Isn’t this true everywhere in the world and most time in human’s history?</p>
<p>I heard that for some to finance companies, they are trying to find the kids from such families and they do not care about their majors or grades at college. All they want are the connections the kids from these families could bring them.</p>
<p>The question for most of the “rest of us” who are not in the league is: What is the potential benefit of attending such a school, if such a school still reserves some slots for our kids for, how can I put a word on this, maybe social justice, in the “holistic process”?</p>
<p>BTW, as for the banks hiring princelings, that’s more common and profitable for the banks in corrupt oligarchic countries like China. Wall Street (at least the trading floor) tends to be a meritocracy (again, outside of corrupt oligarchic markets where insider trading isn’t prosecuted) because PNL trumps all.</p>
<p>Um, mcat2, you kind of heard wrong. PurpleTitan is right.
The recruiting for those positions is very intense - and yes, grades DO matter.</p>
<p>Think about it logically. If these companies are just trying to find rich kids and don’t care about their majors / grades, why do they need to go to Harvard (et al) to do so? Plenty of rich families with not-so-bright kids who go off to average state u and have four years of partying. </p>
<p>“What would be more interesting is comparing how folks who got in to an elite and didn’t go do in life to those who did attend an elite.”</p>
<p>I think each research can only do so much. Apparently this one didn’t deal with what you asked for. But I think I saw some studies that may be able to answer your question. I can try to find that. I don’t particularly like Wai’s research but it does give us an indication that elites are looking for motivated and intelligent people. The quality of students and school names impact each other, the ‘brand name’ effect is there. Their students benefit from the name, and school names are elevated due to the success of their graduates.</p>
<p>“Many CEO’s went to state schools, but once they got placed on the “CEO track” their company sent them to an Elite (executive) MBA program.”</p>
<p>In the article: “Dark gray bars indicate the percentage that attended graduate school, independent of the elite school category.” so it seems the ones with a post-graduate degree from elites are not counting in the 38% elites.</p>
<p>Why should it be shocking that many of the world’s rich and powerful attended elite colleges?
If all the world were a perfect meritocracy, this is exactly what we should expect (unless you believe all colleges are equally good.)</p>
<p>It may be gratifying to know that a few HS drop-outs become “self-made” billionaires or US senators. I don’t think we’d really want that to become the prevailing pattern. We would not want the greatest rewards to go to the worst or even average students (not unless they have some other very exceptional compensating qualities.)</p>
<p>“Elite School = person attended one of the top schools in Table 1 for either undergraduate or graduate school”</p>
<p>And from the article itself…
</p>
<p>Attending an elite school for graduate school would be counted in the “black”. The percentages add up to 100%, so if you attended an elite graduate school, you’re counted in the black, and not the dark gray.</p>
<p>The same linked studies by Wai show that 13.2% of CEO’s attended Harvard, as my earlier linked article shows, this is driven by the MBA program and not undergraduate degree’s (Harvard had only awarded 11 undergraduate degree’s to CEO’s, while awarding 40 MBA’s).</p>
<p>By the way, Wai’s definition of an elite school is based on those schools attended by the top 1% in ability (based on SAT scores) </p>
<p>While Wall Street hiring may be meritocratic with relatively low corruption, the definition of “merit” for that purpose may be an even more uneven playing field based on one’s family SES than it already is with respect to attending and graduating college. For example: <a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg;
<p>Also, late bloomers are more limited, since they may not have the high school credentials to get into HYP where Wall Street recruiting is best, and transferring to HYP after starting elsewhere is extremely difficult (impossible at P).</p>
<p>Late bloomers can get their chance through entrepreneurship and/or b-school. Working your way up from the middle/back office is also still a possibility.</p>
<p>BTW, Wall Street recruiting these days is actually more democratic now in that the undergrad b-schools at schools like Vandy & ND, which you never heard of as Street targets back in the day, are actually sending a decent number of kids to the Street now. And of course, Kelley at IU has a track record of sending kids to the Street with their IB Workshop prepping. This is due to a combination of factors: 1. The Street is losing its luster at the very top. Those Ivy athletes with high GPAs in liberal arts majors that the Street use to scoop up are more and more turning their back on Wall Street. 2. Wall Street has become much better known. 3 decades ago, fewer kids at an undergrad b-school at a place like Vandy were aiming for Wall Stret or knew how to prep for interviews. Nowadays, they’ve prepped so much that they’re beating out Ivy liberal arts majors (and they don’t have to be trained as much). Remember that the quality that Wall Street prizes most is hustle (being cool under stress and loving to compete are highly valued on trading floors, which is why there are so many athletes and military there).
