<p>If a company has metrics that don’t reflect on the job performance (say the hiring manager graduated from Minnesota State University and therefore gives preferences to MSU graduates), they will be hurting themselves because the rationale for giving preference to MSU graduates is not based on performance data at work.</p>
<p>I’m not saying they need to treat every school the same. But if a company wants to give preference to some schools and not others, it is in their best interest to do so in a manner based on solid rationale and reasonsing.</p>
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<p>That is a very good reason to ignore resumes from certain schools.</p>
<p>However, I’m not really directing this at a small company. I’m really intending this to a company that has more than 1000 employees.</p>
<p>Try having 50 hiring managers sit in a room and determine which schools they want to hire from and which schools they don’t want to hire from. It would be very difficult. If the hiring manager had to say why, it probably would be based on anticedol experience from previous (and recent) employees.</p>
<p>Convenience in hiring / staffing is as good of a reason as any. If I am a Minnesota-based company and pleased with the quality of MSU graduates, I get, there really is no real reason for me to try to establish a relationship with (say) Caltech, when I’ve got to pay for my people to fly out there and back, which adds up, and when I’ve got to convince potential recruits to move to Minnesota – another expense / hassle I don’t have when I recruit in the same general area. I don’t “need” to treat Caltech “fairly.” I can ignore them or not as I see fit for my college recruiting. (Not picking on Caltech, just using them as an example here.) Employers need to narrow down the schools they recruit at, and if they are happy with the results it really doesn’t matter which 4 or so they pick. They are under no obligation to go higher or lower on the food chain.</p>
I thought we were talking about brainpower, not job performance.
Being smart and performing well on the job are not always 100% correlated. But to deny that you need to be brainy to graduate from a school like Caltech is absurd. Maybe the rare dullard sneaks though, but very unlikely.</p>
<p>As a former high-tech hiring manager and interviewer in Silicon Valley, my experience is that the school makes almost no difference; it’s 99%+ what the candidate brings in experience, and if we think we’d like to work with the person. For entry level, locale is important; we hire those we liked as interns, and the interns come from local schools (we don’t need to pay a bundle in relocation costs). Yes, local schools are good, but isn’t that true in most major hiring areas? Never mind that we’re not doing much hiring right now. :(</p>
<p>Ah, but you’re talking just recruiting at. There’s nothing wrong with picking schools that you recruit at.</p>
<p>But if a company in Minnesota has a highly qualified individual with a Caltech degree apply, one who is willing to relocate himself and is willing to work at the salary that you offer, do you give him an offer? Or do you decline because he graduated from the wrong school?</p>
<p>That’s the point. If you decline because of the school, it’s best to do so with good reason and good data to back the reason up.</p>
<p>All I am talking about is how college students are viewed by employers, which would relate directly to on the job performance, as brainy lazy employees aren’t worth very much.</p>
<p>We were talking about fresh-out-of-college recruiting, not several-years-int-the-workforce.<br>
Anyway, in your scenario - it depends. Maybe you do a phone interview or fly the kid out. Or maybe you say - eh, I’m just going to stick with my preferred schools for right now to fill my entry level positions. Why does there need to be a “philosophy” behind it?</p>
<p>But “good data” isn’t “because he went to a school where the average SAT’s are only xxxx.” A company can choose to turn down the Caltech-grad applicant because they’re happy with their existing pool. That’s all the reason they need.</p>
<p>Flip it around - the company that hires from Caltech doesn’t need a “reason” to turn down the MSU-applicant other than “we’re fine with who we get from Caltech, thank you anyway and have a nice day.” They don’t need to give as a “reason” that MSU’s average SAT’s or selectivity is such-and-such compared to Caltech.</p>
Then I agree with you 100%.<br>
When hiring, I look for people with the specific skills for the job, people who seem enthusiastic and easy to work with, people we can afford, people I think will stick around, etc.</p>
<p>I could interview 50 people, and not hire the 10 “smartest” for many reasons. They could come off as arrogant or difficult to work with, they could come off as know-it-alls, they might have a poor work history, they might have excessive demands, they might seem like job-hoppers. I did actually sit on a hiring panel recently where two fresh grads came in from Caltech. They didn’t make the first cut. </p>
<p>But I would never deny that they were extremely intelligent, and I could pretty much tell that from the interview.</p>
<p>No. Good data is “we have tracked 500 employees who graduated from Minnesota State University and 500 from Caltech and find the performance evaluations of MSU graduates are on average .5 points higher than Caltech graduates.” </p>
<p>Companies technically don’t need reasons to do anything. However, if a company sells product A and decides to start selling product B, they really aught to have a good reason to start selling product B, otherwise the company will have a hard time surviving.</p>
<p>Same goes with choosing employees. Employers would do well to hire people not based on whim but based on expected future job performance. If they have data that indicates someone from college A will be a good performer, great. But in the absense of data, they should look to other reasons for estimate future job performance (experience for example) rather than based on the UNSWR ranking of the college they graduated from.</p>
<p>bigtree,
Hard to communicate effectively on this topic as so much can be lost in an internet post. Put us in a room together and my guess is we’d agree on 90% of this stuff. Obviously different size orgs in different industries will approach colleges differently and come out of it with different impressions and probably somewhat different conclusions. Thus it is impossible to get a ranking of The Truth about colleges and their relative attractiveness. But I think that there would be some areas of broad agreement.</p>
<p>First, the student is what matters. Not the school and certainly not the PA score.</p>
<p>Second, like the rest of us, students are shaped by their experiences, including at college. Colleges deliver different experiences (although their learning environments are IMO far too intellectually homogenous) and this influences what the student is aware of, is interested in, maybe even values. </p>
