This may include those who attended Harvard. In the interview below, one graduate associates his choice of Harvard with his “greatest regret”:
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Here’s an excerpt from an article written by Niall Ferguson a couple of years ago about his experience at Harvard, in response to the Varsity Blues scandal (unfortunately paywalled, In US colleges, fake-it sometimes beats merit ):
“It took me a while to figure the system out after I moved from British to American academia. At Cambridge and Oxford I had been directly involved in undergraduate admissions. I and my colleagues read the application forms, the sample essays and the answers to what remained of the old entrance examination. We spent long days interviewing the candidates.
The Oxbridge system has long been criticised for admitting too few pupils from state schools or ethnic minorities, but I did not regard my role as that of a social engineer. My goal was to pick the cleverest students, regardless of all other criteria, and my main preoccupation was to separate the truly bright from the well coached. I did not care if they could row or tap-dance. I wanted intelligence, because I would have to teach these people for three years and the last thing I wanted was to spend hours of my life with dunderheads.
Harvard was different. At first, naively, I couldn’t understand why a substantial proportion of my new students were there, as — to judge by their mid-term exam papers — they wouldn’t have stood a chance of an interview at Oxford, never mind a place. It was explained to me that a substantial chunk of undergraduates were “legacies” — there because their parents were alumni, especially generous alumni — and another chunk were the beneficiaries of affirmative action or athletics programmes. The admissions system was managed by professional administrators, not professors.”
And an anecdote from my S’s internship experience at a well known think tank last summer. He’d been there 10 weeks, knew the ropes. Then a new intern joined from Harvard. That person decided that in his first week he was obviously entitled to tell all the other interns what to do. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. But absolutely in line with the attitude of superiority that we heard at a presentation from the Harvard admissions director back in 2017 (and the tour guide).
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While that may be true of hedge funds that come with the financial industry college-prestige bias, that is probably less true of tiny startups. If the latter recruit out of colleges (not all do), local colleges have an advantage, since they do not have the time, resources, or need to do travel recruiting. A bay area company looking for a high concentration of strong CS students will find it more convenient to recruit at Stanford and UCB, and not bother traveling to MIT and CMU.
Colleges like Harvard are less meritocratic these days than Oxbridge or the top STEM-focused schools in the US. They figured out, perhaps correctly, that they only need a few superstars in each field to maintain their prestige and most won’t notice the mediocrities in the rest. Among this group of colleges, Harvard does stand out though with a higher concentration of these superstars because of their self-selections.
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There is an strong existing ecosystem that ties together venture capital, startups, and college students in Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, and several other places. Students at MIT and Harvard have active entrepreneurship clubs intended for students interested in starting a company, working for a startup company, or even becoming a VC. I assume the same is true of Stanford and Berkeley as well.
While it’s true that most startups only hire locally, the national VC firms can assist in putting students in touch with appropriate opportunities at all of their investment firms.
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Harvard shouldn’t necessarily be your reference.
To be very broad:
If you want to look at rankings, look at the Top 40 National universities and Top 25 National Liberal Arts Colleges. (You can even be nitpicky with Top25-24National Universities and Top 15 National LACs.) These would be truly elite and are “the most selective” in the country.
All of these would have some things in common:
- excellent students with drive and variety of interests they pushed to a high level; they’re the best of the best, wherever they come from.
- resources: money to make classes smaller, to open new classes, to replace computers overnight, to offer free, drop-in tutoring every day in any subject needed, to have the most up-to-date technology in the labs and the makerspace and the library, to pay stipends and/or housing if you take an unpaid summer internship, to offer the most generous financial aid to families who earn 65K or less covering not only tuition, fees, room, and board, but also your books and transportation to get to campus or go home for the holidays, and for 70K to 190K a year families would pay less than at a typical public flagship, instate.
- opportunities and networking: those are intangible and hard to explain, but they are so important families that make 300K and are thus “full pay” are willing to pay in order to get these.
One step below, you have many state flagships, national universities ranked roughly 40+ to 60, National Liberal Arts Colleges ranked up to 75 or so. These offer excellent academics, top-notch facilities, smart, driven peers, but their resources, opportunities, and networking -while superior- aren’t the same as the above.
Then you have all Top 100 National universities, Top 20 Regional Universities, National Liberal Arts colleges ranked roughly 75 to 125. All solid, offering what most other countries consider “a very good education”.
The US is VERY lucky in that it has, literally, thousands of universities and there’s a deep bench of excellent, top-notch, and incredible universities (in addition to the usual “good”, “average”, and “mediocre” ones which all countries have.)
Tomorrow, go to your school or town library (if it’s open) or get the e-copy for a book titled Princeton Review’s Best Colleges", from 2018, 2019, 2020, or 2021. Flip through the pages, find 10 colleges you hadn’t heard of before, and come back here to hear what people think about them. 
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Not all of the USNWR (or other ranking) top 40 national universities are awash with money.
Some are state universities, which are almost certainly more “economy class” than the wealthiest private universities. Some of the private universities in the list are much less well endowed than others, so they have more issues like limitations on enrollment in majors or classes, or worse financial aid. And being awash with money does not preclude the existence of very large classes (e.g. the introductory CS courses at Stanford and Harvard).
