Context is everything. In order to appreciate the value added by poor and/or URM students, it’s necessary to fully understand the context in which they were formed. That’s the missing piece. Being poor, for example, very often means growing up in an unresourced war zone. I’d stand candidates who manage to come through that intact up against anyone.
This is a bit of an aside, but as someone who was in tech and is now in finance, I have a different explanation, which is that the hiring practices are very different due to scale.
Google needs to find thousands of new employees each year, and therefore they need to cast a wide net. Not only are the elite tech schools to small to fill their needs, but their top students have choices that pay more and/or have higher impact than a job at Google.
In contrast, each IB needs ~100 new students each year. They have no need to cast a wide net because they can fill their talent needs from the elite schools. But make no mistake. Getting a job at Goldman or JP Morgan is still highly competitive.
So the IBs need fewer employees, and can offer them more money. They get the cream of the crop, so testing is less necessary. Interesting.
From what I can tell, much of IB recruiting at the elites is a rigged game, where the objective is to get internships, beginning the summer of your sophomore year, and usually through connections, leading to a pre-wired permanent offer.
@DeepBlue86 , while there are undoubtedly connections involved in some cases, many students get IB positions without any connections. But you are right that early internships matter a great deal.
@damon30, the best CS students can get higher pay working at hedge funds, and more impact working at startups. They do not go to IBs for higher starting pay. The higher pay at IBs comes in later years.
It doesn’t take a lot of talent to be an IB analyst. They just do the grunt work. Turnover is huge after a year or two. An analyst probably has less than 25% chance to survive the first two years before getting burned out, losing interest, getting fired, etc. There’re plenty of new college graduates lining up to take their positions. IBs don’t need to be particularly careful in selecting their new recruits at that level.
Back on topic. For poor but highly talented applicants who aren’t hooked, the current system just doesn’t work for them, generally speaking. They don’t have the resources, both time and money, for creative and impressive ECs, They don’t have people helping them polish their essays. They don’t have consultants (or even their parents) to help them package their applications to demonstrate their “fit” to their target colleges. Their teachers/GCs are generally not resourced to write them glowing and differentiated recommendations… The list goes on. All they have are their academic records and their test scores.
FYI, my nephew reported the same thing about his first (and in his case also last) two years at Google. But turnover is certainly less in CS.
Their academic records may not be trusted if they are in schools with no or negative reputation among the admissions readers. Also, for the elite colleges, certain prep schools have privileged connections, and low SES students are underrepresented there (though the few that are there benefit from all of the above things that most low SES students have no access to).
Their test scores may not have been optimized by common test taking strategy that is well known in prep schools and high SES schools. A student who takes the SAT or ACT the first time in fall of senior year with no prep may not do as well as if the same student had done at least some test familiarization and taken them in junior year (to give a chance of a retake if desired). Low SES students are also less likely to know that some colleges want SAT subject tests.
Also, about half of children will see parental divorce. Many divorces are nasty and uncooperative. Since most elite colleges (except Chicago and Vanderbilt) want both parents’ finances for financial aid purposes, they are financially inaccessible to low SES students with uncooperative divorced parents.
Tech companies are hiring for a specific skill set. For example, a tech company might want to hire a new grad for a software engineering position that primarily involves programming in C++ and Java. They don’t just assume that anyone who is lists skills in C++ and Java on their resume is an expert. Nor to they give IQ like tests and assume anyone who is bright will figure out how to program in C++ and Java on the job.
Instead interviews at tech companies emphasize a variety of question related to job skills. For example, while interviewing at a well known tech company for my first job after college, one of my interviewers asked me to write the code for a traffic light in C++. In another I had to write code for something else (don’t recall about what) on a whiteboard while the team members looked over and had various questions/comments about the process. Interview questions can also be extremely brief in effort to check the the applicant has some degree of basic knowledge in an area outside of their major. For example, an interviewer might ask a software engineering applicant, “What is the difference between a latch and a register?” or “What is the integral of velocity with respect to time?.” I’ve had some tech company interviews in which the interviewer barely says hi before handing me a paper and asking me to solve problems.
This interviewer problem solving is far from the only way to evaluate job skills. It’s common for tech companies to require applicants have a specific major(s) for a related position. Resumes may further be filtered by looking for applicants who have relevant experience. For example, experience programming in C++ or Java in a work environment for a position that emphasizes programming in C++ or Java. Applicants may also have a code portfolio or examples and be able to talk about relevant past coding projects. Perhaps best of all is if a trusted employee at the company has worked with the applicant and can vouch for the applicant’s abilities and past job success, as often is the case with past internships at the company.
In contrast, it’s my understanding that IB doesn’t depend as much as skills learned in college or past experience in similar positions. Intro IB positions aren’t limited to just econ majors or just applicants who took a particular set of courses. Instead they are more looking for applicants who have general quantitative skills, motivation to work long hours for the team, good communication, etc. Some IB positions do ask about testing via SAT score, and that score can be important for hiring decisions. Interviews also ask questions – sometimes including technical ones, but less so than the tech company type interviews.
There have been some papers (particularly from Lauren Rivera) that emphasize IB hiring applicants with a similar high SES Ivy League type background to better fit with the team. Some of the quoted IBs in the Rivera papers mentioned things like emphasizing prestige in hiring because they wanted to avoid a risk of hiring someone with intellectual defects or “moral failings” such as “faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student”, or considering prestige as an indicator of “polish” including better “social skills and self-preservation abilities.” While some dispute these papers, it’s generally a different process from tech for a different position.