You are undoubtedly correct. If I want to hire nurses, I would advertise in reading materials aiming at nurses… I was trying to get a feel what the job market was generally looking for by checking the ad section of major newspapers. My reason is that if job ads start overflowing into popular media in large numbers, those jobs must be in high demand. I remember in the mid to late 60s, job ads for teachers were running in one of our major national papers, 5-7 pages at a time. I have never seen that again.
Where I am, social science research positions usually go to people with a background in business, economics, and/ statistics. For market research, human resources, marketing, advertising, it is going to be business majors all the way.
I am much more impressed by the 800 than your major or the college you graduated from. Seems like elite employers think the same way as well: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303636404579395220334268350
The obsession with elite colleges here in CC strikes me as odd; it seems like people want to be judged by a proxy of their quality rather than their quality itself.
Canuck, I don’t think there’s a single member of my team (HR for a large corporation) with an undergrad degree in business. And we don’t hire business grads for market research roles- whether entry level or very senior- we hire people with degrees in applied math, psychology (we’ve got a superstar with a PhD in cognitive psych who leads a huge team).
I can’t speak to Canada. But you continue to beat the drum on the value of a business degree for every single business function which is not accurate in the US.
And my company last ran a “Want Ad” in a newspaper about 10 years ago. So no surprise you aren’t seeing what you used to see in the newspaper-- it is no longer in use EXCEPT to run proxy ads to support an immigration case (by showing that of the 50 people that applied, all of whom were US citizens, not a single one was qualified).
The elitist employers may be just finding additional screens to cut down on the number of well qualified applicants they see. Also, use of SAT scores from high school tends to skew the applicants passing the screen toward those from higher SES backgrounds and away from non-traditional students. Perhaps this is the intended effect, much like the valuation placed on participation in sports like lacrosse: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2012-03-22/wall-streets-lacrosse-mafia .
I have a family member in consulting, specializing in executive compensation among other HR functions. 45% of the consultants in her firm have a first degree in business. The next most popular degree, a distant second, is Actuarial Science and Statistics.
I was talking specifically about Canada. Employers here do not need to look for talent elsewhere if they want to fill positions in business. Our business programs are more demanding and competitive than most liberal arts programs. (A poster here with an interest in comparative education has painstakingly explained the differences to me before; it sounds like the average American business student is an entirely different animal from what we see up here). We are really not in disagreement.
I was talking about the distant past…I can not remember the last time I read a newspaper. So again, no disagreement here.
I came to an entirely different conclusion. While standardized test scores are positively correlated with SES, they are much more highly correlated with cognitive ability. So when firms such as BCG and Bain use a minimum of 750 math and a M plus V combine well over 1500 as an initial screen, I know exactly what they are looking for. (For perspective, Harvard’s 25%tile range for M+V was only 1390).
Using the SAT as a first screen would eliminate the pretenders and save the companies a lot of precious interview time and money, as I see it. Is this a subtle pushback against holistic admission?
^^ You are correct, of course. I am always amazed at the number of employers that would allow ad coms to do the “recruiting” for them. I can understand small businesses doing that because they can not afford an extensive recruiting campaign, but that does not explain the behaviour of those elite firms that Lauren Rivera studied. Even educational institutions, who should know better, are making the same mistake:
@Canuckguy, I’m not sure I fully understand the point you’re making.
That’s just ludicrous. Which athlete is better between these two: Athlete A who is in the bottom 10% of their athletic league or Athlete B who is in the top 1% of their athletic league? How does your answer change when I tell you athlete A is in the NFL and athlete B is in the local YMCA senior basketball rec league?
Being an MD/PhD student, I’m not super familiar with MBA admissions, but ironically, the idea that one shouldn’t look at GPA alone and should factor in relative performance is exactly what holistic admissions is. Holistic admissions says that the super rich kid with super well educated parents who has a 4.0 GPA and 2300 SAT score isn’t necessarily a better candidate than the kid who grew up mostly homeless with a high school dropout single mom and has a 3.7 GPA and a 2100 SAT. Non holistic admissions would say the 4.0/2300 is clearly superior.
