<p>I saw a consulting firm not long ago with about 20 consultants of varying ages, each of whom had graduated from either Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. It was pretty clear that the hoi polloi from Columbia or Brown, much less the rabble from Berkeley or Williams need not bother applying for their open consulting position.</p>
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<p>Try again after reading Caplan’s words:</p>
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<p>Ok, so McKinsey and Goldman Sachs want to hire Ivy League grads - but a tiny percentage of economic marketplace. And firms of this ilk churn through many employees while making only a handful ever partner. I’ve worked with many “prestigious” consulting and legal firms here in a major Midwest city, and am not surprised to discover many of their partners come from state universities, or local universities or colleges without little name-recognition or reputation outside of Midwest and/or immediate major city environ.</p>
<p>I’ve also been told by said partners that these firms often have poor experiences with their Ivy League (and quasi Ivy League “wanna bee” school grads) grad employees, with a fair number of their young Ivy Leaguers having adjustment problems, attitude issues, and general impatience with corporate structure, etc. Some firms aren’t so eager to recruit a stable of Ivy League grads.</p>
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<p>What makes these industries “elite” (particularly consulting and high-finance) is the fact that the compensation is very high for recent graduates (particularly at the most well respected / top firms in these specific fields). Additionally, these industries are considered elite because they provide unparalleled “exit opportunities” and exposure to senior management. While say a job in sales or in supply chain or a job as a teacher, etc. are considered good jobs they are not elite because one the comp is not there but two these jobs don’t open doors like the consulting or high-finance jobs do. For example, if the sales person is good they can move up the ranks of their firm and maybe eventually reach a senior exec job. The guy coming from McKinsey, however, will work there for a few years, potentially the CEO of a client company will like this person and hire them in a junior exec role despite the fact that they are young and then while they are at that job they have great exposure to the senior leadership team at the company which just creates more opportunities to make an impression and move up more quickly. I see this even at my company (a well known F500 tech company). On average a higher % of the people that came from banking or consulting are reaching exec levels and most are do it by the time they are 35…contrast that to the people that don’t have this background (the person from sales, supply chain, operations, etc.)…a significantly lower % are reaching these exec roles and the ones that do end up getting there by the time they are 45-50.</p>
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<p>I am someone who had a choice between going into a corporate job and a consulting job (not a McKinsey but a peer firm). I got SO much more exposure to senior management in my corporate job where I actually worked for / interacted with / serviced senior executives, than I would have as a consultant where frankly, for the first few years, I would have been the grunt in the hotel room poring over Excel spreadsheets. But whatever, if people want to believe that sitting in the back of the room running Excel spreadsheets while the top guys charm the top brass is “exposure to senior management,” let ‘em. I know better, since I’ve got quite a few major company CEO’s in my Rolodex. BTW - I also got paid way, way more by the time you counted in my stock options. Let’s just say one really good stock-option year 15 years ago fully funded both my kids’ colleges for all 4 years with plenty left over. </p>
<p>People who think that only consulting jobs “open up doors” are just misinformed and ignorant about all the doors that can be opened in life. </p>
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<p>I was a director at a major corporation (household name you all would know) running a billion dollar business by the time I turned 32. It is just laughable to think that people were brought in from “consulting and finance” to do these kinds of jobs. They were home-grown. I think some of you in the consulting world far overestimate how much the current management is paying attention to your “underlings.” And I left the corporate world to join a small boutique consulting firm and DO consulting for companies much like the one I left. My work extends across multiple industries, including food / beverage, retail, pharmaceuticals, media / telecommunications, and personal services, and it is exceptionally rare for them to “hire in the consultant that they’ve been so impressed by.”</p>
<p>IMO, the most shocking statement in the linked results was this one:</p>
<p>“In addition to being an indicator of potential intellectual deficits, the decision to go to a lesser known school (because it was typically perceived by evaluators as a “choice”) was often perceived to be evidence of moral failings, such as faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student.”</p>
<p>I do appreciate the value of elite school attendance based on my kids’ experiences to date, but attaching a moral component to that decision is a scary leap.</p>