<p>Third, some places do just flat out have smarter students. For example, there is a difference between what you’ll come across when you go to Duke and what you find at Wake Forest. The Duke kids just have a higher intellectual wattage….and sometimes a higher sense of entitlement. One can probably cite similar examples in probably every region of the USA. As an employer, you have to decide what’s important to you (sort of like what blue is saying upthread about HYP resumes). </p>
<p>Fourth, preparedness can be very appealing. When you do find that student who has had a decent amount of mentoring from a prof and some hands-on experience, it’s apparent. Often they display a much quicker grasp of what’s important and what’s not and can apply it in multiple ways. In my experience, some schools are definitely better at this than others. </p>
<p>Fifth, personal characteristics & personal history matter. Maybe I’m a sucker for the underdog, but I always enjoy talking to the bright student who came from a modest background or overcame some adversity to achieve in an impressive fashion. I compare them to the Princetonian who went to St. Paul’s and thinks that he hung the sun and the moon. There are just so many important differences…but still I recognize that both sets of kids often will work just fine with different types of employers. </p>
<p>Sixth, what the student does outside of the classroom is frequently more important than what goes on inside the classroom. I call this the passion identifier. The kids all have to go to class-what they do on their time is a much better indicator to me of who they are and what they’re really interested in and frequently this is a MUCH better indicator of potential success than a high GPA.</p>
<p>Nice post, hawkette. To the Duke / WF example - I agree about the Duke sense of arrogance / entitlement, and that might be relevant for a company that values take-no-prisoners salespeople for whom a bit of arrogance and beat-the-other-guy is a good thing – and that might be completely irrelevant and a turn-off for a “gentler” but no less successful company where the mantra is collaboration, not competitiveness.</p>
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<p>No one employer could ever get to that point, however. And how can you pool employers when different employers are looking for different things? And even so, performance evaluations come from immediate managers, not “the company” as a whole.</p>
<p>We confuse a lot of things when talking about college degrees.</p>
<ol>
<li>Some kids with x name are really smart, motivated, etc. They succeed. We then assume the degree matters a lot when it was actually the kid. Plenty of Yale grads fail or don’t succeed to a very high degree - and many choose not to compete, which is true for all schools. So if we’re talking “effect,” then it would occur up front and then would wear off. </li>
<li>We look at the effects of grad school and impute those backwards. Supreme Court justices come from a few law schools and then from a few undergrad schools. That’s a very small sample. One can’t impute the other direction has much value - meaning x kid from undergrad at same school. So we look at a relative handful of achievers and think this is more common than it is. </li>
<li>We confuse the effects of graduate schools in academics with the rest of reality. Grad school matters for academic hiring. It helps getting into graduate school if you score well. You tend to score well if you get into a “prestige” school but you can score well if you go somewhere else. A few studies show that your grad school affects your income for 10 years because academic jobs are relatively few and don’t turn over that fast. But again, we impute an effect from undergrad to grad that is actually attributable to the inherent attributes of the students who take the tests that we value for admission. You can get in from almost anywhere but you need to score well, etc. </li>
</ol>
<p>But these factors matter little when comparing the relative prestige that is actually the issue in rankings. And which any person who reads these forums sees all the time. If you take apart the data sources - to the extent publicly available - the idea that schools can be ranked in meaningful order rather than grouped generally is statistical garbage. The idea that school #45 is meaningfully worse than school #37 or better than school #62 is junk. And yet people attribute value, as though my t-shirt is better because it’s Armani while yours is Calvin Klein. </p>
<p>Individual programs differ and each school has strengths but the concept of relative prestige is horribly over-valued. People actually take on lots of debt to go to school #26 rather than school #34. That’s financially stupid. </p>
<p>To be blunt, many of the prestige posts here - and specifically in forums like Yale - make me cringe. I wonder how people with the ability to get into such schools can think so shoddily. Gee, isn’t Yale’s english department more prestigious than Princeton’s? OMG. OMG. OMG. Which is better for getting into a top medical school, Yale or Dartmouth or Princeton? OMG. OMG. OMG. Makes me question the ability of the admissions officers at these schools.</p>
<p>The point that I was making about the companies is that:</p>
<p>1) Yes, universities should produce employees that are skilled in the workforce</p>
<p>2) Few or no companies have actual data that indicate students from one university outperform another. Most make decisions based on whim, or where the last five employees came from, or where the guy who just got fired graduated from.</p>
<p>I worked for a large international manufacturer of soft drinks for many years. The company used to hire people for its sales training classes based on interviews, but too many of them washed out. So, the company changed to as “assessment center” approach, bringing screened candidates in and then haviong them read case studies and make presentations (to retailers and bottlers) in role-playing situations. The participants were graded on seven characteristics, e.g. decision making, decisiveness, analytical skills, I forget the rest. Tracking the employees hired through this method showed that they were much more successful employees. In this case, the college attended might have helped a candidate get into the assessment center but after that it all came down to performance in the role playing. It was a great way of weeding out glib bsers who interviewed well but were clueless otherwise.</p>
<p>KY,
Nice anecdote and an intelligent way to upgrade the interviewing. Taking information and then thinking critically about it and applying or acting on it is an underappreciated skill, but absolutely vital for success in many businesses.</p>
<p>I guess there is a reason to live on the Coke side of life….:)</p>