<p>Some of us did go to firms that hired nationally or internationally. No real change in their hiring patterns.
I agree elite schools may help for internships and that first job. But “elite schools may help” is different from “you’re doomed if you don’t go to one.” Because there are so many opportunities out there in the world. I dislike the fearful, scarcity zero-sum mentality on CC.</p>
<p>I wonder what it takes to get your foot in the door these days. How necessary is that campus recruiter? These days?</p>
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My experience is based on entry level hires from the past couple years at my organization, and what these new graduates tell me about where their friends are working. Also based on the unemployment rate for new grads, which despite all the sensationalism about it is not 99%, which is what it would have to be for only elite grads to be getting jobs. It is pure nonsense.</p>
<p>And BTW, I’ve been at campus recruiting events for my organization the past two years. About the most elite campus our group was on is Cal. We hire a lot of engineers.</p>
<p>I know quite a few unemployed or under-employed "elite "school grads.</p>
<p>I hail from a southern state where generations of my family attended the state flagship. Then, usually, they go to one of the state’s professional schools. Then they get jobs. The state flagship is definitely not one of the “elites” but all the southern cousins of my snowflakes’ generation who have followed this route have very nice jobs. Someone from HYP probably wouldn’t even be considered for one of those jobs. Unless maybe married to someone important in the state, but maybe not even then. There are so many applicants with the right “qualifications” :)</p>
<p>Maybe it always has lots to do with family and connections …</p>
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<p>Granted, the landscape is not that great for the kids as was emphasized by yesterday’s jobs report. But, and this is purely anecdotal of course, I think it is just taking longer with a little more perseverance these days. My nephew just recently got a decent full time job after a year. He graduated from a middle of the road school with a major I never heard of. One new guy where I work said it took him around 9 months to find a job. Engineering degree from a decent UC school. We have interviewed folks from the top schools but not many. I assume they are looking to better jobs.</p>
<p>When I attend a job fair representing technical employment at my org, we typically don’t see the Googles and Apples there. I assume they are recruiting at the top schools. That’s fine. there’s no law saying you have to work for Google. Of course, I always see Enterprise, which would hire every new grad if they could, and here in LA we see the aerospace companies. But primarily I see all sorts of companies I never heard of. And when I drive around industrial areas I see hundreds of other companies I’ve never heard of. THey are hiring somebody to do their work.</p>
<p>But yes, of course it is tough now days. And of course a great GPA from a great school helps. And of course connections helps. I think all that has always been true. But it is also true that 99% of the world will not attend an Ivy League school and they have to work somewhere or everyone is in really, really big trouble, Regardless of where they went to school. Apple and Google need customers after all.</p>
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<p>This is true now and has always been true. I’m relatively convinced, though this is just my own conclusion and not a thesis by any of the researchers, that this is actually the reason that attendance at an elite vs. 2nd tier is mainly showing up as beneficial for the low SES students.</p>
<p>Here are my data points from well connected kids: doing an internship can help, but nothing is actually better than getting a job in an organization. So, the kid who wanted to work in corporate at a name retail place got a job in that store and worked 10 hours a week junior and senior year and had very high sph. (sales per hour.) The company has an internship program, but… wait for it… they hired this kid to come to corporate for the job that the internship allegedly leads to.</p>
<p>Now, why did this kid take the job instead of the internship? cuz dad and mom said, “Just go do sales for the company. Be good at sales and it will get you on the radar much faster than some internship.”</p>
<p>My own snowflake took the unpaid internship and when they offered her a part time job at the end of the internship? She took the job. Did well. Will graduate with a position she loves, loves, loves. </p>
<p>Most of the other kids around her have jobs already… careers, I guess you can call them now that they are finishing up. the one common denominator? All of them are willing to relocate to where the jobs are, and most of them will have some parental safety net and don’t really have to worry about their first year’s salary.</p>
<p>My suspicion is that if you can get your parents to pay for your college education and subsidize you for a couple of years out of school, you will do better. How is this any different than it has ever been?</p>
<p>As a counter - I know plenty of NIU grads who walk right into some pretty good jobs. Not every firm wants or cares about elite schools. And their money is just as green as anyone else’s.</p>