<p>“In addition to being an indicator of potential intellectual deficits, the decision to go to a lesser known school (because it was typically perceived by evaluators as a “choice”) was often perceived to be evidence of moral failings, such as faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student.”</p>
<p>There’s no way grown adults who hold real jobs are really stupid enough not to get that people’s school choices may be constrained by other things, such as finances, parental or student health requiring someone to stay close to home, or horizons that just weren’t all that expanded during high school. Really - people aren’t that dumb. What kind of nitwit actually believes that the only people who are successful are graduates of elite schools? Like, they can’t drive down the street and realize the many ways people can make money that are fully realizable from most state u’s? Good grief. I love elite colleges with the best of 'em, but you’ve got to be pretty slow on the uptake to think that success is restricted to them. Or else pretty sheltered and naive and unworldly.</p>
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<p>Congratulations by the way that is very impressive! I guess maybe my view is skewed by my current company (also a household tech name that you probably use our products daily). For example, all of the divisional CFOs and corporate CFO in addition to most of the heads of product planning and marketing across most of our divisions (all of which are $10-15B+ divisions) are former bankers or consultants. About half of our divisional presidents also have this background. I can only count a handful that don’t have this background. Most joined after a few years of banking or consulting into manager / sr manager jobs and rose up the ranks internally to VP/president levels. Personally, having come from investment banking into my company i was hired after working on a deal with this company by one of the divisional CFOs and was hired into a level that put me 2-3 levels above anyone my age (24 when i joined) that had joined the company directly out of undergrad…which at least here where i work is standard for most banking / consulting hires and i would say that my exec exposure far exceeds anyone my age that came into the company directly and exceeds most of the people even at my current level across the company as most have never been in a meeting with our CEO…something that is a weekly occurance in my job. It may just be a corporate culture thing though but most of my banking friends or college friends that went the banking/consulting route and moved into the corporate work have had similar experiences.</p>
<p>btw im not arguing that these fields / firms are indeed more elite…im just saying I think they are considered elite because of the comp and the PERCEPTION (we can debate all day how true / untrue this is…but thats not the point) of strong exit opps that accelerate your career.</p>
<p>Ivy leaguers and lottery school grads must just prefer to work with/are most impressed with Ivy Leaguers and lottery school grads. It is a little network, one of many out there, but one that gets top billing and much compensation. To wit, they also often serve on each others’ boards.
Check out any web-site for a consulting firm or private equity firm: the bios are all about the schools, degrees, the boards served on. It is a way to advertise and attract respect and interest, within the circle who think these things means something special.</p>
<p>To me the two most important ways to get an interview and perhaps the job itself are what your credentials look like on paper/on the net, and who you know/your network.</p>
<p>Many are automatically impressed by elite colleges, Big 5, top Wall St firms, right or wrong, silly as it seems: humans take short-cuts.
Of course, these are not the majority, and there are plenty who are biased against people with these credentials.</p>
<p>To me, one of the perks of being in finance or a consultant or an accountant is that one can shift over to corporate/industry/government at some point. It is not that easy to go the opposite direction.</p>
<p>p.s. As an Ivy League FEMALE with a finance background back in the 80’s, I did not feel that the network of power and leadership was open to me. I fear it is still not as open to females as males today…</p>
<p>p.p.s. Discussion about DRIVE and the desire to PLEASE and DO WELL and FOLLOW INSTRUCTION reminded me of the famous marshmallow experiment: it showed that the ability to DEFER GRATIFICATION (in order to get MORE LATER) in young children was a strong predictor of “success” (sorry, I cannot remember how they measured that). To test for the ability to defer gratification, each child was told that if (s)he did not take the marshmallow in the bowl while (s)he were left alone for a period, (s)he would get two marshmallows when the adults returned.</p>
<p>"[E]valuators drew strong distinctions between top four universities, schools that I term the super-elite, and other types of selective colleges and universities."</p>
<p>Which are the top 4 besides Harvard? Yale, Princeton, Stanford? Or would that be HYP plus Dartmouth or Penn-Wharton?</p>
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It’s an unalterable rule of CC that whenever there is a list of top schools, we have to argue about which schools actually belong on it.</p>
