Did he take HADM 4300, 4310, 4360, 4370, 4375, 4430 for his major?
https://sha.cornell.edu/admissions-programs/undergraduate/academics/courses/food-beverage-management/
I believe he was a Poli Sci major in the College of Arts and Sciences which has an elite reputation. The so-called “contract” schools at Cornell generally have somewhat lower standards for admission and not the shiny reputations of Engineering and CAS.
I think it is much more likely that a kid who majored in Beer landed nicely because of connections rather than because of where he went to college.
Cornell doesn’t have a major called Political Science. I assume you mean Government. A good portion of Government majors work in fields that are more focused on college reputation that most. Consulting is the most common field of employment among Government majors most years, and .the most common job title usually is some variation of “analyst”.
2nd hand information about what one kid may or may not have done is not a good representation. While attending a HYPSM school, I knew plenty of kids who partied and drank frequently… sometimes multiple times per week. . A large portion of this group joined fraternities/sororities. However, many of the same group also managed to separate academics from partying/beer and do as well as most other students in their classes… often good enough to get into medical school or other selective professional school. For example, I knew one kid who kept a large amount of beer in his backpack while taking finals, so he could binge immediately after his last final was over… but he still studied and did well on his finals. After college he became a successful medical doctor.
Yes, you can find a small minority of employers who are particularly sensitive to prestige of college name, but they are the exception, not the rule. In the survey I linked earlier, employers as whole said they thought more positively of candidates from flagships than elite colleges. However, there are a few rare industries with different patterns that did focus on attending an elite college.
For example, in the paper at http://www.thinedgeconsulting.com/assets/pdfs/Ivies%20extracurriculars%20and%20exclusion%20Elite%20employers’%20use%20of%20educational%20credentials.pdf , the author interviews 120 persons involved in hiring new grads at “top tier firms” – 40 banking, 40 consulting, and 40 law. Most of those interviewed mentioned be concerned to some extent with school prestige. Some made comments like:
*“Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at…the Brown candidates, you know the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of everything else… Unfortunately it’s just not a great situation. There’s not an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school.”
“Good grad school, okay undergrad but not Ivy League…So one thing I’d definitely want to ask him is that if he went to Exeter [for high school], why did he go to a lesser undergrad? What happened?”*
However, while going to Cornell can be helpful for attaining such a position, being hired at such firms involves far more than just the college nameplate. There is usually a high GPA cutoff (often 3.5 or higher), a long series of interviews, standardized testing of some sort, etc. There also can be en emphasis on cultural fit, which can be more like the fraternity club type culture, rather than than the top academic culture. This contributes to why kids in Ivy fraternities tend to be overrepresnted. For example, some of the employers from the paper linked above wrote:
*"We like to interview at schools like Harvard and Yale, but people who have like 4.0s and are in the engineering department but you know don’t have any friends, have huge glasses, read their textbooks all day, those people have no chance here…I have always said, [my firm] is like a fraternity of smart people.
“We look for someone who’s got a personality, has something to bring to the table. You know, for lack of a better term, someone you can shoot the s**t with… Typically…they were in sports, they were involved in different activities on campus. The more well-rounded individual versus the candidate who has the 4.0, who’s got all the honors…”*"
BC- I’m pushing back because you describe the phenomenon as “systematic” whereby a middling/slacker from Cornell is going to beat the top student at Binghamton. I don’t think it’s systematic- I think there are vestiges of the old days working their way through the food chain.
Systematic is a Morgan Stanley policy that if your name ends in a vowel you can interview for back office roles but nothing customer facing. That ended in the 80’s. Systematic is when resumes from HCBU’s get tossed because “even if we made her an offer she wouldn’t want to work here”. (sure- if you’re a bunch of racist and misogynist slobs, why would she?)
Yes, I believe that your friend’s kid majored in drinking and still got a job. But I’m not sure your conclusion- that the more qualified U Conn kid got beat out- reflects a systematic failure.
The folks to feel bad for in this highly inefficient and tough to penetrate labor market (pre Covid of course) are NOT the high achievers at U Conn and Rutgers who major in history or engineering or urban planning or poli sci. The folks to feel bad for are the kids who major in recreation management or criminal justice or television production at the directionals. The first-- because that four year degree will qualify you for jobs that right now don’t require a degree at all. The second because CJ is not a fast track to law school (which is what most first gen college students who major in it think it is). And the third because given what’s happening in newsrooms around the country and the race of technology, a kid who has been making Tik-Tok and Youtube videos for a few years is going to be just as qualified for those entry level station jobs (the traditional career path- a few years racing around to fires and car crashes in Cedar Rapids and then moving up to a bigger market). So the kid and family- in debt up to their eyeballs and then the reality of the labor market comes crashing down.
