My neighbor works in CS and does some hiring for his company. He said they only care about two things: Do you have the skills they need and can you get along well with everyone else already employed there? He does not care at all where you got your skills.
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I have never heard of that happening. Ever.
My husband also works in CS for a top company. He says the exact same thing! They look for whether the applicant has the necessary skills and whether they will add to/fit in with the team.
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That is a nonsense. If the ultimate degree is from University X, all upper-level coursework has been done at the level of University X.
And you provide evidence of just how much of a nonsense it is:
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there are vanishingly few MIT grads with perfect GPAs. People can name them. Odds that your friends are fielding many of them are absurdly small More importantly:
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If your friends are rejecting plenty of applicants from MIT / Cal grads b/c they don’t have a strong enough mathematical background & critical thinking, then clearly the college isn’t the important metric.
Setting your evaluation algorithms to root out any applicants from an ‘acceptable’ university who spent the first 2 years at a CC is eltism.
The student who can get themselves from CC to a top-tier university, and then finish strong at that university is likely to not only be smart enough, but have the kind of drive and persistence to be a particularly good employee.
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They are both absolutely correct and in the end that is the only thing that we care about too. If you find us someone with the necessary skills and the fit to the team, we will hire them regardless of the college / CC listed on their resume. The challenge for us is finding such people with limited resources, which is why you have to narrow down the field early by quick hacks like this, which may or may not be the best way to do so.
Also, note that I am talking about fresh graduates where you have little information to down select candidates for further steps (interviews etc.). If someone has industry experience, the equation changes significantly as some other company has already done the work for us in evaluating the candidate.
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You have the right to say that the process is elitist. In some cases, the motivation is also elitist, for example, the companies that brag that they only hire from such and such schools. I would humbly argue that there are cases when the motivation is not elitist (as I listed above) though the end result is the same.
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By perfect GPA, I did not mean 4.0, but I can see why it would be construed as such on a college admission board. I apologize for my imperfect language (no pun intended). The only reason I mentioned that anecdote was to highlight the selective process and the possibility that I am in a bubble that may not be representative of the broader industry.
I would disagree here. These anecdotes do not show that college isnt the important metric. They merely show that college and GPA are not the only metrics .
Side note: I am more of a reader / lurker. This is my first time getting into an extended back and forth on an internet forum and it is mentally exhausting.
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I have been in corporate recruiting for over 30 years, attend panels and symposia with colleagues across a wide range of industries and sectors, participate in “Best Practice” events, etc. with some of the most “elitist” employers on the planet- and have never, ever, ever heard of this as a “thing”. And I’ve worked for companies where starting at a CC and ending up at a university (with a solid GPA, rigorous transcript, and all the other “stuff” including the ability to think analytically) would most definitely be a “thumb on the scale”.
There are lots of reasons why a talented kid starts at a CC. In my own family, I’ve seen “Mom just diagnosed with cancer, need to be close to help with the younger sibs during chemo weeks”, “need to stretch the college budget” and “I have no clue what I want to study so I’m going to get some of the basics out of the way at CC before I get distracted by the gazillion courses offered at a four year university”. All legitimate. And I’ve never worked for- or heard from a colleague- that this is a problem in any way.
Multiple pathways.
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Not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I have never heard of such a screen, and I havebeen involvedwithhiring for decades. And I know, based on my colleagues, that it doesn’t keep people out of our company.
Personally, I would be interested in talking to someone like this. It shows a certain grit.
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Sadly, I believe this is probably true. A friend of my son recently accepted an offer at a well known quant finance firm. Student goes to U Chicago and is studying pure math + CS. Apparently he switched majors to pure math to make sure it didn’t look too “easy” to the quant firms.
So even at prestigious places like UChicago there appears to be a pecking order. So I’m not surprised they would weed out students who start at CC. Is it fair? No, but with so many people vying for a limited number of jobs, its the employer who can call the shots. As long as they don’t discriminate based on a protected class, I believe they can get away with this. Not a lawyer, so don’t quote me on that.
