<p>I am majoring in finance and journalism. </p>
<p>Would it be better to go to a college in Queen, NYC at rank 150 ish or a school in a small town around 55 ish on the US News and Weekly report.</p>
<p>dont choose schools based on there ranking, go where youll be happy and excel</p>
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<p>There is no straightforward answer to this question. It depends on what advantages you’d get from being in NYC, and whether the rankings reflect quality differences that matter to you. </p>
<p>Are you assuming that, for careers in finance or journalism, a NYC college would give you more opportunities than a small town college (all other things being equal)? If so, what is your evidence for that? The quality of career counseling services has little if anything to do with a school’s location. Internship opportunities may be much better for students at some urban schools. However, if you are interested in them, have you investigated whether students at this particular urban school actually are getting the kinds of internships you want? The small town school might have good connections of its own. Investigate.</p>
<p>I saw on this article (I tried looking for it, but can’t find it, darn) whose author said that his friend, who is an employer of a company, DOES differentiate among prestigious, competitive schools and less prestigious and less competitive schools. The author said that the employer considers a 3.3 GPA from any undergraduate from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, and a couple others. If the job applicant is not on that list of competitive, prestigious colleges, the applicant needs a 3.9 GPA to be even considered. Basically employers are cutting some slack for those who had it tough, due to competition, in their undergrad.</p>
<p>Sorry for not finding the article!</p>
<p>Most extreme case: some of the employers only consider graduates from HYPS+Wharton.</p>
<p>Memo To Brown, Cornell And MIT Grads: You’re Not Good Enough
[Memo</a> To Brown, Cornell And MIT Grads: You’re Not Good Enough](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Memo To Brown, Cornell And MIT Grads: You're Not Good Enough | HuffPost College)</p>
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Just curious, who are some of these top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks?</p>
<p>Let’s put it this way: If you stand out in a crowd at a prestigious, competitive school, you will likely meet your career goals.</p>
<p>The author said that the employer considers a 3.3 GPA from any undergraduate from the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, and a couple others. If the job applicant is not on that list of competitive, prestigious colleges, the applicant needs a 3.9 GPA to be even considered. Basically employers are cutting some slack for those who had it tough, due to competition, in their undergrad.</p>
<p>One author from one unsubstantiated article, in an unnamed field from an unnamed company.</p>
<p>Most extreme case: some of the employers only consider graduates from HYPS+Wharton.</p>
<p>This may be true for a tiny handful of firms that can afford to do so, but the vast majority of employers will not have this view. It’s ridiculous to think that a top engineer from MIT or Caltech won’t be able to find a job.</p>
<p>To answer the OP’s question, that answer is pretty much impossible to answer because rankings are not the most important thing. Finance tends to be a more pedigree-conscious field, but it depends on what you mean by finance. Do you want to work on Wall Street, or will some well-respected but not top finance firms be fine, or do you want to be the in-house person at a more local bank or financial institution? It also depends largely on what you do; if you go to the prestigious school but don’t do any internships, that may be worse than going to a lower-ranked school but scoring a great internship in your field.</p>
<p>It is undeniable that any elite jobs are only available to grads of top colleges.</p>
<p>Here is a review of Rivera’s “Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion: Elite Employers’ Use of Educational Credentials”. The actual paper is behind pay walls.</p>
<p>[How</a> Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty](<a href=“http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/how_elite_firms.html]How”>How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story - Econlib)</p>
<p>Remember that this is for elite investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, so it may not necessarily apply to other types of employment.</p>
<p>Perhaps noteworthy is that, even within the firms, resume reviewers’ importance of school prestige tends to be based on whether the reviewer attended a high prestige school.</p>
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<p>Dunno about journalism, but finance is one of those industries that is prestige-driven. The higher the better.</p>
<p>Employers don’t care about the USNWR or other ratings. If anything, it is the recruiters’ behavior patterns that can influence an institution’s rankings. What does matter to employers is is their own experience with graduates of a given program. That is what gets them to return again and again to recruit, and consequently gives rise to the notion that X is better than Y for a career in Z.</p>
