I am sure they are huge, and they hire broadly. I was only speaking of per institution hiring ratios.
1 Like
Does not look like a lot of elite college bias in the top median earnings of recent biology BA/BS graduates shown on College Scorecard: Search Fields of Study | College Scorecard
1 Like
That data is hard to interpret. Those are median wages 4 years after graduation . From Detroit mercy. The number is 95k. It sounds like theyâve gone to school again in some allied health field. I am talking about some jobs that pay 80-90k to fresh bio undergrads. I have been told that school name brand may matter on the margin.
The context of this conversation at home was whether these jobs will be accessible from a state flagship. The answer is yes, but not in the numbers that would be representative of bio kids at state flagships. Based on anecdotal observations of kids from different schools at summer internships.
It does not seem like there is much of an elite school premium for BA/BS biology graduates from:
- JHU cell / cellular biology and anatomical sciences: $46,330
- JHU neurobiology and neruosciences: $43,609
- Harvard ecology, evolution, systematics, and population biology: $54,389
- Emory biology, general: $48,491
(Above are from College Scorecard.)
1 Like
I donât know if any of them go into a proper biology job. They are probably all optimizing for medical school admissions.
Some examples of people that I know have stepped away from medical school are
- product manager at a company that makes scientific equipment.
- a bio consulting firm
- investment banking in their healthcare practice
- jobs at the big pharma majors that market their patent portfolios
- investment firms that buy patents
Etc
These are non medical school headed kids. Consciously.
These salaries are likely not 50k.
You have access to jobs such as these from JHU, Harvard, Yale etc. Difficult from Rutgers.
1 Like
My biology major daughter did TFA straight out of school and earned just under $70,000 with full benefits. She switched to a clinical research job (at a well known facility) and is earning $70,000, with amazing benefits. Sheâs leaving, but I thought her job options were pretty good for somebody who knew they were going back to school. The salary would have been the same had she started at the clinical job straight out of school (it was offered). She attended a strong, well known flagship.
1 Like
Iâm not sure itâs easy to generalize. School A may send a greater proportion of its graduates to Company X, because Company X has had good experience with graduates from School A, so it sends a proportionally larger team to School A to recruit every year and it looks more favorably at School A graduates in a tie-breaker. The students at School A are also more likely to have good contacts in, are more familiar with, and have heard more good things about Company X. In other words, thereâs a mutually good feeling about each other. With more graduates from School A going to Company X, that mutual relationship is likely to deepen over time. The opposite can sometimes happen as well.
Is it prestige? Yes, only if one defines prestige as reputation and favorable experiences established over time. Otherwise, no.
2 Likes
This a good point. Sometimes it seems like people use âprestigeâ almost as a derogatory word. Like it is unearned and hollow. Most Prestigiousâ schools, IMO, became prestigious by offering best available academics.
3 Likes
Itâs also hard to generalize even within a small part of one sector like the FAANG companies. Meta was notoriously elitist in hiring, even compared to Google which Meta modeled its hiring practices on. Amazon and Apple much less so.
1 Like
Apparently Fortune 500 CEOs need a skill set, not a prestigious university degree.
I think this is highly dependent on three things, what the person does, who they did it with and how far into their career they are. All of those trump alma mater, especially undergraduate.
As a retired software guy, low to medium sounds right to me. These companies tend to have technical tests that everyone has to take at the start of the interview process. One of the reasons for those tests is to eliminate things like college bias in hiring. What going to a prestigious college might do is increase the chance of a recruiter contacting a new college graduate. After a few years, though, your skills and experience will matter much more.
6 Likes
My two cents is I think it is very rare for school âprestigeâ to matter in the sense it automatically gives any applicant from that school a boost.