Of course, Wall Street is also changing. The upside isn’t what it was, and I don’t see the heyday for high finance coming back for generations.</p>
<p>MMB consulting (while recruiting other schools), still seems to be concentrated on HYPS, however.</p>
<p>I wonder how the USA compares to the UK, France, China or Japan in terms of the percentage of CEOs, or senior government officials, educated at “elite” schools? My impression is that the US percentage is comparatively low (and that admission to Tokyo University or one of the grandes écoles is a more valuable ticket to wealth and power in Japan or France than admission to the Ivies is in America.) </p>
<p>Tk, all you have to do is walk down the street of any super affluent American suburb – they are NOT overwhelmingly populated by grads of elite colleges. It’s just a silly notion. </p>
<p>In Japan’s case, up until the mid-'00s, some of the most prestigious departments like METI(MITI before 00’s) were closed to anyone who didn’t graduate from Tokyo University’s Department of Law(Equivalent of our Poli-Sci major) as that department required the highest admission scores on the national college entrance exams with the possible exception of applicants to medical school.</p>
<p>A friend who was sent from a government department which had a similar history to study at Columbia for his MIA told me if he had graduated just a few years before as a Tokyo U Econ graduate…there was no way in h&^ll his department would have accepted him…much less graduates of other elite Us like Kyoto, Waseda, Keio, etc. </p>
<p>Also, many major Japanese conglomerates won’t hire anyone for an entry-level management track position unless one has an UNDERGRAD degree from an elite Japanese undergrad. </p>
<p>Even an MBA from a Japanese elite after a non-prestigious or foreign undergrad degree wouldn’t do it as one Bucknell graduate in the '80s found out. He ended up having to follow a corporate recruiter’s advice to enter Tokyo U as a “transfer student” to get their undergrad degree. Once he did that, the very same Japanese corporations which spurned his earlier inquiries were falling all over themselves to hire him as he’s now a genuine “Tokyo U” graduate. </p>
<p>I think this depends on how powerful and affluent these people are. Are the extraordinarily powerful or wealthy or not, or just merely powerful or wealthy ?! (like some CCer claiming that a household having $150k annual income is wealthy.)</p>
<p>A year ago, SEC was investigating the hiring practice at JPMorgan Chase that was originated from the “Sons and Daughters” program.</p>
<p>The offsprings of the powerful elite could be hired on a separate track. This reminds me of the “development” track in college admission.</p>
<p>"The program was originally called “Sons and Daughters.” And although it was supposed to protect JPMorgan Chase’s business dealings in China, the program went so off track that it is now the focus of a federal bribery investigation in the United States, interviews and a confidential government document show.</p>
<p>JPMorgan started the program in 2006 as the friends and family of China’s ruling elite were clamoring for jobs at the bank, according to the interviews with former bank employees and financial executives in China and the United States. The program’s existence, which has not been previously reported, suggests that the bank’s hiring of such employees was widespread.</p>
<p>Saying they wanted to weed out nepotism and avoid bribery charges in the United States, JPMorgan employees in Asia started the program to hire well-connected candidates on a separate track from ordinary applicants, the employees and executives said. Without the program and its heightened scrutiny of the candidates, the employees argued, JPMorgan might improperly hire the children of Chinese officials to win business."</p>
<pre><code>(of a person) Possessing enough wealth that one does not need financial support from another person and does not require income from employment. [quotations ▼]
</code></pre>
<p>Are we talking about people in this category, whatever country they come from? Like they say in Spanish: “nada que ver” (that is, nothing to do with the rest of us mere mortals no matter which tax bracket you fall in that have to go to work everyday).</p>
<p>People who are that wealthy don’t HAVE to send their kids to Ivies or elite schools. Because they don’t need to impress anybody and they already have the connections they need. If you have a company you’re going to leave to junior, you don’t need him to have a Harvard degree to take it over - no one will care. I think some of you are painfully naive for not realizing that plenty of wealthy people are more than happy to send their kid wherever he wants - and if that’s not an elite school, what do they care? </p>
<p>Depends on the given wealthy family and the cultural values they hold. If the be-all and end-all for them is to be independently wealthy and own a company large enough to sustain that, your point holds.</p>
<p>However, this is not always a given as the given wealthy family themselves may value education or at least, the signaling of such from having an elite college degree. Even if they may not feel it as much, they may also live in a cultural region where having an elite college degree confers greater social capital and respectability among those of their class/social circle and/or in the larger society as a whole…whether we’re talking foreign societies or those in some well-off American enclaves such as the well-off parts of the suburban/urban NE. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, If you have a chance to ask Romney or his parents, I would bet you would get a different answer. (I think his father tried to get elected but failed. I believe his parents were already wealthy.)</p>
<p>Sometimes I think that for SOME (not all) wealthy, ambitious, “powerful” and hardworking people, the elite college education seems to have some “fatal attraction” for them; its value to them may be beyond their practical value. They could buy almost many things relatively easily, but they still need to work on it if they want that credential. This happens to JFK’s family, or the Bass family from Texas, especially when the parents themselves have not obtained that credential yet.</p>
<p>I never understand what studies like this are supposed to prove. Obviously only a tiny percentage of graduates even from Harvard or Yale will ever become among “the world’s rich and powerful,” so it’s not like going there will guarantee you that kind of success. And as sally305 said, saying that 38% of CEOs went to elite schools doesn’t prove anything. I bet more than 38% of CEOs are white men, but does that mean either that being a white man gives you a good chance of becoming a CEO, or that if you’re not a white man you might as well give up on that dream? Becoming a CEO is already so extremely unlikely for anybody at all, that everything about it is a crapshoot. You might as well try to figure out what characteristics you have to have to become a US Senator. (And by the way, plenty of US Senators went to less-than-elite schools.)</p>