While I am sure there are kids who still get a major leg up on jobs because of who they (their parents) know, the process for the “top tier” firms that @Data10 alludes to above is pretty rigorous, at least it was for S who is an HYPSM senior. The general rule of thumb around his campus is your GPA needs to be around a 3.7 or higher for the top firms in consulting or banking. He worked summer of sophomore year at a boutique consulting firm where the process was: submission of resume, initial phone interview; complete and present on Skype a case study pitch with a given set of facts; in person interview with CEO.
For this summer’s internship (he did banking), he started the process towards the end of last summer. There were informal events on campus with most of the large IB’s (e.g GS, MS, JPM, BoA, etc…) starting in the prior spring and going through the fall. No question going to an “elite” program helps here. I can’t imagine, other than some of the top flagships, those firms would send in the teams of people that they did. So here the process was completing an on-line app. I suspect there was a “cut” here and continuing applicants were asked to submit a video interview (computer generated). Next there were Skype interviews with real people. The interview questions were both “personal” and substantive. The finalists were then invited for an almost full day of in person interviews.
S said the whole process was like taking another class in terms of effort and time commitment. His intern class in his sector (fixed income) was about 50 interns. The majority came from the usual private school suspects, but there were interns from top flagships as well. They were then tossed into the deep end of the pool. It was made worse by the fact that the program was shortened by 2 weeks (and remote). Drinking from a fire hose is a good metaphor. One of his projects was to present an analysis of select tranches of 5 actual CDO’s and those tranches’ sensitivities to various risks. Other than reading Liar’s Poker and The Big Short prior to his internship, S had no clue about CDO’s prior to this project. Finally, they only made permanent offers to about 60% of the interns, so add in a Hunger Games metaphor. S was able to secure a spot on the desk he wanted, but he did not come across any slackards. He did say that there were some definite “rocket scientist/financial whizzes” and different levels of communication and people skills he could observe during group Zoom sessions. But there was no one that majored in beer pong, and everyone he came across had the necessary work ethic and brain wattage.
^ here is an older article on the selection process written by someone involved in it:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-elite-business-recruiting-really-works-jim-manzi/
@NearlyDone2024 If you like Bryan Caplan, you would love this guy:
“So Daddy’s advice is: Use pass-fail classes to take things that you need as education but can’t afford to screw up. Take summer school at other schools in ways that allow the credits to transfer but not the grade (note to students: take these pass fail as well, because usually you will have to give transcripts for all college courses taken, and GPA will reflect that as calculated at the application level).”
I’m sorry but I find it hard to believe that an evaluation committee would choose an applicant with a bunch of pass/fails on their transcript over an applicant with grades for all courses. DS19 had the option of pass/fail for his courses last semester due to the Covid disruption. He had A+'s in all his courses except one, an elective, in which he had an A-. He chose not to convert that mark even though had he done so he would have ended up on the Chancellor’s List (4.0 GPA) instead of the Dean’s List (3.7+ GPA). The general advice that was given was that anyone seeing a Pass would just assume that the mark had been a C+ or less. He felt it was more important to show marks for all his courses rather than try for a perfect GPA. I’m sure selection committees are well versed in any attempts by students to try and game the system.
GPA comments here are intriguing. I’m going to start a separate post about GPAs.
Indeed, comments on the pre-med forum section tend to have the opinion that medical school admission readers do not like to see applicants who look like they were trying to dodge academic rigor or were grade-grubbing too obviously. Taking lots of pass / no-pass grade options or taking hard courses at other colleges during the summer are examples that seem a little too obvious.
If you’re an engineer, take Renaissance Art pass/fail if writing a 50 page paper on Leonardo, comparing his renderings of structures and mechanics to that of his peers strikes you as scary and outside your comfort zone. If you’re majoring in English Lit, take Macro pass/fail if the idea of a weekly problem set makes you nervous. If you’re majoring in Urban Planning, go ahead and take that Russian Lit class pass/fail if you love Tolstoy but know that reading several 800+ page books during the semester is going to be a struggle.
