<p>What are some careers where attending a prestigious college will give a huge boost and what are careers where prestige doesn't matter?</p>
<p>Finance, consulting.</p>
<p>Any job closely related to $$$.</p>
<p>Academia is deeply rankings-conscious.</p>
<p>I think the clearest industries are probably finance and consulting, even mediocre (average gpa average extracurriculars) students at top schools get interviews with prestigious divisions at top finance and consulting firms and several get offers. Law cares religiously about which law school you go to and law schools seem to care a little about prestige (more about lsat though). Med schools don’t seem to care much where you go to undergrad. </p>
<p>not sure how other industries view prestige, but I have a hard time believing that any of them care about prestige as much as finance and consulting appear to. </p>
<p>caveat: you also see some students from state schools and unknown schools make it finance and consulting, but these tend to be the absolutely top students at their univ, something like 3.8+ gpa along with high performer / captain of varsity sports team for example. Sometimes people will get in because they come from rich and connected backgrounds.</p>
<p>also no industry requires prestige, but some clearly favor prestigious colleges.</p>
<p>Medical research, highly sought after medical specialities, big law.</p>
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<p>As prestige-conscious as finance and consulting are, I would again submit that academia tops them all. For example, as an academic, you are expected to maintain a copy of your CV for public scrutiny at all times - and your CV will be intensely scrutinized. Every time you give a presentation, every time you meet somebody in conference, every time somebody reads one of your papers, your CV will be examined and scrutinized. ‘CV-snooping’ would be deeply unsettling for most people, but is treated as a matter of routine within the world of academia, being as unremarkable (and, perhaps as unsettling to the squeamish) as dogs sniffing each other’s rears. And what is invariably one the very first things listed on your CV? Your schools - those at which you hold faculty positions and those at which you obtained your degrees. Heck, it’s routine to list your schools before you list any of your actual research publications, which one would think would actually be prioritized. In fact, the schools that you obtained your degrees from is often times listed first, even before your current faculty position, even for fully tenured faculty who had earned their degrees decades ago. </p>
<p>Consider these examples:</p>
<p><a href=“http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/5411[/url]”>http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/5411</a>
<a href=“http://www.people.hbs.edu/mbaker/cv/cv.pdf[/url]”>Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School;
[CURRICULUM</a> VITAE: Monica Lam](<a href=“http://suif.stanford.edu/~lam/cv.htm]CURRICULUM”>http://suif.stanford.edu/~lam/cv.htm)</p>
<p>While finance and consulting are indeed prestige-conscious, I am not aware of any such comparable social expectation within them for people to be so cognizant of the biographies of even casual colleagues. Do bankers and consultants meet each other in social gatherings and then immediately rush home (or, now, whip out their smart-phones) to check the CV’s of the people they just met? Probably not. But that happens routinely in academia. In fact, you’re actually expected to know the biographies of the people in your academic field.</p>
<p>Well, the thing with academia is that grad school matters more than undergrad school. Malcolm Baker went to brown undergrad. In academia, who cares Brown? If Baker have not attended Cambridge and Harvard, his CV won’t look as good, in my opinion, not counting Mr. Baker’s accomplishments, of course.</p>
<p>^ ^True, though this varies by discipline, and even by subspecialties within disciplines. There’s also some emphasis on the particular person under whom one obtained one’s doctorate.</p>
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<p>I was on the website of a consulting competitor of mine, and to my surprise they did have something that showed “a sampling of undergraduate and graduate schools our consultants come from.” The ones cited were:</p>
<p>Brown University
London School of Economics
Northwestern University
Stanford University
University of Chicago
University of Michigan
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
Yale University</p>
<p>^ Those are ALL prestigious schools.</p>
<p>Yes; what’s your point? Except you’ll always have people on here that argue that Michigan doesn’t belong on that list, or that Notre Dame doesn’t belong. You know, those types of people. Boy are they tiresome!</p>
<p>Notre Dame gets recruited by nearly all the prestige-conscious firms so its definitely elite in that regard. Its just not a research powerhouse. Michigan graudates are like everywhere lol not just in the US but internationally. </p>
