I can see this happening, particularly in some parts of quant. It should not/will not happen in Tech, because they figured out how to do high volume initial screening. Even in quant, many firms have figured out high volume initial screening, but some firms have a manually intensive process. Basically, the issue is that if they feel the rigor of your foundational math course work (vs someone at MIT, for example) is insufficient, as it might be if you went to a CC, then there may be some discomfort in going through the process with you.
On the flip side, these firms are known to have hired people that chose not to finish their degree. So it is really a skills based hiring.
I am not saying employers who might be trying to hire in part for SES are doing a good job of it. I just wonder if it is happening some places — where two candidates have what appear to be the same skills, the hiring preference is for the one whose resume best signals well-connectedness, perhaps? (That doesn’t mean the employer reads the signals correctly, but that they use their guesses as a tie-breaker.)
Many eons ago, when I worked at a law firm, I know GPA only mattered about if you went to a “lesser” law school — not if you went to Harvard. And I don’t think it was because there was a belief that a poor Harvard student knew the law as well as a top student from a different school. I think there was a hope that the Harvard student knew more wealthy potential clients.
I do not know if that kind of thing still happens.
Does it happen at a small firm in (fill in the blanks, not picking on any state in particular) which is still asking candidates “What church does your family attend?”. I’m sure it does. Does it happen at companies which refuse to cover contraception for employees and are still asking female employees “do you plan to have children?” I"m sure it does.
Change is slow at small companies which don’t face the huge exposure (reputationally, legally, regulatory) that large corporations face. But big companies are now spending millions of dollars per year on EDI training (not just for hiring- up and down the talent pipeline) to make sure that there are some checks on personal bias.
And hiring for SES status is particularly tough in the US unless you are using the Gilded Age definition of the 400 families.
This part is well established in several sectors. And this part is entirely reasonable:
It is this part where the train goes off the track:
Mixing grads of “low ranking” unis (eg not inside the T25-T50 cutoff noted earlier) with students who started at community college and then finished at a T25-T50 is a false equivalency. It might not be fair to the star student at the ‘low ranking’ uni, but the OP’s point is that they have to draw the line somewhere, and as another poster put it ‘fishing where the fish are’ makes sense.
On the other hand, to then argue that a student who did 2 years at Duchess County Community College before transferring to Cornell and graduating with a 3.8 GPA in Math (or whatever) from Cornell, is inherently so much less likely to be a good recruit (esp in the key areas noted of ‘strong mathematical background and critical thinking’) than a student who did all 4 years at Cornell that they should be eliminated a priori is not logically defensible.
I call B.S. on that claim. I’ve never heard of that before. I’ve never seen such a question on an application, and I’ve never had an employer ask me that question. I started out at community college. I’ve interviewed at Google, Amazon, and many fortune 500 companies. I’ve worked at several of them. In fact, the opposite has been true. When I bring up community college in interviews, employers actually become intrigued. People who go to CC are mostly doing it on their own dime. It actually shows motivation and maturity.
Unless an HR person has been hiding under a rock (or working for a company whose board and CEO are willfully ignorant) it is hard to claim “not aware of it”.
While I would hope that the example in this thread is isolated, I would be very surprised it if was, at least on a subjective level. Looking at posts on CollegeConfidential, there is a lot of subjective “elitism” regarding the role community colleges play in our educational system.
While most acknowledge the important role CCs play for a certain segment of society, many do not seem willing to accept that a student who takes the CC route to an “elite” institution could possibly be as intelligent or as well trained as a student who was admitted directly. I’ve recently seen posts comparing STEM prep at Community College to the equivalent of middle school math, and posts suggesting that while kids attending CC might be successful in some less rigorous majors, they couldn’t compete with kids pursuing highly quantitative majors at top schools. It seems that some believe that potential for success in some fields is locked in by success in high school, on standardized tests, and in the admissions game, and those who don’t clear these hurdles at the end of high school are inherently inferior.
In short, it’s hard for some who have invested so much in the traditional path (excelling in high school, acing standardized tests, directly entering top universities, etc.) to realize that other paths may lead to the same place. So it doesn’t surprise me that this attitude might sometimes filter up to hiring practices.
Except that hiring practices are under scrutiny like never before. 20 years ago a CEO could sit at a board meeting and say with a straight face “If we have a diversity problem, it’s because of the pipeline”. Not any more. 20 years ago there was no Facebook or Twitter or Glassdoor to call out a company on the fact that while there might be gender balance, all the high paying jobs are held by men, and all the low paying jobs are held by women. 20 years ago you didn’t have employees ready to go out on a limb (and risk their jobs) by describing demeaning (or illegal) behavior on the company’s Slack channel or at an All Hands meeting.
Does the behavior described (btw, by exactly one poster, and disputed by everyone else?) happen ever, somewhere, in the US? Probably. Is it a “systematic” problem where it’s being practiced by dozens of Fortune 500 companies right under our noses? I’m voting no. I’ve never heard of it being a problem- and I hang out on SHRM forums, go to events and recruiting roundtables, have a dozen colleagues from other industries where we share knowledge, etc. and boy, this is a crowd that likes to send up a red flag when there’s a problem!