<p>I am not asking which are the true top 4 overall, which is open to endless debate, but rather which ones are the top 4 most desirable feeder schools in the minds of those hiring for banking and consulting firms–a foursome that supposedly was identified in the study. God knows we don’t need another ranking thread lol.</p>
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Aren’t the official approved default pre-argument list lengths either 3 or 5 schools? Four is throwing me for a loop. :)</p>
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<p>Again, not my experience. Ivy League / similar elite grads work side by side with “lesser” (you know what I mean) people all the time, and people are judged by how well they perform in the workplace. I manage an Ivy League PhD right now. Certainly a smart guy - but he’s no smarter than me, just skilled in a very specific area, and I have intuition and expertise in certain things he doesn’t. He’s not slumming it by working with me, or working with some of my other employees who went to decent-but-not-outstanding schools.</p>
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<p>I think the point is, if there is a small group of fields / firms who all consider themselves elite, but no one else really does, are they really elite, or just full of / obsessed with themselves?</p>
<p>Let me give you another analogy - this has to do with Greek life. At my alma mater (which has reasonably strong Greek life), there was a subsegment of the population who spent a lot of time and energy (IMO) “ranking” / rating all the various houses and identifying who were the “elite” / better houses. But the rest of the students didn’t really give a darn; they hung around with who they wanted to hang around with, and whatever “ranking” their house had on this list was of no relevance whatsoever to their lives. This is sort of how this whole “consulting, high-finance, law firm” thing feels to me. It seems to matter a lot to the people who are in it who are convinced that these are elite jobs, but not very much to anyone else. Again, these are perfectly fine jobs – I’m a consultant now! I just don’t get who decreed that these were the sole definition of elite jobs, because it sure doesn’t seem to be anyone outside of those fields who cares.</p>
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<p>That’s a very astute analogy and I think it’s definitely valid with regards to ranking / deciding on how elite firms are within a certain industry…no one outside of that industry cares. Where this kind of falls apart for me is in the fact that most people, particularly in the consumer culture we live in, do “keep score” and that score is based on wealth…therefore people are inherently bucketing jobs/etc based on economic potential. These industries are known or perceived to be high income fields. Hence, even among the general population that may not know what someone in high finance does, there is a perception that these industries are somehow elite. Even if a director of product marketing makes more than say a lawyer, among the general population there is not a perceived “brand recognition.” Why do so many parents want their kids to become lawyers or doctors or bankers and not kindergarden teachers or social workers or supply chain managers or facilities managers (all of which are respectable jobs)? Those of us in the industry know that what we do is not anything special, we are just cube monkeys that work on spreadsheets or legal docs or powerpoint decks but b/c we make a lot of money I do think the general population does perceive these jobs to be somewhat prestigious or elite…</p>
<p>Yeah, that’s where I respectfully disagree; I don’t think that the general population really knows or cares much about high-finance or consulting, and they “understand” what a lawyer does but it’s not this OMG-someone’s-a-lawyer-all-bow-down-to-them-how-elite thing. </p>
<p>I have plenty of friends who are all in these fields! And plenty more who could buy and sell the first set. I think the most money to be made, personally, is in privately held companies where your compensation is under the radar screen … Not in well-known, publicly traded companies. But then I’m a real advocate of making money quietly so that no one is the wiser, not having a “glitzy” job.</p>
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<p>The real reason all of those consultants had those degrees from those particular schools is because if you go to work for a consulting firm, which will hire from all sorts of top 50-100 universities, you have to go to grad school within three years. The consulting firm will assist you in getting into these MBA programs, and they will be at these schools. If you come back to work for the firm for two years, they will reimburse you for the cost of your MBA. </p>
<p>They want those school names and so they get you into those schools. It’s not really because they originally hire from those schools, because they hire undegrad from a much wider field.</p>
<p>So, it’s not really what it looks like. They create their own Ivy and Booth and Kellogg grads from thier original Notre Dame and Michigan and UNC and blah, blah, blah hires.</p>
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<p>this made me laugh…in all seriousness though I don’t really think there are any “normal professions” where this would be the case…the only ones that are kind of like this are professional athletes, celebrities, astronauts, etc. </p>
<p>good discussion though pizzagirl I enjoyed it. :)</p>