@Pizzagirl “lead the Metropolitan Museum of Art or write a symphony or perform on Broadway” is a pretty spurious comparison. We’re comparing an art history degree to a CS degree, not an art history degree to chairing MIT’s EECS department.
How about critical thinking skills and cognitive ability to start. We need an objective evaluation of a student’s general ability independent of major and/or school. I think the obsession with elite schools is unhealthy.
What is wrong with interviews as an assessment tool? It is highly unreliable, as shown in the Harvard Business Review article I posted earlier. That article is not really news either, as the research of Philip Tedlock has shown this to be true for years.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/12/05/everybodys-an-expert
Laszlo Bock was a McKinsey guy. This is a problem of “range restriction”. I have a hard time believing he doesn’t know that. Remember, in response to this article,
http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203733504577026212798573518
there is this: “I think this student was making a mistake,” said Bock, even if it meant lower grades. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the training.”
He was either being flippant or trying to be provocative.
True. I am willing to bet that on average, a Stanford engineering grad has a higher SAT score than a Stanford communications major. Does it happen in all cases? Of course not. Furthermore, how do I compare that communications grad to a Berkeley physics major? The SAT would solve both problems for me. That is why I believe standardized test>major>college attended, though I would never base a hiring decision on any test battery alone.
Then why was my suggestion of hiring business grads for business functions so strongly resisted?
Canuck- because in a real life corporation there is no such thing as “business”. There is investor relations, and market research, and product development, and strategic planning, and graphic design, and social media, and government relations, and sales, and operations etc. In the US- the typical “business” grad- from your typical undergrad business program, has taken “buyer behavior”, not a rigorous statistics sequence; has taken “International business” but not a two semester sequence on European History (pre and post WW 2) or the history of Colonial and post-Colonial Africa or what-not; has taken Organizational Behavior but not a quant based Psych or sociology sequence; has taken a Freshman writing class but never written anything using primary sources or original research.
I’d rather hire a political science grad for my government relations team than someone with a business degree from random U. I’d rather hire an applied math major for market research than someone with a business degree and a concentration in buyer behavior. And I’d certainly rather hire someone with a history degree and fluency in a relevant foreign language than someone with a degree in international business.
I’ve interviewed kids with the international business degrees from many US undergrad programs. They don’t realize that you need to understand the religious and familial structures of pre-Mao China in order to launch a successful venture in contemporary China. They have no historical perspective on Europe pre-Marshall plan. They don’t know why some people in South America speak Portuguese and others speak Spanish. And they don’t know why there is hostility between Bangladesh and India.
Where in the world am I supposed to staff this “international business” person???
My company can’t run on people who think that the relevant things they need to know and do on the job have anything to do with “business”, or can be taught in a content-based class about a business topic. We’ve spent millions of dollars over the years developing training programs to teach a smart political science major how to do a discounted cash flow analysis, or how to teach a smart urban planning major what LIBOR or Basel 2 is.
But we’re not in the business of teaching spelling, syntax, or abstract thinking to young grads who walk in the door unable to write or analyze a complicated research study (and write a four page executive summary of same which actually captures the main ideas of the study).
Which is why kids with liberal arts degrees still manage to get themselves employed in management-track roles at large corporations. Everyone can teach the mechanics. The hard stuff (thinking, writing, analyzing) we leave to the universities.
Blossom is spot-on, canuckguy. Maybe things are different in Canada. But that’s how it is here.
I am going to ask my husband to read this entire thread. My D is a junior in high school, and my husband is making her feel bad for every major she is considering and thinks that if she does not have a degree in business that her degree will be worthless. My D, however, is very passionate about many things, she is very creative and artistic, and has told me that she would be absolutely miserable doing the things her father thinks she should do. She will likely be going to school in state and not racking up student loan debt, since we will be able to cover the costs. My husband is really making her feel like if she does not get a business degree that she will never find a job anywhere.
Spot on @blossom!!! I cannot tell you how many people I’ve encountered in my 25-yr career in finance and real estate who cannot write or mount a cohesive argument worth a damn. It is one of the most mystifying things to me how legions of kids can get through college today and emerge w/o basic communication skills necessary to work in many functions. And canuckguy, for your data collection, this phenomenon is evenly spread b/w top schools and community college grads. My liberal arts education provided me with the backbone of these skills (which are still being honed over the course of my career), and unfortunately, an intolerance of the lack of said skills, in others.
@howsefrau32 I would encourage your daughter to follow her passions. Doing well in college (which generally correlates to studying subjects of interest to you) will yield a higher GPA, and more opportunities for distinction in areas in which you are passionate. Doing the best you can and distinguishing yourself will open doors for jobs and grad school, whereas, middling through a more “practical” curriculum you could care less about will not. There are opportunities for all sorts of majors, but the key is learning problem solving, communication, and critical thinking skills and distinguishing yourself in your field of study. In most “business” settings, you can learn the specific tasks related to your work on the job.