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So far, we’ve only got one poster saying that their company hires this way, and many others saying that they don’t. I wondering if this is just a single company issue, or maybe a single type of employer. Further from what the poster described (limited resources) it seems to be a relatively small company so probably not one that very many graduates would even encounter. This doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem. I think that given the responses here, this is not something that someone deciding on whether to do community college or not really needs to worry about.
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My husband has done hiring and certainly looks at where a kid has graduated from. As far as I am aware, people just list the college the degree came from. Otherwise, why list all the schools one might have transfer from? If someone asked to see transcripts, which my husband has never done, they can see the schools then.
I’m guessing like 95% of bosses, my husband cares most about experience. Yes, he expects a degree, but if someone started at CC he’s not going to care about that. And fwiw, he actually is put off by kids who list their frat or sorority on their resumes, unless they provide more context for why that matters.
FWIW, I attended CC and transferred. I am certain it has never mattered to anyone in my various careers.
The underlying theme in this post is snobbery and along with the other post started about CC’s providing enough rigor, I’m wondering what’s inspiring these questions. Is there more interest in CC at the moment because kids are getting shut out at admissions and that might be their only option?
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If this really is a practice anywhere, I wonder if it is a disguised means of hiring for a certain socioeconomic class.
Some employers care not just about skills, but also long-term ability to bring in clients. Someone who is full-pay at an elite school could be presumed to come from a more well-connected family than someone who is not. It may not be said explicitly, but I do think some employers might be interested in whom a candidates daddy and mummy knows.
This thread grew out of another thread by a student choosing between Purdue (expensive) and starting at community college with a goal of transferring to Virginia (in-state).
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I do not believe this to be true, and I’ve hired for Private Wealth Management, High Net Worth/Family Office type professionals.
1962? Absolutely. 2022? No.
A recruiting professional who is hiring based on soc/ec status vs. brains, competencies, analytical and problem-solving skills, communication skills, etc. will have a very short-lived career making hiring decisions.
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I do not believe this is true at least for the firms I have worked with. Cannot believe any tech firm would hire based on socioeconomic status and parent’s connections unless they are hiring a lobbyist.
This is what I was thinking when I read the title. Snobbery. On objective merit (grit, overcoming obstacles and all that) I’d be inclined to think the CC transfer ought to be the better candidate than the OG university candidate, all things being equal. But there is class signaling that happens when the whole educational path is on the resume, and for some (individual human) employers, the subjective component will work in favor (want the more grounded applicant) and for others they want someone “more like them”.
Yet there’s another angle as well, not as grounded in class snobbery but a different “chip on shoulder”. The (individual human) employer might resent folks perceived as having taken the easy way in high school (making assumptions about why applicant “ended up” at CC), and then make additional assumptions based on their own life (these kind of high school non-nerds bullied me, or they were having fun when I was studying as a teenager so why should they be rewarded, etc.) it would be terrible policy for an employer to have, but human individuals making employment decisions are still subject to psychology and unresolved resentment.
And finally there’s the folks who want to keep snob factor alive for the sake of their own children (if I’m giving opportunity more widely than the past, then the historic advantages I can give my kid (due to race, money, legacy, connections, etc.) are less valuable.
@blossom, do you think it is possible anyone is trying to hire for BOTH (skills AND SES)?
I find it VERY hard to believe that a company would not hire based on CC, esp in this environment where so many soft factors are used in the hiring process.
The problem is that folks are often wrong about SES. The kid who grew up in Greenwich CT is the son of a groundskeeper and a live-in housekeeper (small apartment over the garage of a palatial home). I’ve met folks like this. Socio-economic status is what exactly?
Kid with an impressive last name (there are a LOT of Rockefeller’s around who are in no way shape or form related to the family) whose mom is a social worker and dad teaches middle school, kid went from magnet schools to “fancy college” thanks to ability and grit and financial aid.
Unless interviewers are asking “did you summer in Nantucket or the Vineyard” (that question would get you fired at my company) how are you exactly ascertaining parental lineage?