For god’s sake, do not take courses in your OWN discipline pass-fail, and do not take courses that are either required or recommended for grad school pass-fail.
There are worse things in life than getting a B.
@blossom well noted, but another point regarding the private college/Ivies education is that by their nature, these schools like Princeton, Williams, Dartmouth have thousands of loyal alums who hire, mentor and recruit out of these schools. Also, the curated selectivity creates a natural network that is hard to replicate at other schools. That is a key differentiator. Alums who have received a leg up from another alum return the favor. Also, the friends you make during 4 years on campus create bonds and benefits beyond the job referrals, it is the intangible sense of belonging to a community that is meaningful to you.
I don’t think this is unique to smaller privates like Williams, Dartmouth, and similar. For example, I’ve taken classes at UCSD in my field, and one of the first things that stood out to me was how much they emphasized Qualcomm-tech… far more than similar classes that I have taken at Stanford, which is understandable since UCSD and Qualcomm are located practically within walking distance of one another, and Qualcomm was founded by a former UCSD professor (the UCSD school of engineering is named after him). UCSD also has professors with unique connections at Qualcomm, such as consulting and past employment, has special opportunities for UCSD students to get Qualcomm mentors, etc. As such, it’s not surprising that LinkedIn shows Qualcomm employs far more UCSD alimni than any other college (SDSU is 2nd), resulting in a huge alumni network.
If you want to work as an engineer at Qualcomm, UCSD is probably going to have a stronger and more useful alumni network than any other college. A similar statement could be made about many other San Diego companies. UCSD has a strong alumni network in San Diego, and gets a lot of local San Diego alumni involved in recruiting activities. This works out well for the many UCSD grads who want to stay in the San Diego area.
I experienced an even stronger local bias while taking classes at University of Wyoming. If you want to work in Wyoming, University of Wyoming is probably going to have a much more useful alumni network than Dartmouth or Williams. And among the students I knew, almost all did want to remain in the Wyoming area.
@gwnorth Not sure about pass-fail classes, but this comment is certainly true:
“So, a friend here in DC asked me about two recent interns of his who had gone on to law school – he was astonished and troubled to find that the MIT grad with the B average in STEM had fared far less well than the NYU English major. As in: the NYU lit grad went to Harvard and the MIT grad was wait-listed at American.”
My sister was caught in a similiar trap many decades ago.
There have been various attempts to measure the “strength” of the alumni network at various colleges over the years. You can argue with virtually every metric these studies use- but out of a group of them, a couple of trends seem noteworthy-
1- Women’s colleges-- Smith comes out on top on many of these studies, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr as well.
2- Catholic colleges- Notre Dame usually leads the pack, but the rest hold up their own nicely.
3- SMU- I can’t explain it. But I’ve seen several iterations of “how powerful is the alumni network” and SMU is always on the list.
4-The flagships in their own region, Wisconsin and Michigan on a national level.
The tech colleges do not fare well typically but in my experience, they don’t need to. A Cal Tech kid who wants to work at NASA (or anywhere else of that ilk) does not need an alum to pluck his/her resume out of the pile. MIT grads aren’t relying on “old school ties” to get their ideas in front of VC firms, or to get hired at the next unicorn.
@TennisParent but that network is nothing like like the Aggie network from Texas A&M. They wear a ring for a reason.
@Eeyore123 I live in TX and the Longhorn and Aggie networks are insane. So is SMU. My Ivy degree gives me no advantage in Texas over grads from those 3 schools. Ive been involved in recruiting and seeing it in action has boiled my blood more than once. Powerful alumni networks are not limited to elite schools. But don’t tell those obsessed with prestige.
I think it’s more about skills, whether technical skills that employers or society need, or communication skills to convey ideas, to inspire and lead. Sure, college brand names help send a signal (that you’ve been vetted at least once before), and similarly for alum networks. Ultimately though, your skills will count, whether in high paying jobs on the coasts, or some more mundane jobs in the middle of the country (there’re some exceptions in investment banking, as IBs are fundamentally in the relation/distribution businesses and relationships/connections are important considerations). We’re far from a true meritocracy but nepotism won’t take you very far (even on Wall Street).
@itsgettingreal21 that is because the only company that I know of in Texas where Ivy grads had a distinct advantage over TAMU or t.u. grads was Enron. That didn’t end well.
My oldest son went to SMU and what you say is very, very true!