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<p>I was about to mention this. Acdemia is about who you work for not what school you go to. Its natural thta the best people to work for are at the best schools. However going to work with a Nobel laureate at a 200 ranked school could do more for your career than going to the number one graduate school.</p>
<p>Sakky, I would agre with your examples but you should also be aware that there are some people who believe school is more important than accomplishments and vice versa.</p>
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<p>But that’s what I’m talking about. The OP’s question was not specific to undergraduate studies. In academia, where you obtained your PhD matters tremendously, even if you obtained it decades ago, and even if you’ve published extensively since then. People still care. They probably shouldn’t, but they do. Academia is the only profession that I know in which you can be a grey-hair, and yet have people that you meet not only rush to download your CV to examine where you went to school, but also expect that you have your CV publicly available so they can complete that examination. </p>
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<p>And now you’re behaving like a true academic: glancing at people’s CV’s and judging their worth by where they went to school. Again, notice how Baker’s accomplishments were listed after his education, which illustrates the primacy of his education. You actually have to scroll to page 3 before you get to his publications, which are ostensibly his true ‘accomplishments’.</p>
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<p>Yet that’s rarely listed. Education, on the other hand, is always listed, and is almost always one of the first entries on any CV. </p>
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<p>Yet the difference is that that’s merely a sampling. You can’t connect any individual consultant to any individual school through that sampling. </p>
<p>But in academia, everybody expects to be able to connect individuals to their specific alma maters through publicly available bios. For example, Harvard Business School doesn’t simply say that they have a faculty who obtained PhD’s from schools such as Harvard, Stanford, or MIT. People want to know specifically that Malcolm Baker got his PhD from Harvard, Al Roth from Stanford, or David Garvin from MIT. </p>
<p>For that reason, I would propose that academia is even more prestige-conscious than consulting or finance. I am not aware of any social expectation within those industries for everybody to maintain a public bio that details where they went to school, nor of a cultural dynamic that encourages people to peruse each others’ biographies.</p>
<p>I thought most CVs started with your education . . .</p>
<p>However, I do agree that academia is more prestige conscious than Finance/Consulting in the long run. Is even difficult to get funding if you dont teach at a top 20 school. And to teach at a top 20 school you need to have attended a top 10 school to have a shot. What a cycle. No wonder so many PhDs end up in industry or strategy consulting</p>
<p>The PRESTIGE factor is much more important in Law School, Medical School and Graduate School than undergraduate schools. </p>
<p>However, prestige may get you in the door but not necessarily keep the job, and I have seen people with more modest credentials dance circles around people with so called prestigious diplomas, both in teaching, the professions and consulting. Nothing, repeat NOTHING, trumps competence and compassion. </p>
<p>People with high IQ’s often lack EQ’s. And everyone knows the secret to success in business and professions is EQ’s. You must have “the core gray matter” to get started, but once there, if you lack people skills you will sink like a rock.</p>
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<p>I wish that was actually true: yet the fact remains that that’s not what people examine. Most bios do not list who they studied under. But they do list where they went to school. </p>
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<p>But of course the problem is that there are very few Nobel Laureates at low-ranked schools. And those that are are often times preparing for retirement and so won’t really want to work with anybody. </p>
<p>Then there’s the pernicious problem that seems to afflict a great percentage of tenured faculty, including Nobel Laureates: * many are no longer actively publishing top research*. Paul Krugman, for example, hasn’t published a single research paper in an A-level economics journal in over a decade. {Note, for those who want to argue details, the 2008 piece he wrote in JME is a response piece, and is therefore not actual research.} Krugman instead chooses to spend his time as a pundit. Similarly, Peter Diamond & Oliver Williamson haven’t had any A-level research pubs since 2005. {Note, reprints of their Nobel-ceremony speeches that appear in AER do not count as actual research pubs.} To be fair, they’re spending their time doing other things, such as writing books, serving as academic administrators, or (in Krugman’s case) writing a column for the NYTimes and appearing on MSNBC and CNN. But that doesn’t help you as a PhD student. You’re not going to be allowed to write for the Times or appear on CNN. As a new scholar, you’re going to be expected to do research, so you want to be working with people who are actually active researchers. </p>