Another test level is no replacement for the tried and true expectation a kid have some sort of experience and have started to prove some of the basic attributes needed. Even an engineering kid, if he/she has no additional experiences besides class and lab assignments, is a stab in the dark. Building a career isn’t about managing homework and tests, getting a nice grade. It’s about jumping a different sort of moving train, one with its own goals, direction, momentum, and need to thrive. Savvy young 'uns get that. I made sure my girls got that. Think about that analogy, CG- who do you think will hop that train? The kid whose record shows he can run, grab and stick, in relevant ways? Or the kid who stands there saying, “But I was an X major and here’s my gpa?”
Let’s be honest about the non-tech majors, though: they bring a different variety of challenges and knowledge, standards and sense of what’s required to accomplish a goal well. The best kids can think, identify issues, analyze and interpret, problem solve, review their results, write well, etc, build client and peer relationships, absorb the level of tech knowledge required and keep that train moving. But not all of them. There’s no “magic” in a humanities degree, either. It’s still the individual. And, “show, not just tell.”
The results of the referenced internal study caused Google to change to their hiring methods, including their unique policy about requesting test scores, so it wasn’t just Bock who doesn’t understand how to interpret Google’s internal studies. Instead the teams who develop Google policy came to the wrong conclusion when interpreting their internal study that found test scores as having “no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation” as not being an important criteria for hiring. Of course you know better.
The article in which Bock mentions switching from an electrical engineering / computer engineering major to a psychology major will have a negative impact on employment is quite a different issue. As I and many other posters have said, employers do not think of major as just a proxy for intelligence. Instead many jobs require a specific skillset and training learned in college. Like the student in the article, I was an EE major who attended college in the bay area. Most of the jobs I interviewed for required a major in EE (or sometimes related field like CS, or general E). They did not limit applicants to majors with the highest average test scores. Instead they limited applicants to majors who received electrical engineering related training during college that is required to perform well on the job. If the student changed her major to psychology she would likely not be looking at a very different set of jobs that required different types of skills learned during college and placed different importance on having grad degrees in the field.
Communications majors and physics majors are generally going to look for different types of jobs. However, if an employer does need to compare the two, in the employer survey I mentioned, employers said the most important criteria for evaluating resumes of new grads were internships and work experience. Many employers would compare the two by looking at who has the best experience succeeding in doing something similar to the job activities in a work environment. Of course an employer would also consider whether communications or physics related skills are more appropriate for the job.
I think you are putting way too much weight on Laszlo Bock’s quote (just as I think that Canuckguy is putting too much weight on the Manzi article he links too). The range restriction problem that Canuckguy highlights is definitely a factor here. I think Bock is engaged in a bit of PR and is also just observing that once you’ve narrowed your list of new graduates down to those who either are from the top CS programs and are in the top 20% of their class or who have some outstanding experience or accomplishment, then there isn’t much point in looking at GPA further. I doubt he’s saying that Google is wasting their time interviewing C- students from poor programs.
But rather than parse what Bock says, in the spirit of Big Data I’d suggest we look at what Google actually does …
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this myself, but this is supposedly a representative list of the top 10 schools that Google employees attended and the number of employees from that school:
School Alumni
Stanford University 1,859
University of California, Berkeley 1,645
Carnegie Mellon University 901
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 763
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 671
University of Michigan 585
Cornell University 537
University of Washington 519
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 490
Harvard University 478
It’s dominated by the usual suspects; even more so when you realize that there are many universities that are 10 times the size of Stanford or MIT that are not on this list The only thing that’s surprising to me is that the absence of any university from India or China. I might also have expected some other California names like San Jose State.
It seems to me that regardless of how Google has tweaked their recruitment processes they are still ending up hiring from what most people would consider the top CS schools. Of course, I have never worked at Google. Perhaps there are people who really have knowledge of their hiring practices for new graduates who could comment further.
You should say what Google “did in the past”, not what Google “actually does”. The whole point of the quote was Google’s internal studies found that their previous unique policy of focusing on brand name schools, GPA, and test scores were not effective, so they switched their hiring criteria. Another article that explains this better is at http://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates/ . Instead Google has been increasing hiring of employees who did not attend college. Note that the NYT interview mentioned that as many of 14% of Google employees did not attend college at all in some teams.
San Jose State is 11th…
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-20-best-schools-for-getting-a-job-at-google-2014-10
I could spend an extra $20 million per year on my new grad hiring and “diversify” to get the best students at Rhodes, Rollins, Kean, Wittenburg, Trinity, and a bunch of other places my company does not currently visit. And we’d likely end up with great new hires.
Why would I do that? I’m not making a value judgement about Rollins graduates when I opt not to take a team there to interview. But the concentration and number of kids with the kind of profiles we hire are so strong and abundant at the campuses we do visit, do our shareholders WANT us spending more than we have to assemble a class?
blossom - I agree completely. My company is one of those “elite” employers that pretty much hires new graduates only from schools that are top ranked in their field, so almost all the 23 year-old employees come from 5-10 “elite” schools. But if you look at where the 33 year-old employees went to school, you would find more diversity in the number and types of schools (though of course by the time someone has 10 years of experience no one really cares where they went to school).
