Top University of Minnesota grads are ‘at least as good, maybe better’ than the best and brightest from Harvard, former Goldman Sachs CEO says

[AustenNut]

This reminds me of the WSJ article that was reposted in the Job Prospects for ‘24, ‘25 Grads thread. The WSJ article had the following quote:

@AustenNut

Firm data show that hires from noncore campuses often perform better than those from core schools, she added. Last year McKinsey ultimately hired from about 80 schools.

“We know that this distinctive talent is not only centered at a handful of, I’ll call them, elite sources,” Ciesil said.

So this aligns with the rest of the Fortune article in terms of the top students amongst a much bigger pool of students being pretty awesome candidates. But the swimming upstream analogy also rings true, as those top candidates are needing to catch the attention of the McKinsey and other highly-desired orgs in different ways, as those organizations are not visiting the college campuses anymore (whereas they are visiting the “elite” schools…which makes it swimming with the current for those students, vs. students at non-elite schools swimming against the current).

And @BKSquared (who originally shared the WSJ article) indicated that the swimming upstream or “hungriness” factor often then relates to the performance after the hire, and not just getting hired.

@BKSquared

The observation of finding gems in unusual places definitely has been my experience in Big Law and IB. The juniors who came from not top tier schools tended to be “hungrier” than those from top tiers. I think they knew that they were starting a half step behind their “Ivy” colleagues. For most junior level tasks, work ethic > “brilliance”.