<p>Nobel Prizes are retrospective awards given for research that was performed in the past, but they say nothing about how productive in terms of research the winners are today. Hence, what you actually want is not to work under people who have already won the Nobel, but rather somebody who is currently productively producing research that will eventually win the Nobel. But of course the problem with that is that you can never be certain who’s going to win. What that also means is that PhD students are actually well-advised to work under junior faculty, rather than famous name-brand tenured faculty, because, if nothing else, at least the junior faculty are going to be productive, while many of the tenured faculty aren’t.</p>
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<p>But that’s my point: why does it always have to start with your education (or sometimes with your current faculty affiliation, and then immediately followed by your education)? After all, regular business resumes often times denote education last, or in some cases omit it entirely. For example, if you have decades of business experience, you could make the reasonable case that your education is irrelevant. But for some inexplicable reason, the world of academia treats your education as highly relevant, even if you graduated decades ago. </p>
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<p>Well, actually, it is precisely those graduating with a top 10 (actually, more like top 2-3) PhD program who have more non-academic career opportunities available to them, although whether they take those opportunities is a different question. Let’s face it: if you obtain a PhD from some no-name school, the only thing you can really do with it is enter academia, probably lecturing at some low-tier school. {Or if you earned your PhD in engineering or science at that no-name school, you could take a job in regular corporate R&D). But if you earned your PhD from a top school you probably could leverage that into a lucrative career in consulting or finance. For example, I know of one guy who upon finishing his engineering PhD at MIT, immediately joined a venture capital firm. I can think of several others who became strategy consultants. {What that also sadly means is that many of our most talented young engineering talent - those who were good enough to complete PhD’s at arguably the most prestigious engineering school in the world - do not actually want to work as engineers.} </p>
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<p>Are you sure? Academia, especially in the technical fields, is notoriously rife with people who lack social skills, often abysmally so. Ted Kaczynski was an infamous recluse with minimal social acumen who garnered widespread complaints about his poor teaching and inability to relate with students or other faculty, or even hold a bona-fide conversation with them. But he nonetheless was hired as the (at the time) youngest assistant professor in the history of Berkeley and who was expected to win tenure had he not suffered a severe mental break and unexpectedly resigned his position (and then eventually became a serial killer). </p>
<p>And once you’re tenured, you truly don’t need any social skills at whatsoever, because you can’t ever be fired. You can be the biggest jerk in the world, and nothing will happen to you. In fact, the junior faculty and the students will fear you, because they know that you can greatly damage their careers through one nasty phone call or email.</p>
<p>Finance and consulting.</p>
<p>For consulting, on Oliver Wyman’s video introduction to prospective applicants ([People</a> & Culture](<a href=“http://www.oliverwyman.com/cn/118.htm]People”>http://www.oliverwyman.com/cn/118.htm)), schools highlighted include: Dartmouth, UPenn, Harvard, Imperial, Oxford, etc. It only recruits on campus at Dartmouth, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, UPenn, UVa, and Yale. MBB is not used for this example because they are less selective in where they recruit.</p>
<p>For Bain Cap, it only recruits undergrads at Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, UPenn, and Stanford.</p>
<p>For Bridgewater, it only recruits at Dartmouth, Harvard, Michigan, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale for its investment associate position (one of the most sought after introductory positions in the finance world, perhaps even much more sought after than ones at Goldman and McKinsey).</p>
<p>Sakky,which is wiser…excelling at a no name school and getting into a prestigious grad school,before branching into finance at zero cost(assuming you have a full ride),or going to a top undergrad school ,with less aid,then heading into finance after undergrad?</p>