It all boils down to the efficiency reasons that you talked about. We are an “up-or-out” industry, and at those 5-10 schools we can find a high density environment of high potential 23 year-olds that we are prepared to take a bet on and train. But 75+% of them won’t make it 10 years. Our lateral hiring is made of people in the industry who have proven themselves, and there are a lot more schools represented. Instead of recruiting at those schools, it’s just more efficient for us to let other companies hire and train them and for us to try to hire the cream of that crop after they’ve been sorted to the top. Even in highly technical fields there are a lot of skills that a leader needs that can’t be gleaned from a college record, and frankly 23 year-olds still are growing into themselves so trying to identify top potential hires at that age has a ton of built-in randomness.
Just sighing out loud. Why is Google always the go-to example? It’s an Everest. Or, why is it always about companies that recruit on campus and which few campuses? Are we really saying, if you don’t get into Google (and its cousins, the few top consulting companies or IB firms,) you are doomed? Of course kids aren’t. Not everyone gets the brass ring and not right out of the gate. Most kids do what most of us did: pay our dues first. I note “Google” shows up 19 times, on this page.
Now it’s Google. In 2001 it was Microsoft. In 1980 it was Warner cable. In 2007 it was Goldman Sachs, and in 1978 it was Procter and Gamble.
The “most desirable company to work for” prize says nothing about the company’s business strategy, stock price, market share or long term prospects and everything about which company got the most media and investor coverage in the last few years. Even so, the list (there are companies which track this stuff on college campuses) is remarkably stable over a generation. I don’t have the report handy, but I suspect that Coca Cola, Merck, P&G, have been in the top 30 for the last 20 years. I suspect that Apple, HP, Microsoft have been in the top 20 since their inception.
College kids aren’t especially discriminating when it comes to this kind of stuff.
In an earlier thread, some posters said some elite school students struggle with simple math as well.
I understand these institutions admit who they admit based on institutional self-interest, but that also increase the odds of mismatch between job applicants and employers. This is the reason I suggested an exit exam independent of school and major; I suspect this is also the reason why astute firms ask for SAT scores years after graduation.
This is one area where the hiring process can be improved. Previous experience and performance is important, but not checking up on cognitive ability leaves a lot on the table. Decades of psychological research have shown that to be so.
This goes some way in explaining why one of my kids was turned down for an interview slot with a consulting firm while in college, but was recruited by another 9 years after graduation. I don’t even think she’s “top shelve”, btw, then or now. Glad to know the system is more “egalitarian” than I give it credit for.
I was actually looking at it from the perspective of a small employer looking for the best candidate, and that of a candidate looking for the best employment opportunity. @blossom makes a good point about efficiency, although I would probably go to the schools with the largest physics and math departments and start looking from there.
“I suspect this is also the reason why astute firms ask for SAT scores years after graduation.”
So for the 99%+ of employers around the globe who DON’T ask for SAT scores, these companies are not “astute”? I can’t even come up with anything to say about that comment. Furthermore, the suggestion that kids need another standardized test in order to leave college and “properly” enter the world is ludicrous. Aside from the fact that there is no way thousands of private universities could ever agree to administer such a test, in terms of agreeing on content, there is no way any such test could capture what everyone actually needs to know to be successful in their career or life. I think enough posters have commented on different aptitudes for different folks, and that a wide range of people besides the Mitt Romneys of the world could be considered “successful” or more importantly, happy. It’s not all about data, it’s about real life.
A company which only recruits math and physics majors is going to have a tough time staffing its sales force, marketing and advertising departments, employee relations and executive communications (aka speechwriting) functions. What happens next year when they need to renegotiate contracts with five different labor unions? What happens this Fall when a piece of legislation which could double the price of a key raw material starts to work its way through Congress?
You have a very bizarre way of looking at the world. I assume you actually buy stuff from real companies- or take the train and fly on airplanes, have life insurance, carry a cellphone. Do you really think that all these enterprises can operate with only math and science whizzes???
Bill Gates launched the original and groundbreaking software with a team of linguists and anthropologists. Are you smarter than Bill on how to build a tech empire???
Has this thread essentially become ALL of us arguing against one poster’s ideas based on another country? (And heaven only knows what experience.)
I realize some on CC swoon when they hear some 13 yo took a test designed for 16-17 yo’s. And now you want s 21-22 yo’s job chances to be based on a test as a hs jr or sr?
Can he be yanking our chains? If not, I’m not sure he’s even getting our points.
Of course, what to put on such an exit exam that can reliably test what is desired to be tested without unintentional biases based on one’s major can be a difficult task, since college students’ courses and curricula vary widely. Perhaps that is why tests like the GRE general, GMAT, and LSAT target skills that are not directly dependent on college course work (though college course work may indirectly give training and practice in those skills).
Please explain why you think that these firms are particularly astute.