I’ll take your word for it that such hiring practices aren’t prevalent or codified policy. More generally, though, while it is terrific that there is more scrutiny than there used to be, I don’t have great faith that hiring has been cleansed of “elitist” hiring practices, especially when 1) the bias may be implicit; and 2) there may be nothing necessarily illegal about the practices. (Maybe you can set me straight, but I’m not sure that favoring four year attendees of X college over CC transfers to X college would be illegal.)
If anyone has any comprehensive data beyond anecdote regarding the favoring or disfavoring CC transfers in the tech industry, it would be interesting to read. Maybe a good project for a future social scientist, if those still exist.
As a hiring manager in FAANG for last one decade plus, in Tech we never cared about where this candidate went to college , in fact I had superstar Developers and Technical Program managers just with high school education. They are street smarts , they will get the things done. All we care is, whether this person can do this job and good fit for the team. So Tech employers don’t reject just because you went to CC.
I run (and have developed and attended) umpteen training courses on implicit bias- not just in hiring, but in giving feedback (Black women get less feedback, and less USEFUL feedback, i.e. “that presentation didn’t go very well, let’s break it down so we can prevent it from happening again” then White Men), advancement, on-boarding, etc.
Has it been eliminated? No. But what the poster alluded to- systemic bias AGAINST CC to U grads-- is the kind of thing that’s low on the food chain and easy to identify when it happens. And it doesn’t take much at an individual company level for change to happen. I worked for a CEO who was a Santa Clara grad and he was shocked to discover we didn’t recruit at Santa Clara. (Stanford yes, Santa Clara no). So it went on the schedule, and guess what- those new hires were terrific. CEO left after a few years, Santa Clara is still on the company’s schedule! Similar story with Stonehill (it was the CFO, not the CEO).
I realize these are the anecdotes you DON’T want, but if there is data out there on this alleged problem I’d love to see it.
@pmuthusamy, while I don’t doubt your personal experience, I also don’t think that you could possibly speak for everyone who hires those graduating (or not graduating) in quantitative/tech fields. Or at least your opinion is not the only opinion . . . Around 65% of tech recruiters say there’s bias in the hiring process | Computer Weekly. And the hiring bias sometimes even finds its way into the AI which is supposed to eliminate bias. Understanding Bias In AI-Enabled Hiring. And FAANG companies are scrambling to address problems with problems created by bias in the workplace and by past hiring practices. In short, I just don’t buy that there are no bias issues in tech hiring or culture.
@blossom, Not sure what you are looking for here? I’ve said I’ll take your word for it that such hiring practices aren’t prevalent or codified policy. You’ve acknowledged bias in tech hiring hasn’t been eliminated. We’ve both agreed that it would interesting to see data on this particular issue, if it exists. Without such data, I suspect we’ll get no closer to agreement than that.
I think discriminatory hiring still happens, but that it isn’t as open as it once was and probably isn’t corporate policy, more of an individual hiring boss’ practice. The boss who told me he’d never have hired me, or probably interviewed me, if I’d gone to a different law school was more than 30 years ago, and he was a 65 year old guy at the time. The HR department would have processed my applications as normal and put it on his desk to pick who he wanted to interview even if I’d gone to that ‘lesser’ school. The thing that was funny was that he’d gone to a for profit law school, in Louisiana, that had gone out of business many years earlier so it wasn’t like he was an Ivy leaguer only looking to hire other Ivy leaguers. He was just a snob.
I can’t imagine a program would be eliminating all the resumes with a community college listed, or a state directional or HBCU or religious college. Will the individual doing the hiring choose that candidate? I’m sure there is still discrimination going on when a woman or black or 61 year old candidate walks in for the interview.
I have also wondered about how employers would even know that someone started at community college. This got me looking at my resume (which I had not looked at for a few years). I found that my education was just listed as:
M.Sc. (subject), university, year.
B.Sc. (subject), university, year.
That was it. There was no GPA. No “starting year and finishing year”, No courses, nothing other than the date and the major and the university which granted a degree. No one would know whether I was a transfer student.
I agree with the post immediately above that this may vary according to the hiring manager. Of course a hiring manager can be attracted to a particular resume or reject a particular resume for almost any reason.
I do not know whether this might vary according to the industry that someone is in.
I’m almost positive DH and I got our first jobs at the same company because in his resume he listed sailing as an interest and the department manager loved to sail.
In the part of engineering I am familiar with, I don’t recall attending CC as ever being a detriment. In fact, one could draw a parallel between a person that attends CC first to a person that initially enters the workforce and goes back later for their engineering degree. The nontraditional students often have valuable hands-on skills (technician) that can actually make their resume more attractive than a traditional student’s.
Its sad that a job applicant would be rejected because they started at a CC. Maybe they HAD to go there for financial reasons. Any employer who doesn’t think of that, is not an employer I’d like to work for.