When someone (e.g. employer) considers school prestige, is s/he really judging you by how you did at the prior school you attended before attending the prestigious school, and (if the prior school was high school or earlier) how supportive your parents were (financially and otherwise) in terms of supporting your attendance to the prestigious school?
I.e. if an employer considers your college prestige as a factor in whether to offer an interview, is it really basing its decision to offer an interview on how well you did in high school (in order to get into the prestigious college), and your parents’ willingness to support (financially and otherwise) your attendance at the prestigious college? Similarly, if a law employer considers your law school prestige, is it really basing its decision on how well you did in college?
I don’t think prestige works the way you seem to think it does, @ucbalumnus.
On the Street and in Silicon Valley, people often pull in people from their network and recruit at their former schools. That makes some schools targets.
Some industries (like MC) see themselves as a pure meritocracy, and they try to pull in talent where they can. Elite schools tend to have a high concentration of talent so they are more likely to recruit there (but offices will generally recruit at the better local schools as well). They’d look at PhDs from anywhere, but you’d have to do the legwork if you’re at a non-target.
So in short, “prestige” in the industries it matters tends to be due to either a high concentration of alums in that industry or a high concentration of talent at a school.
UCB, I hire for a living and I don’t understand your question.
Companies like to recruit at Swarthmore, for example, even though they can’t hire “accounting majors” or marketing majors from Swarthmore. But you would have to work really hard to find a Swarthmore math major who wasn’t really good at anything involving logic and numerical analysis, and you would have to work really hard to find a history major who couldn’t write persuasively or read a lot of conflicting and divergent information and come up with a coherent narrative of “what happened”.
The fact that Swarthmore is prestigious (at least in some circles) is tangential. Or perhaps it is irrelevant. Swarthmore admits academically talented kids, is known for intellectual rigor, and so it produces the kind of talent that some companies need to hire.
I can hire terrific kids from fill in the blank college. But I have to work hard at it; I have to interview very widely; I can’t use my magic sorting stick to figure out who can make it through a tough training program in corporate strategy and who doesn’t have the quantitative chops (even math majors- at some colleges they may be good at math, but they aren’t good fact-based, analytically oriented problem-solvers.)
Is this your question?
Prestige is sometimes a marker of the stuff companies care about- and sometimes it’s irrelevant. There are a lot of colleges which the public considers “prestigious” which have come off the recruiting calendars of companies I’ve worked for. Rampant grade inflation, loose academic standards (kids with a B- average in accounting making it into the college Honor Society at the Business school), kids able to get credit for classes taken during the summer at colleges with MUCH lower standards. It’s not that there aren’t terrific kids there- but am I really sending a team to interview for new grads at a place where our hit rate is going to be 1/30 interviews? No I am not. I’m sending the team to a place which is thick with the kinds of kids we need to hire.
Which of course will vary depending on the company, division, business needs, etc.
Why do corporations love to recruit at Brigham Young? Because all the LDS men (and now, the women) have done a two year mission overseas by the time they graduate; they are older and more mature, they are usually fluent in at least one other language and frequently more. And more to the point- they know that a posting “overseas” doesn’t always mean Paris. Is BYU “prestigious”? Who cares? Their students have the goods; companies love to recruit there especially if they have hard-to-fill roles requiring language fluency and geographic flexibility!
Right. In engineering hiring circles, MUST evidently is prestigious. Is that because of the HS these kids went to? Doubtful. MUST is nearly open admissions. But they turn out high quality engineers, which is what hiring managers care about.
But wouldn’t a successful math or history major from any college have those skills, so that the name of the college that s/he is at is more of an indicator of his/her high school achievements (i.e. the stronger in high school person got into Swarthmore, while the less accomplished in high school person had to settle for Rutgers, Stony Brook, UC Riverside, etc.)?
@ucbalumnus: “But wouldn’t a successful math or history major from any college have those skills”.
How do you define “successful”? Are you assuming that a history major who pulls a 3.9 at school A would definitely have the same skill level as a history major who pulls a 3.9 at school B?
If you define “successful” as “pass Blossom’s screen”, then I think it’s been made plain that there are higher concentrations/total numbers of “successful” students at some schools than at some others.
I’ve used this line in many circumstances…including my job…and when hiring.
“There were two things they didn’t give me in graduate school…a magic wand and a crystal ball. My job would be ever so much easier if I had those things.”
You know…there are outstanding grads from just about every college…and there are also clunkers at just about every college.
You do the best you can when recruiting, interviewing and hiring. But even kids from the most prestigious schools sometimes don’t work out for one reason or another.
Debi Thomas…brilliant…Stanford grad, orthopedic surgeon, and couldn’t hold a job for more than a year.