<p>It is perfectly OK to pick up the phone and call the Career Center at the college/university you are interested in and ask about recruitment for a specific major and/or by specific employers. You may find that X really is more likely to get you the job you want in career field Z.</p>
<p>Rivera’s paper (linked in post #10) is pretty interesting. And pretty shocking, really. It’s based on interviews with an extremely narrow band of employers—big investment banks, blue chip law firms, elite management consulting firms, seemingly all New York-based, but I’m not absolutely certain of that. In that rarefied world, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Duke are apparently perceived as “second-tier” institutions. More alarming, though, is the class bias that comes through in these employers’ hiring patterns, and in how they described what they were looking for. Not only were these employers looking for graduates of HYP-Wharton (Penn Arts & Sciences need not apply), but the employers were looking for candidates with the right “polish” and “well-roundedness” (= indicia of high socio-economic status) and the “right” extracurriculars (e.g., crew, lacrosse, other prep school sports played predominantly by kids from high SES backgrounds). In short, according to the study, they’re essentially looking to perpetuate the elite old-boy network that launched their own careers. Diversity was far down their list of employment criteria–as were grades, the thought apparently being that if you’re smart enough to get into Harvard, you’re smart enough to be one of us, and we, of course, are smarter than anyone else on the planet . . . even if you did pull a B- average in college. </p>
<p>Had to work to help pay for college, leaving not enough time for crew? You have our sympathy, but you don’t get the job.</p>
<p>Shockingly ignorant and offensive attitudes on many fronts, in my opinion, if what’s reported here is an accurate reflection. It should be emphasized, however, that this is one study of a very narrow band of employers by one researcher, and it’s a “study” with a lot of interpretive spin. </p>
<p>However accurate Rivera’s portrayal of the employers she interviewed, I should think the rest of corporate America, which doesn’t have the luxury of filling its ranks entirely or almost entirely with graduates of HYP-Wharton, would take a different, and broader, view.</p>
<p>How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty</p>
<p>Wow! So much for merit. The attitude is amazing. I guess those schools don’t do much to broaden people’s experiences after all.</p>
<p>An undergrad BSchool graduate from say Indiana with a resume of increasingly impressive internships/summer jobs/special projects is far more likely to get hired than a Wharton undergrad who expects me to thank him for letting me bask in the glow of his wonder.</p>
<p>In my experience the vast majority of the finance world inbreeding described above is directed toward graduate school hires. The undergrads are frankly one big blob of rabble.</p>
<p>Go to the cheaper undergrad school where you’ll do the best, Get a job for 3-5 years where you actually accomplish something. Apply and get into one of the stop graduate schools where you will learn all the same stuff. Do well. Network. Cash checks.</p>
<p>Why do so many people go to elite schools ? Employers notice these schools on a resume and know the student is top notch . It helps get them an interview ,but students from other schools get interviews .They may just have to work harder to get them .</p>
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<p>I’m not shocked at the unfairness of it all. They’re private firms; they can hire whomever they like (within the bounds of the law and any EEO standards they care to observe).</p>
<p>What I’d find shocking is a limited range of competence and perspective at such powerful, influential firms. (I’m also a little shocked at the apparent low regard some people in those firms have for their own expensive educations. “Too abstract”? “Useless”? Sounds like the whole experience may have been wasted on some people.)</p>
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<p>Oh, I’m not really shocked at the unfairness. Just at how entrenched are these ante-deluvian attitudes. This is just so 1950s; fire up the old-boy network and keep it going, we don’t really care about competence and merit, we’ll let the Harvard admissions office make those decisions, then we’ll just weed out the Harvard guys by social and cultural characteristics to ensure that we’re only getting people just like us, i.e., white, affluent, prep school backgrounds. Makes me want to vomit. Can they do this? Sure, they can hire whoever they want, for whatever stupid reasons they want. But it makes it much, much clearer why I’d never want to trust my money to these people. They’re a blot on society.</p>
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<p>Vance Packard’s *The Status Seekers<a href=“published%20in%201959”>/i</a> indicates that in the 1950s, elite prep schools and colleges were much more social elite than academic elite.</p>
<p>Of course, academic eliteness has become much more important, but the social elite is in the best position to give their kids a head start to reach academic eliteness. And some unspecified amount of legacy preference remains at many of the elite colleges, indicating that the well connected need not reach the same level of academic eliteness expected of others.</p>