the highest paying job possible and stick with it as long as you can, particularly when you're young.
The results? My relatives have mostly retired in their 30s through their 50s and live very comfortably.
Sacrifice now and give yourself the most advantages now through hard work, and that’ll result in an easier life in the future.
And goodness knows graduates of 9 are all just flipping burgers @@.
Aren’t your parents embarrassed to be such slavish followers of rankings?
With regard to the conversation some time back about competition and astronauts, there wouldn’t have been a space program or a moon landing if it weren’t for competition. Just an interesting thought…
You may be a happy alumnus, @HappyAlumnus, but this is ridiculous.
Small differences in rankings are far less important than other factors that may be important to a student, such as price, geographic location, size of the college, size of the community, availability of particular majors, quality of the program in particular majors, whether or not students live on campus all four years, convenience or inconvenience of transportation to and from campus, and any number of other things I can’t think of at the moment.
You forgot how well the window decal will look in their parents’ car, Marian.
Well, that’s true. I believe #9 this year is Penn, and God forbid someone might think it’s Penn State. 
From a recruiter’s point of view, size does matter – why spend a trip recruiting from a pool of a dozen in the desired major or a few hundred for non-major-specific recruiting when you can go somewhere to recruit from a pool of hundreds in the desired major or a few thousand for non-major-specific recruiting?
And a not-so-elitist employer may find recruiting at elite schools to be a waste of time when the yield is too low due to the elitist employers (consulting and investment banking) take most of the worthwhile candidates with big pay packets.