I used to help hire software engineers and my husband still hires in this arena. For that area, it was more about the rigor and technical level of hires than the particular name of a school. The hires that came out of competitive, technical large public U’s were a favorite. Grads from LAC’s were rarely hired for deep technical development. And I have nothing against LAC’s at all. My oldest is seriously considering going to a LAC and in some ways I think I would have found myself better at one. My dad really shoved me down a technical path because I was capable and he knew I’d be employable. But it was a very technically rigorous education.
I think it can really depend on what part of the country you are in and what the job type is that you’re looking at
I’m sure I will be judged by this, but I have hired for years and only thought of Swarthmore as quality stationary until recently when I realized that the paper is actually Strathmore, and Swarthmore is a college. Granted I am on the west coast, and haven’t heard of many of the colleges often referred to here, different circles I suppose.
You can say the same thing about most successful students going to most universities. A student who is highly successful in high school is likely to be highly successful at a state U. Anyone who gets into a prestigious school has been highly successful both academically and also in something else. Past performance is very indicative of future performance.
@blueskies2day, no, that’s perfectly understandable. I knew of Swarthmore (heck, I was accepted there back in the day), but before I joined CC, I though Bates was a motel, Colgate was toothpaste, and Colby was a cheese (I grew up in the Midwest, lived on the West Coast and even the Tri-state area for a few years).
Most people don’t know of hardly any LACs that are outside their area. Nor do they know much about public honors liberal arts universities. Most people in Missouri probably think Truman St. is some open admissions directional when it is actually the most selective public in MO (and that would be even more true outside MO). Likewise, most people in FL probably don’t even know that NCF exists (even though, in terms of alumni achievements, it’s a Near-Ivy).
Hah! Next thing you know NBA teams will be drafting many of their players from the top college programs. Don’t they realize that by targeting college basketball programs with the best reputations they are really just basing their decisions on how well their players did in high school?
Obviously the decisions to draft Michael Jordan from UNC, Kareem from UCLA, Wilt Chamberlain from Kansas, etc. were only made because NBA teams are blinded by prestige. I would definitely fire any NBA GM who was willing to draft Lebron James based on just his high school record.
“When someone (e.g. employer) considers school prestige, is s/he really judging you by how you did at the prior school you attended before attending the prestigious school?”
Yes. This is a particularly strange pattern in the legal community. Sought-after employers, including federal judges hiring clerks, heavily weight law school prestige (though they think of it as quality, rather than prestige). But if you take a middle-of-the-class Harvard Law student over an A-minus student from Georgetown or Duke Law, you are prioritizing college performance over law school performance.
@Hanna, well, YHS use to be the only holistic law schools (just because they were so in demand, so they could pick and choose which top-stats kids they wanted; these days, it may only be YLS and SLS as HLS is huge so needs every tippy-top LSAT applicant they can get, though that may be changing as they don’t require the LSAT now). So they would also be prioritizing the law school adcom’s judgement.
Regarding the tangent on how employers consider college prestige in hiring, there is a huge amount of variation. In general, school prestige has little impact on hiring decisions, especially compared to things like relevant experience. However, there are a few key exceptions that get a lot of discussion on this forum, including some “elite” IB and law firms.
For example, in the the study at http://www.thinedgeconsulting.com/assets/pdfs/Ivies%20extracurriculars%20and%20exclusion%20Elite%20employers’%20use%20of%20educational%20credentials.pdf , the researcher provided mock resumes to hiring managers at various elite IB, consulting, and law firms and had them evaluate the candidates. She also interviewed the hiring managers about their choices and hiring policies in general. The hiring managers indicated that “school prestige” and doing the right ECs were the two most important factors in choosing who to bring in for any interview. In some cases, the hiring managers emphasized attending 1 of the ~4 most prestigious colleges, calling Brown or Penn “2nd tier”, and Berkeley or Michigan “safeties”.
The reasons hiring managers gave for such a focus on school prestige fell in to a variety of categories including avoiding a risk of intellectual defects or “moral failings” such as “faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student”, prestige being an indicator of “polish” including better “social skills and self-preservation abilities”, a better potential for future fame and influence for the company that hired them, and validating their own educational trajectories.
Attending an “elite” college is also an indication of applying to and choosing to attend such colleges, rather than public or near by colleges. It’s also important to note that even in the extreme examples above, school prestige was far from the only factor. For example, having the right ECs was ranked almost as high as school prestige to reduce risk of hiring persons who were “boring,” “tools,” “bookworms,” or “nerds.” It’s not just how well you did in HS… that’s one of many factors.
When I wrote “how well you did in high school”, I meant inclusive of extracurriculars, test scores, impressing teachers and counselors enough to induce them to write stellar recommendations, etc. as well as getting top grades in hard courses, since that is what is needed to get into a college prestigious enough to be hired by college-elitist employers.
Regarding extracurriculars done at the applicant’s current school, that paper also mentions that evaluators tended to favor high-SES extracurriculars (like preppy sports over football, basketball, and soccer) when evaluating applicants on that measure. Also, long term activities that may have needed expensive parental support since childhood are also favored.
