My D is a senior at Pomona and back when she was a HS senior and a college freshman it used to bother her that people she’d meet in “everyday life” had never heard of Pomona and had no idea how selective it is. She’s long past having that bother her, and she landed the post-graduation job she wanted by mid-October of senior year. She has plenty of classmates who have landed the jobs they wanted as well. The ones who are struggling are the ones who would presumably be struggling elsewhere. Students with serious depression/anxiety issues. Students who are struggling academically. Students without a focused career goal in mind. (These groups tend to overlap.)
The ones who have had the most success so far during senior year are the ones who figured out by junior year what jobs they were targeting and what skills and qualifications the recruiters would be looking for – as an economics major, that would include some combination of quantitative skills, coding, advanced math, finance or accounting depending on the desired career. Students who had their resumes and references/ letters or recommendation ready to go early in the Fall. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter where you go to school, but it does matter that you make use of the resources available.
PS @homerdog My niece and her husband are both Returned Peace Corps Volunteers living in the Chicago area. She works for a major pharmaceutical company and he works for a Big Four auditing/accounting firm.They met each other while both were working in Senegal!
Oh @corinthian. I hope you know I have nothing against the Peace Corp. I just don’t think it’s S19’s path. My best friend from college was a Peace Corp volunteer and met her husband while serving.
I totally agree with your comments about students preparing themselves for the work force. It’s certainly not all the responsibility of the college to find kids jobs!
@homerdog I wouldn’t recommend the Peace Corps for either of my kids either, even though I have great admiration for those who complete their assignments. My niece’s experience involved a wide range of challenges, hardships, injuries and illnesses but also tremendous personal growth and lasting friendships.
In the survey at https://www.chronicle.com/items/biz/pdf/Employers Survey.pdf , hundreds of employers were asked to rate the relative importance of different factors in evaluating resumes for hiring new grads. Among all the surveyed factors, college reputation was ranked least important by employers. Among specific industries, college reputation was ranked least important in all surveyed industries except education and media/communications. In general, employers focus on indications that you will be successful at the job, rather than indications of your college’s reputation.
However, this doesn’t mean college reputation doesn’t matter. There are specific sub-fields, where it can give you a good leg up, such as investment banking on Wall Street. Employers that don’t place much weight on reputation in evaluating resumes may still recruit at specific colleges, and attending one of the few those colleges in which they recruit may give you a leg up. However, the colleges at which specific employers recruit likely doesn’t follow well with the opinions of random people you talk with on the street. I’d suggest focusing on whether the college will help/hinder with your specific goals, rather than opinions of others. Some of the discussed colleges have good information about how the college assists with first job, which employers attend career fair events, success of grads in finding jobs, etc.
An example report for Amherst is at https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/LoebCenter_AnnualReport_2015-16.pdf . Among other things, they list the employer and job titles by major. For example, among Math majors, the most common job title was Analyst. The most common employers were Amherst College and Deloitte. A NESCAC college may be a good choice or a poor choice, depending no your goals.
It’s a mistake to think low name recognotion is a problem peculiar to small colleges. Most people in Illinois don’t know the difference between U of Chicago & Chicago State. Even people in Big 10 states can rarely tell you anything about Northwestern. Case Western, Carnegie Mellon, & Washington U in St. Louis will elicit blank stares coast to coast. Ask Penn grads how many Joe Paterno questions they have gotten in their lives, and CalTech grads how often get asked about San Loius Obisbo. So unless you go to Harvard, Yale, Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, or UCLA, get ready for a lifetime of confused looks.
And all the folks who confuse UPenn and Penn State. Or Cornell U vs Cornell College. And so on.
I think it can mislead high school kids to focus intently on what jobs where. If a kid is considering any Highly or Most Competitive college, first you need to get in. And that’s more, much more, than your post grad career intentions. Do all the link following you want. But miss the points the college wants to see and you won’t be deciding yeah or nay on those schools, come spring.
@lookingforward yes. One needs to get in first. In our case, I don’t think we can wait until March to have S19 put things a little in order in his head. It is putting the cart before the horse a bit but he’s got a heavy academic schedule and track in the spring so adding college decisions on top of that with just four or five weeks to spare will be very stressful. We learned this during fall when he tried to write essays during XC season. Luckily, he did write most of his essays over the summer but then it took three solid months for him to find time to be able to write the five left over essays. He won’t have brain space to start from scratch on his decision making between March 20 and May 1.