Compared to national universities, LACs commonly focus on keeping class sizes smaller even at frosh/soph levels, but often have to trade off with having fewer offerings at the junior/senior levels. But top 40 (or whatever) LACs also vary in financial resources and therefore their ability to have resources to have smaller class sizes without being too limiting on junior/senior level course offerings.
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I went to a no-name, unranked institution for undergraduate since I wanted to work my way through and not have student loans. I then got accepted everywhere I applied for graduate school, the best schools for my field, and I was awarded an NSF fellowship. I chose Harvard for my grad degree.
I was surprised to find that the students I met at Harvard were no smarter or hard-working than my friends at my undergraduate institution. The main difference I saw was money. Harvard has it. Fancy buildings, lots of opportunities to study whatever you want wherever you want, etc. And, of course, the name opens doors. You go to Harvard? Then you must know what you’re doing, sure, go right ahead, we won’t question it.
The important thing to remember is that I got a top-notch, stellar education at the no-name college during my undergraduate years. Why? I looked for opportunities. I took the most difficult courses I could, I asked professors for research opportunities, I took many classes at once, etc. So did my friends. Could you graduate at this no-name and be a total slacker? Yes. But if you wanted a great education, you could have one, and then the professors can write you fantastic letters of recommendation. I had publications and jobs and volunteer work and tons of classes with A grades. So that little college’s name on my graduate school application (as opposed to an Ivy name or a top 100 name) did not hold me back whatsoever.
A great education can be had anywhere, though you might have to be really proactive in finding the opportunities.
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In some areas, it closes doors. In our area, many of the Ivy league schools are dissed by at least a few employers I know (too elitist, etc). Cornell and U Penn are exceptions. It’s weird, but it definitely colored my guys’ views when they were considering where to apply. “I want to go to a school where I can wear the sweatshirt and be fine anywhere I go.” He has no regrets. The school he selected is either highly regarded around here - or unknown since it’s not a big sports school.
As I think about it, really, there is likely to be bias from someone with any name. I’m sure it’s not supposed to happen, but I know engineering firms around here have firms they like to hire from and those they shy away from (Penn St rules). In some other places with two identical candidates, but one from X locally known school and Y unknown school, X will win (unless previous grads have colored the picture negatively). Stuff like that happens. I doubt it only happens here.
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I am highly doubting this statement. More likely is that the company is unable/unwilling to compete. It is like a college football coach saying that they don’t like 5 star recruits because they are too good. The reality is that they can’t complete against Alabama,tOSU, etc. It just isn’t worth their time. However, if the recruit shows some interest, they will wine and dine them.
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It is interesting that a college graduate is often heavily judged effectively by their parents’ financial circumstances and choices and their achievements while in high school, since these are the factors that determine the name of the college attended (for those who go to college soon after high school; these factors may not be as dominant for those who went to college as non-traditional students).
I’m going to take a wild guess that you don’t live in a rural area.
One of the most interesting things to me reading CC is that I see different points of view than those I live around and grew up with.
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I’ve had it happen to me in a major metro area. A company recruiter called me about a position and had my resume in hand. She was intrigued so wanted to interview me but was concerned that attending an Ivy made me overqualified for the position and that I would be bored (really crazy given the position). They ended up going with someone with weaker credentials who they thought was a better fit.
Folks doing the hiring have their biases.
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When I asked about it from one person here I was told, “Those type won’t fit in. They feel they are above everyone else and should be the boss.”
It’s certainly bias IMO. Individuals vary. If they are applying here, chances are they think they would fit in. But when one has oodles of applications and only wants to interview a few, I guess one has to make choices somehow.
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As I mentioned above there seem to be a good number of people who live up to that stereotype. I recently worked with a company where a senior executive at one point used a picture of Harvard as his Zoom background, just to let everyone know where he went to college 30 years ago. Fortunately he left the company, to everyone’s immense relief.
Or work in high tech.
Harvard is great at many things. It is not great at everything. No university is great at everything.
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It seems to be heavily influenced by personal experiences. There appears to be a general feeling that Harvard (or top-tier school) kids won’t be happy in “non-Goldman” like companies. I recently heard from an annoyed leader that a kid from a top school seem to want to directly want to deal with the C-levels or try to flash or overuse the school card relatively a bit more unnecessarily. These stereotypes need to go away, but won’t be easy…
I think that is a kid problem, not a school problem.
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Some of it may be due to small sample sizes. If someone encountered one Harvard graduate who acted like the mentioned stereotype, that could set the stereotype of Harvard graduates in the mind of that person. Whereas if the person encountered dozens of state flagship graduates, one of them who acted like the mentioned stereotype is unlikely to set the stereotype of state flagship graduates if there are many others who did not act like the mentioned stereotype.
Note that small sample size of personal experiences can result in stereotype setting on other characteristics, such as for people from a rural or urban area, distant state, low population foreign country, uncommon religion, uncommon race/ethnicity, etc…
In terms of recruiting, some employers may not bother to recruit at Harvard because they may believe that most graduates not going to graduate or professional school are going to Wall Street or management consulting.
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Yes, certainly it is a kid problem in this particular case, but not-so-top-tier companies seem to avoid Harvard types, which reminds me of Nash Equilibrium:
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