<p>Does what college you go to and graduate from really matter? I want to go into business and it seems that intelligence is the key determinant for business related jobs.</p>
<p>Better colleges do on average have much higher starting salaries, but is that due to the college or the average student from Wharton being smarter than the average student from state colleges?</p>
<p>If someone from a state college is equally intelligent as someone from Wharton, will the pay be equal? For major I-Banking jobs, the resume includes such things as SAT I and SAT II scores and the major does not really matter. It would appear that in an I bank job, for example, intelligence is the only thing you have to prove.</p>
<p>I believe better colleges do allow for better oppurtunities and perhaps better education, but as shown by I-Bank jobs, major does not even matter. This would indicate that intelligence is valued the most and at the end of the day the college you go to should not make a huge difference.</p>
<p>My guess is that same intelligence student from Wharton vs. same intelligence from state college would be an interesting comparison. I believe that the Wharton student would have the edge, but not by THAT much.</p>
<p>Potential employers don’t ESP and they have time to administer IQ tests at a job interview. They are going to assume that colleges have pre-sorted candidates for them and will look at the name of the school you graduate from as a proxy for intelligence.</p>
<p>@beantowngirl
No, but Penn State is recruited by Goldman Sachs. They tend to give their jobs to people with high SATs and 4.0 college GPA. Penn State is by no means a selective college, yet students still have the same chance of getting a bulge bracket job.</p>
<p>Some employers recruit and interview at specific colleges. So a state college student may still get good opportunities, but probably not as much or better quality as a Wharton student.</p>
<p>That was not my exact point. Better, more competitve colleges have graduates who earn on average more. But, is this attributed to the quality of the school they go to, or the above average intelligence of the student body?
I was suggesting that the bigger impact is intelligence and not the quality of the school they attend. Because major does not even matter for many business-related jobs, it would indicate that knowledge is not so important. For example, in engineering or medicine knowledge of the subject is vital to the job. However, business related jobs take people who have majored in math, phyics, economics, business, ect…
This indicates that knowledge is not important for many jobs in the business sector. You must simply prove your intelligence. You can prove to be the smartest person in the world, but without substantial knowledge in medicine, you would be useless in that field. That is not the case for business.</p>