Good point. And there’s so little time left before deadlines. I just mean some on CC get so analytical, when these are high school kids, yet to experience the big buffet of classes. Career interests can change. For me, the bottom line was the quality of the career support services, both toward graduation and before (internship support or summer jobs,) resume writing and more. Not who lands what job title in what specific industry. Or the exact names of who recruited last year.
This OP posted this thread in the College Search and Selection forum, not the College Admissions forums. He asked about employment outcomes in regards to searching for and selection college, not college admissions. Yes, many students who apply are not accepted. However, you also need to decide where to apply to before you have a chance of being accepted, which more relates to the point of the thread.
The OP didn’t ask about quality of career support services. He asked about employer recognition of the college and related downsides in regards to employment. The list of employers who regularly recruit at the college and employment outcomes of recent graduates more directly relates to the question. Furthermore, estimating quality of career support services without considering actual outcomes of graduates or actual employers who recruit at the college is prone to misleading conclusions.
But the whole point of this thread is not if the people in NYC know Bowdoin and Colby and Bates, but whether those in Tulsa and San Diego and Minneapolis will. Some will and some won’t. If you want people to be impressed just because you went to one of those schools, you’ll have to stay in the northeast to get that instant recognition. I think people in the midwest and west and even the south aren’t impressed that you went to a small New England college, or even the Ivies or Stanford. Most will recognize UCLA or Georgia Tech or UConn but not Tufts or Emory or Pomona.
I do think that in the east just having gone to one of the ‘name’ schools carries a lot more weight than in other places. I worked with a guy who had gone to Yale undergrad and everyone knew it and another guy who had gone to MIT and Harvard law and hardly anyone knew. The first guy was from the east so it was important to him and he talked about it all the time, Yale this and Yale that, The Game, New Haven. The MIT/Harvard guy was from Wisconsin and it just wasn’t important to him to lead with MIT/Harvard information. I knew the town he was from (I’d lived there for 10 years too, so it was our connection) long before I knew where his degrees were earned.
Here’s the thing. Most people don’t know much of anything about schools outside their own tight sphere. With a few notable exemptions, particularly schools with strong engineering, people will tell you they know schools when all they can tell you is the state in which it’s located (because it’s in the name of the school) and the name of the football team. Ask someone if they know the University of Arizona…or Kansas…or Ohio…or Massachusetts and everyone will say yes. Ask them to tell you a single fact about the school aside from athletics and unless they’re from the state or a contiguous state you’ll mostly get blank stares.
@Sue22 are you trying to use yourself to prove your point? There is no University of Ohio. The Ohio State University and Ohio University, but not University of Ohio.
So true. ? I started with the U of Arizona then added random states for effect only half thinking.
I’d be willing to bet however that if you asked people outside the Midwest if the U. of Ohio is a good school you’d get a lot of opinions based on the premise that it exists. IOW, whether the man on the street has heard of your school is not a good measure of whether attending a school will leave you with good job prospects.
@twoinanddone: I guess I was more reacting to this part of the OP (though I didn’t quote it): “This just makes me wonder if educated people in New York don’t recognize them will employers around the country recognize them.”…which is why I cited having lived in NYC as well as my “educated” background.
I think the problem is not so much name recognition. A lot of people will get the warm feelies if you mention Bowdoin or Bates if they are generally disposed towards liberal arts colleges but will they know how selective they are compared to Pomona (Powhat?? I guarantee you the majority of people who went to small selective liberal arts colleges will trip on Pomona being a selective school) or Kalamazoo or St. John’s or Oberlin? I don’t think most people keep that kind of stuff in their head.
If someone were to come to me with a four-year degree from a “small private college in Maine”, the first question I’d ask myself would be, “How did he afford it?” and my answer would probably be along the lines of “He’s either very rich or very smart. Or, possibly both.”
Lol, for schools I barely know, “I heard kids are happy there” does the trick. I wouldn’t assume anything. This was driven home in the old arguments about Truman State. I then met a number of grads who impressed.
But seriously, look at the Nescacs list and then compare it to college standing.