Do you have a citation for this? Because Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier has a whole book out that disagrees with that. As she says:
Later down in the article, Guinier provides a table of income vs. SAT score. I plotted it in Prism and did a linear regression. For simplicity, I used the middle value of each income range (e.g. 0-20k was entered as just 10k and then for 200+ I used 220 since the previous two points jumped up 20 and then 30 so I went 40 for the last one to account for the fact that 200+ obviously could skew wayyyyyy to the right). If we try to fit an exact line such that every dollar in income correlates with an increase in SAT score, the linear model I get (SAT score = 1.647*income in thousands + 1360) accounts for 94.8% of the variance.
I guess all my consulting friends had top SAT scores (I honestly have no idea what scores they had). Definitely didn’t realize anyone past undergraduate schools used SAT scores for much. Seems like a waste to me especially when you have 3 or 4 years of college to use too.
There was a thread here on Guinier and her book. The consensus is that she really does not know her statistics well and I have to agree with them. You can do a search for it.
Holistic admission is designed to allow the elites to admit whoever they want. The strategy is very simple: admit as many scions of the rich and powerful as they can, and the proletariat are bound to follow. A great business plan, and it made them very influential and wealthy. Guinier is spot on here.
She is wrong in thinking that standardized testing give a huge edge to the rich; it does not. Going test optional is giving a big edge to the rich; standardized testing gives the middle class a fighting chance against the rich. The poor? They have always been and always will be a sideshow.
Citation? This TED talk by one of the world’s leading authority on the topic tells it as it is. Not sure why mainstream media is not more forthcoming with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv_Cr1a6rj4
Almost none of Kuncel’s correlations in his graphs break 0.6, most being much lower than that. Those correspond to R squared values of 0.36 or less - i.e. correlated but represent a minority of the influence on the outcome due to the influence of other factors. The r squared for the data Guinier provides for income and SAT is 0.948 or r value of 0.97, dwarfing every correlation he presents in terms of its accuracy. Obviously her data is already averaged and stratified so it’s not a complete apples to apples comparison and I do disagree with people who insist the SAT is solely reliant on wealth. The question we entered into is what is the best predictor for SAT score - you said it was cognitive ability.
I went to Kuncel’s study (funded by the College Board) mentioned in his talk where he controlled for SES https://research.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/publications/2012/9/researchreport-2009-1-socioeconomic-status-sat-freshman-gpa-analysis-data.pdf While the paper was published in 2009, it uses data from 95-97. I would argue with the boom in the test prep, that the SAT data from 95-97 (in contrast to Guinier’s 2013 data) is wildly out of date - and that’s not even factoring in the fact that the SAT was dramatically changed during academic year 05-06. According to a frontline PBS report, the average student in 95-96 spent $8 ($12.43 in 2014 dollars) prepping (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/facts.html) obviously not an actually representative number with almost half of students spending 0 and 1/8 of students averaging $400 ($621.35 in 2014 dollars). I unfortunately can’t find current numbers but with the test prep industry being worth over $4B (~$2.6B in 95 dollars), there’s no way it hasn’t gone up - especially since i’m pretty sure it wasn’t already a multibillion dollar industry in the mid 90s.
I too would disagree with removing standardized testing as I think more data is better than less data but I’m very doubtful that the SAT is more associated with cognitive ability than income (my expensive NYC high school class with a median score of 1490/1600 comes to mind). I think anyone who has taken and prepped for the SAT knows that it’s a test that can be studied for and mastered - a claim that the college board used to deny vehemently for decades because it invalidated the idea that it’s a pure test of cognitive ability. The CollegeBoard has since reversed their position and partnered with Khan academy to offer free test prep - a nod towards cutting off the advantage that wealthier students have historically had. I think standardized testing can be useful as long as people recognize its flaws - such as the fact that it heavily correlates with wealth - potentially more so than any other single variable.
Actually studies have shown that prepping improves the score very little: https://stat.duke.edu/~dalene/chance/chanceweb/141.briggs.pdf
That is the beauty of IQ testing.
Another thing, beyond $200,000, PIAT scores actually go down as income increases. Knowing that PIAT and SAT are highly correlated, I would be very surprised if SAT scores do not do the same. Anyone has data on that?
Cute but yeah, the students I know who are in engineering programs also ace their humanities. Doesn’t everyone? Why the colleges don’t view the grading discrepancies between humanities and STEM as unfair and problematic is beyond me. But, the engineers I know are as good at writing as the people I know who majored in the humanities. They amy not know what the symbolism of the red cape is in some obscure English novel but they can read and write as effectively as English majors and they are as well versed in history as are the English majors. The STEM majors seem to have much clearer thinking than the English or history majors.