Rather, I think selective schools and employers are generally looking for people who they think will have a good chance of satisfying, or exceeding, their goals for their students and entry-level employees. That may involve looking for people who have already performed at a relatively high level in a challenging environment. It may also involve looking for people who have shown mastery of certain knowledge or skills. Finally, if they are devoting significant resources (like in-person recruiting), they may want to identify places where there is a good chance there will be more people who meet their requirements, and of course might actually want the position.
I think all that is more or less sufficient to explain most of what we see among selective schools and employers.
Like, I donât think merely going to a highly selective college gives you a boost for highly selective graduate or professional admissions. However, if you do really well at a highly selective college, that may be seen as worth more than doing only equally well at a significantly less selective college, on the theory you faced more competition to do that well. Indeed, maybe you can do a bit less well at the significantly more selective college and still be seen in a somewhat better light. But that will almost surely have limits where if you donât do well enough at the more selective college, the people who did really well at the less selective college will start being ranked over you by selective schools and employers.
And then certain selective schools and employers, like law schools, say, donât really care if you have any specific knowledge base. Others may have pretty specific majors and such they require. But I have encountered very few cases where schools or employers think only a few colleges can provide such an education (only really in very specialized fields). In most common fields, schools or employers seem to think many colleges are capable of providing an adequate education in their desired fields, and so it really goes back to how they see the performance of the applicant in that field in light of the perceived competition they faced.
And finally, some schools and employers may recruit at some colleges and not others, but I think that is mostly just because they have reason to believe that their recruiting efforts are more likely to yield the applicants they are looking for at those colleges. Which may in part be a function of a willingness to go a bit deeper into the class at such colleges (including based on prior experience with such people succeeding with them), but may also in part be a function of just knowing a lot of the best-performing people at that college will be interested in the position.
OK, so given all thisâif you knew you would do equally well no matter where you went, then youâd generally want to go to the most selective/competitive college possible. Except of course you canât know that, precisely because the most selective/competitive colleges are more competitive.
I think there is also a temptation to go to a college which is particularly known for the specific sort of thing you would want to do next. But again you might be then decreasing your odds of doing really well in that program, as others seeking your future position may be thinking the same thing and end up competing with you in that program.
Same with choosing a college where your target schools or employers regularly recruitâseems like an obviously good idea until you realize other people who are targeting those schools/employers are likely thinking the same thing.
So I think in theory, there is a kind of sweet spot where you are looking for the combination of college, and, if relevant, program, where it will look quite competitive to schools/employers, and maybe gets in-person recruiters (if relevant), but wonât actually be so competitive you canât do really well. And that might not be the most competitive program, the most competitive college, or so on, that you can get into. Maybe it will be a âgood enoughâ program at a âcompetitive enoughâ college.
And I personally donât think âprestigeâ is a helpful term at all. I really donât think selective schools/employers are typically looking for generically âprestigiousâ applicants. They are looking for GOOD students/employees, and likely thinking about all this in terms of how to get the best students/employees that they can.
4 Likes
I think there is a chicken-and-egg problem in answering this question.
Letâs take investment banking.
Student A comes from a well-connected wealthy family and attended a well-regarded boarding school from a young age. Parents and school unite to ensure Student A has all the opportunities and resources to build a stellar college application.
Student A gets into an Ivy, where their parents are alums and donors, along with several boarding school classmates and children of their parentsâ friends. Student Aâs circle expands to include friends of these friends and others Student A meets through selective student organizations. Student A participates in expensive vacations with some of these people before and during college and lands internships at prestigious firms where family friends are top executives.
How much of Student Aâs success is related to the name of their school and how much is due to the wealth and connections that got them into an Ivy in the first place? Could someone like Student A break into investment banking even from a âlesserâ school because of connections?
More importantly, would Student B be as successful if Student B were a first-generation college student accepted into the Ivy? Assuming that Student B has to work on all school breaks and canât afford the vacations, golf outings, parties, and Greek system events that Student A participates in? If Student B starts out with fewer connections and has fewer opportunities to expand them in college, does Student B still land the coveted job? And, if the answer is yes, does it happen at the same rate as the Student As of the world? How does it compare to others with Student Bâs intellect and drive at less selective schools?