<p>At one point, there was an engineering bust, maybe the mid 70s. Then, as we hit the early digital age, things started, stumbled, picked themselves up, in cycles. Understand that, during the same long period, we’ve also seen a boom in the number of college kids. So, to some extent, we need an economist’s view. Not all kids come out equally prepared, having made the very most of their college experience. Not all have the breadth and depth of work skills, all it takes to satisfy the job. This parallels the admit question. Not all “good students” have that “more” or “it” to be compelling. And just as there simply aren’t enough seats at Harvard for more than 5-7% of the applicants, there aren’t enough big bucks jobs for every Tom, Dick and Harriet who gets to graduation.</p>
<p>We’d have to extract for the kids who did have internships, research or valid early work experiences, references, who have whatever level of interactive/interview skills, can show some organizational savvy. And yes, be willing to make copies or stay past 5 or help on someone else’s deadline, as part of entry level.</p>
<p>The skill sets are just not limited to transcript, the name on the sheepskin. Or even just getting a degree, as if it should be the magic key</p>
<p>And if I had been asked the sort of question cobrat was, about scalawags or revolutionaries or whatever the common, superficial notion was, I would have smiled and parried. Shown my awareness of the image, suspected it was to test my savvy and rebound. Not taken offense.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think that a lot of people posting on this thread would believe that Jonathan Swift really wanted to eat Irish babies.</p>
<p>It’s SATIRE people. She’s making fun of HERSELF and making fun of people who trot out these excuses when they don’t get into whatever their “dream” school is, and she is also making fun of the lengths some people go to to gussie up their applications.</p>
<p>Nobody cares about that article anymore, Consolation. We are back to our regularly scheduled programming, though, fortunately we are not discussing a tech school in Massachusetts which seems to bring out the vanishingly tiny data points. ;)</p>
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In the area I work, let’s say energy and infrasturcture related, this is really true. If you look to the top jobs at power companies or utilities, or oil companies, or transportation companies, or similar jobs, most often they go to people who worked themselves up thorugh the industry regardless of where they went to school. </p>
<p>If I wanted the ideal experience to get a job in the power industry, a good path would be join the Navy, and then get a degree. Power plants love Navy people. Then work your way up.</p>
<p>Where does the school really matter for engineers? IMO, aside from the Facebooks, etc. in technical consulting. Employers love to hire people with fancy alphabet soup to diagnose problems or testify in cases. Like htis place-</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.exponent.com/]Exponent[/url”>http://www.exponent.com/]Exponent[/url</a>]</p>
<p>I think CEOs think the shareholders like to see it. But i don’t think the common person, particularly the common person on a jury for example, is all that impressed by it.</p>
<p>There you go again, PG, bringing in the exaggerated phrase “doom.” And did anyone exaggerate the unemployment rate for new grads as 99%? </p>
<p>In a nutshell, certain schools are perceived as being among the best and most prestigious. Therefore, many more people want to attend those schools than others. Each year, it has gotten more and more difficult to gain admission to those top schools, as evidenced by the fact that the admissions rates for S and H now under 6%. Therefore, there’s a perception that students now have to achieve at absurdly high levels or have a supremely special quality of some sort to be admitted. The article was lamenting how extreme the competition now is, and Suzy tried to use humorous examples of how far she’d have had to go to have had a shot. I don’t see where she says she should have gotten in, or was suicidal and despairing because she didn’t. To the contrary, via the allusion to TV, she joked about the fact that she knows she could have done more. Gloom and doom, employment rates, and fast food jobs were not implied anywhere.</p>
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No. Did someone claim somebody said that? It wasn’t me. I said if only Ivy grads could get jobs then the UE for recent grads would have to be around 99%. It isn’t. So lots and lots and lots of other kids are getting jobs. Not as many as we’d like, but frankly the Ivy population is miniscule. </p>
<p>THere are around 3.5 million kids graduating high school each year. And another 500K of that age that don’t graduate. The kids attending these elite schools represent a rounding error in the employment situation.</p>
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<p>This is really a good and obviously frequently overlooked point.</p>
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<p>IMO, this is utterly and completely untrue.</p>
<p>I went to high school in the Midwest and then went off to an elite college–not HYPSMC, but elite. Only one teacher in my high school had ever heard of my college. I knew that if I had wanted to return to the Midwest after graduation --I most definitely did not–that I’d be better off with a degree from the state flagship. I also knew that I wanted to avoid attending the state flagship at all costs. There weren’t many kids from that state in my college class–a grand total of 4–and the other 3 also knew full well that in terms of job prospects in their home state they had shot themselves in the foot. If you grow up in Texas, I doubt you need to be told that getting a degree from Cornell or Brown is not going to wow Texans. </p>