"She is wrong in thinking that standardized testing give a huge edge to the rich; it does not. "
Standardized testing does give an advantage to the rich because, on average, the rich students know more. Any knowledge test is going to, on average, stratify by income in the US.
Higher income students know more because they have better schools, and on average, they are more likely to have parents who have a better understanding of the importance of education and make it a priority for their kids. That does not mean it is unfair. What it is telling you is that the US is not doing a good job of making sure that low income students get a good education.
Getting rid of the test is just shooting the messenger. That is just ignoring the problem, not solving the problem. The way to have fewer people who have cancer is not to discontinue testing for it. That would be foolish. To solve the problem we need to do a better job of educating low income students and parents.
^^The short answer is “non shared environment”. Robert Plomin grew up poor, but his genes made him create his own environment at the Chicago public library. This non shared environment, short of extreme deprivation, represents the largest environmental influence on cognitive ability by far. Influences such as SES, parental style, education level etc. are rather “inconsistent”. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8970941/sorry-but-intelligence-really-is-in-the-genes/
While still on Lani Guinier, I can not help but wonder how she got along with Amy Wax. They were both faculty members at UPenn at one time. I think Amy is still there.
Chem and Bio majors both appear on many of the lowest paid, worst majors lists. If you are going to college primarily to pick a career, good luck. I hope you brought your crystal ball. Best to pick up great skills - reading critically, speaking publicly, research, a high social iq, and analysis. All those things apply to every career in every job market.
By liberal arts I think the op is thinking about humanities and social sciences. The issue actually is a little more nuanced than that. There is no doubt that some disciplines are more cognitively demanding than others, and that we are most likely to end up with a degree in a field we can do, rather than in a major that we want.
As a result, I always argue that one’s major, though not as good as standardized test scores, is a better filter for ability than elite school admission. Firms like Bain and BCG obviously agree with me. Google, I think, is on board as well. So, for me, standardized test>major>college attended. On CC, the consensus seems to be college attended>major>standardized test. Pretty much tells me what SES most posters are from, no?
I have a sibling that when asked, will modestly tell you that she has a degree in psychology. What she is not saying is that she graduated with distinction in mathematical psychology with a physics minor to boot. She did very well for herself…not only could she do mathematical modelling, she was able to explain it to her clients in language they could understand. It is outliers like her that tells me one’s major, though a good filter, is still inferior to standardized testing.
For most employers in the real world, it is experience > everything else (beyond base level expectations, such as expected degree level and possibly major if it is relevant to the job). In job categories where standardized tests are used, they typically use tests specific to the job, not those taken in high school for other purposes like the SAT or ACT.
Canuckguy, while it’s true that many humanities majors don’t have a direct path from their (undergrad) graduation to a solid, well paying career that doesn’t mean they can’t eventually get there. Maybe by a more circuitous route than their peers with a more “practical” education, but the end result can be similar.
My boss at a Fortune 200 company – a SVP of marketing – was a history major. No MBA, he worked his way up. My attorney was an English and art history major who left his PhD program in comparative literature to go to law school. My psychology major niece is at a top consulting company overseeing programs for the National Science Foundation. I, a comparative literature major, worked as a television newswriter and producer before moving on to marketing and corporate communications in fields that have nothing to do with literature. I can cite lots more anecdotal evidence, but then, you yourself probably know a lot of very successful people who studied those pesky humanities in their misspent youth.
Oh good grief. My clients are all Fortune 50, major clients. I work with their directors and VPs on a routine basis. There are plenty of liberal arts grads among them. It’s not in the least bit unusual. I’m sorry some people have so little imagination that they can’t fathom otherwise.
I think you will see that approach mostly among teenagers trying to strong-arm their parents into shelling out $200,000 for their dream school. (Usually it will be phrased something like, “I’ll make more if I graduate from NYU” or “companies only hire grads from this school” or “I won’t have any opportunities unless I go to a school that is world famous”). Even the ‘major’ thing is mostly teenagers as far as I can tell; if you visit the Business School forum there are countless threads along the lines of, “which set of two majors and three minors should I do to guarantee myself a job?” as if employers make hiring decisions by simply counting the number of majors on your resume…
I’m not saying that there aren’t industries where majors and college attended aren’t super-important, but the be-all and end-all dogmatic approach described doesn’t really reflect the real-world experiences of most people.