6 Likes
My daughterâs grad program in genetic counseling had 200 applicants for an entering cohort of 12. Other schools range from 6-27 per cohort with anywhere from 150-400 applicants. Getting an interview is not based on undergraduate prestige at all. Yes, there are applicants from Stanford, Duke etc but most (over 70%) do not attend such schools. The majority attended âregularâ colleges. Applicants from Brown could go to Rutgers, and applicants from a state school might end up at Northwestern.
Once you have your masters, employers do not care if you graduated from an Ivy or a state flagship. Programs within both schools are viewed as peers and graduates will be working side by side.
1 Like
The article states, âOf the 2023 Fortune 100 CEOs, only 11.8% attended an Ivy as undergradsâ.
USNWR states, â Only 0.4 percent of undergraduates attend one of the Ivy League schools.â
That means Ivy undergraduates are over represented by a staggering 29.5 times relative to size amongst the Fortune 100 CEO sample. So while it does suggest that any background can lead to a CEO role it confirms that the most frequent and well traveled path to such roles includes an undergraduate Ivy degree.
While an exact number is hard to identify there are 3,000+ 4 year colleges in the US and only 8 of them (Ivy League) produce 11.8% of Fortune 100 CEOs. Seems to validate the value of attending one of these schools. This overrepresentation at senior levels extends beyond corporate America into other fields such as public policy, medicine, law, etc.
Once again you can succeed from any school or background but those that attend Ivy schools dominate a variety of fields relative to their small population sizes.
Here is another article to considerâŠ
The Road to a Supreme Court Clerkship Starts at Three Ivy League Colleges - The New York Times.
Embedded in the article is the often underreported fact that half of Harvard Law students come from an extremely small group of elite schoolsâŠ
âThe study, which considered 22,475 Harvard Law graduates, took account of three data points: where they went to college, whether they qualified for academic honors in law school (graduating cum laude, magna cum laude or summa cum laude) and whether they obtained a Supreme Court clerkship.
About half of the graduates had attended one of 22 selective undergraduate institutions, and more than a fifth of the graduates had gone to college at Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Both of those groups graduated with honors from Harvard Law at above-average rates.â
Pointing out that not all business leaders or Supreme Court justices went to Ivies doesnât invalidate the reality that those that did (.4% of college graduates) seem to be over represented in these lofty roles.
4 Likes
So approximately 30% are from âsuchâ schools and those schools populations are far less than 1% of total students. What does that suggest?
1 Like
They look at the applicantâs grades, their experiences, letters of rec etc when deciding who to interview. They do not care about undergraduate prestige, itâs about what you have done. Itâs also a field that values work experience, and getting in straight out of school is hard (not impossible, but harder). Most take gap years.
So I am asking earnestly because I have no experience in this area, why are elite school kids (based on your comments) over represented by a 30:1+ ratio versus their population size? Alternatively are you saying the people making these decisions ignore prestige but the over representation is a function of the prestige school kids having done more?
Perhaps I am being naive but given we are talking about genetic counseling, I will use an analogy. Wouldnât it seem significant if a small sub section (less than 1%) of the population were getting 30% of reported cases of an illness?
2 Likes
Donât know. I only know the schools attended and what is stated by admissions committees. My daughterâs cohort actually does consist of some âstrongerâ schools in addition to 1 Ivy, so maybe it matters more than they actually will admit to, for her particular program? Other programs are not represented by âtopâ schools at all (hope I am making sense).
If somebody went to Duke and does not have what they are looking for relative to other applicants, they will not receive an interview despite attending Duke. If the Duke student had everything they wanted, they may get the interview but might not gain acceptance unless they were a fit (personality).
The group my D belongs to has some students from prestigious schools. They all (?) matched. Was it the school name, or was it the type of student (attending all types of schools)?
1 Like