<p>Yes, there are people who go to elite colleges who are stunned by the fact that having an elite degree from a non-HYPSMC top school isn’t helpful in Texas, but those would be people who grew up in other regions of the country. They are no more provincial than my cousin transplanted to the South who expected us all to be wowed when her son was accepted to the Citadel. The Citadel’s SAT and gpa ranges are very similar to those at UMass-Dartmouth. I wouldn’t expect someone in South Carolina to be wowed by a student who attended UMass-Dartmouth and it was equally unrealistic to expect her New England relatives to be wowed by a Citadel acceptance. </p>
<p>College is–or at least should be–more than 4 years picking up a piece of paper that will qualify you to do things that require a college degree. If someone attends Swarthmore and gets a wonderful education that education isn’t worthless because it doesn’t impress the folks in Texas as much as one from Texas A&M or the folks in Michigan as much as one from UMichigan.</p>
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<p>Maybe not much difference. Back in the 70s and early 80s it was possible to support oneself, in an urban environment, on a minimum wage job: retail, restaurant work, etc. while one worked on finding the long term career. I don’t see that really working for friends’ snowflakes. Even with those sorts of jobs, a safety net is necessary. Some of this seems to me to have to do with rising health insurance costs. Obviously all snowflakes who don’t have to worry about student loan payments are in a highly enviable position!</p>
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<p>I didn’t really take offense so much as just thought the interviewer was being a bit loopy. However, I kept that thought to myself and played along in a calm civil professional. As I said…I wanted the already gone south interview to continue to its natural civil conclusion. </p>
<p>Moreover, this interviewer wasn’t doing it as a test…there was definite apparent hostility and contempt toward my LAC due to stereotypes he had of its students/graduates. </p>
<p>I’ve been “tested” on multiple interviews and there wasn’t nearly the level of apparent hostility and contempt in those. </p>
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<p>Speaking of which, I had a college classmate from the Carolinas who was solicited as a “Citadel Scholar” because of his stats and ECs. However, he turned them down because he didn’t want to attend a military school type environment and more importantly…wanted to get out of the stereotypical southern environment that the Citadel epitomized. </p>
<p>He ended up being very happy at Oberlin and didn’t care that back in his home area, our LAC’s name is unknown at best…regarded with downright hostility/skepticism at worst due to the radical left campus culture that was then prevalent. </p>
<p>He also learned to say he majored in Political Science rather than his Area Studies Major as he found the latter tended to dumbfound/elicit suspicion from most local employers.</p>
<p>This recent turn of thread has me thinking-is the Ivy only recruiting from the Big CS Companies only for RECENT grads? Because I know people at both Google and MS who have their degrees from state U’s that have NO rep in CS or engineering and that I’ve never seen mentioned on this board anywhere. I’ve got a friend who’s an attorney with the biggest name firm in Seattle (think Gates)-he’s from a tiny private law school most people out here have never heard of.</p>
<p>But these are all people in their 50’s. Their JOBS are new, but the degrees are not. Did they just start out at the right time or do the Big Companies and Big Firms actually, in fact, hire non-Ivy-degreed people?</p>
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<p>First of all, who said getting a degree from an elite school isn’t helpful in Texas? I certainly didn’t. I said that in Texas it matters not if one does not have a degree from an elite school. </p>
<p>Secondly, I also never went on to say that a degree from Swarthmore or any other elite is “worthless” in Texas. Sheesh, could you twist my words a little more, please?</p>
<p>I DID say that degrees from elites get respect from hiring entities in Texas. Just not shock and awe. And they by no means get the automatic edge when in competition with candidates who got their education from local publics and privates, whether we are talking Texas, or Arkansas, or Idaho, or wherever. The notion that it’s only the elite school grads who get the best jobs is the one I’m debating, not whether one can get a good education and a good job with a degree from one of the “tippy tops.” :rolleyes:</p>
<p>There is bias all over the hiring map. For and against this school or that for any number of reasons.</p>
<p>Most businesses don’t know how or who to hire anymore. Who is qualified to do anything in a world where trophies are given to everybody? How much experience do can you have when looking for entry level work? It’s really getting ridiculous.</p>
<p>I couldn’t get a friend hired at my company. He built a multimillion dollar company, presided as president then sold it. He wanted a job in sales and was rejected for no sales experience. He got experience at Yellow Pages, winning a top sales award 2 years in a row then interviewed again and was told he was over-qualified. The manager couldn’t pay him what he was making even though my friend knew that going in and was cool with it. </p>
<p>Who understands the job market now? People I know, young and old, that find jobs, either have an inside connection or were lucky (right place, time, credentials, etc). Although I’ve seen a few lie to get a job and they worked out just fine.</p>