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<p>She has presented evidence from interviews with people with actual hiring power in those firms. That seems to be far more compelling than mere anecdotes. After all, how many of us have that sort of interview access? </p>
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<p>So are you prepared to launch a formal accusation of academic fraud? Are you saying that she didn’t actually conduct those interviews?</p>
<p>No offense Sakky just because she wrote a research paper doesn’t make her research correct or complete. Look at this for instance, for the garbage that gets published as research. Since you have an engineering background, I’m sure you’ll appreciate:
[Medical</a> Researcher Rediscovers Integration - Slashdot](<a href=“Medical Researcher Rediscovers Integration - Slashdot”>Medical Researcher Rediscovers Integration - Slashdot)</p>
<p>And its been cited (I believe 77) times in other research articles. Just because it’s research, even from a Harvard PhD doesn’t make this true. And I attend one of those schools that is supposedly preferred above all (before anyone accuses me of bias). Just saying from my personal experience too (having been at a firm she perhaps even used in her research) the ways she describe the differences and the quotes she use really exaggerate how much these schools are preferred. In fact it takes not much longer than following DunninLa’s suggestion in an earlier post to learn that these advantages aren’t anywhere as marked as the researcher makes them out to be.</p>
<p>That being said the research article does have a lot of proposed theories that I consider to be true: such as the discussion about GPA, attending top schools=signalling, and extracurricular activities. So it’s definitely not all garbage or anything like that. You’re just focusing on what I find to be admittedly the weakest argument she has.</p>
<p>Nobody is saying that academic research is flawless by any means. However, it is still stronger evidence than the anecdotes that have been put forth as a competing counterargument. Why are people so willing to believe those anecdotes, but so unwilling to believe her paper? If people want to maintain a healthy skepticism, they should be skeptical about all claims. </p>
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<p>I don’t see what the problem is, as she simply asserted that those targeted schools are preferred amongst the firms in question, she never once made a numerical claim about how much they were preferred. In fact, she can’t. That’s not what qualitative research is designed to do. </p>
<p>And, honestly, who is going to argue against her claim that those targeted schools are indeed preferred over other schools? To do so would necessarily require endorsing the opposite hypothesis: that those target schools are actually worse compared to non-targeted schools for those firms in question. In other words, it’s actually worse to attend Harvard than a lower Ivy if you want the best chance of being hired by those firms. Is anybody seriously prepared to argue that?</p>
<p>“We aren’t talking about HYP vs. state school or little known LAC’s. We are talking about Yale vs. “potentially Wharton.” What the study is suggesting is that Wharton is potential on the second tier in finance and consulting, behind Yale. I’m not a big fan of Wharton, but this study sound like ******** to me.” </p>
<p>Well, I realize that Wharton is highly ranked, but Rivera’s study isn’t about rankings; it’s about how attendance at particular schools (and, secondarily, extracurricular participation) translates into employment outcomes. It might be disconcerting to some people, but if it’s any consolation, sometimes Wharton does make the cut, according to the quoted interviews.</p>
<p>Besides, the firms seem less interested in hiring expertise than in hiring perceived prestige. IDK, maybe, undergraduate business administration (or, even Philadelphia) just isn’t perceived as prestigious. lol </p>
<p>Within the context of the study’s qualitative methodology, the interviews apparently were conducted and analyzed in a more systematic fashion than merely collecting of anecdotes. The reported interview quotations, however, are best viewed as illustrations of certain conclusions, not as the data themselves. If you want to point to methodological shortcomings, that’s one thing (e.g., she coded the interviews, but didn’t clearly state the code definitions or calculate inter-rater reliability for coding), but there’s no basis to think that the interviewees didn’t actually say the things about Wharton that were reported.</p>
<p>sakky, how many seats or slots do you think are there for such positions?</p>
<p>This thread is unproductive and just trying to incite an arguement. </p>
<p>I think the biggest bump is given to those applicants who have the best connection. If daddy is head of the department, his son is getting a job even if he did not go to HYP. After that, an HYP applicant probably has an advantage getting the interview. (Note: Many HYP students gained admission based on a connection).</p>
<p>Life is not fair and never will be.</p>
<p>Can a graduate from non-HYP get a job on wall street? Of course…</p>
<p>I doubt if getting into Harvard as a non athlete& minus connections can help one get those plum jobs,irrespective of GPA</p>
<p>This article is a mistake. I wanted my dean’s opinion and he claims that HYP have a SLIGHT advantage, but nevertheless its not too much. A person from Dartmouth or even the infamous Duke you people bash on have a great change to land jobs that HYP targets. Not to mention even MIT.</p>
<p>MIT is one of THE best. Anyone saying otherwise is stupid.</p>
<p>^It seems that even the perennial CC battles amongst certain UCB, Michigan, & Duke advocates have not generated the types of emphatic negative statements that we’ve seen from some posters in response to the Rivera article. Again, I maintain that this is due to the fact that some of its findings contradict some of those posters’ most cherished beliefs about the place of their preferred schools in some pecking order. So, in support of your belief, you asked your dean’s opinion and apparently dismissed the findings of a qualified sociologist who has systematically studied the topic? </p>
<p>Look, the Rivera study has nothing to do with bashing schools; nobody said MIT is not “one of THE best.” Rather, her study has to do with how certain types of credentials (i.e., attendance at particular schools and extracurricular participation) translate into hiring decisions in certain types of firms. It is not a valid basis to dismiss Rivera’s findings just because you don’t understand the article or because its findings challenge some of your beliefs. I don’t think that type of thinking is taught at MIT, Duke, or Dartmouth. If you disagree with Rivera’s findings, at least have some valid basis for your disagreement, whether its conceptual, methodological, or whatever. As it stands, her research does yield new findings about an understudied topic and places these in the context of related social science research.</p>
<p>lol, my former son in law dropped out of his nowhere-near-an-Ivy in freshman year and he has been making money hand over fist on Wall St ever since. Investment banker and currently at Barclays. </p>
<p>It’s got a lot to do with your personality & how hard you work.</p>
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<p>Uh, how is it a mistake? Even your dean conceded that HYP do indeed have an advantage, and that’s precisely what the article stated. So, if anything, your dean only confirmed the truth of the article. </p>
<p>Now, the dispute may be over how much advantage HYP has, and that the research paper cannot say, as no qualitative research can provide precise numerical values. That’s not the purpose of qualitative research. Its purpose is to provide *directional *outcomes (X is more/less than Y), and it fulfilled that purpose. </p>
<p>Again, if you still disagree, then please read the paper and find out what it actually said. That’s why I posted it.</p>
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<p>I’m prepared to argue that the opposite of > is ≤, not <. So to assert that the paper is bullcrap is to assert that attending those supposedly lesser schools gives you an at worst equal chance of landing those jobs.</p>
<p>But you can’t argue that, because no chances between two choices in any social science question of any interest are ever exactly equal, meaning to infinite decimal points. Either one choice or the other is better, even if only by a small amount.</p>
<p>Again, if we’re talking about several hundreds slots and positions here, this article must be worrisome and should cause for concerns. Otherwise, it should not affect anything much.</p>
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<p>Proof? I can’t think of any reason why it would be impossible to have two schools that give their students not observably distinguishable employment prospects in a certain area. I suppose it may be unlikely, but I don’t really care about that.</p>
<p>sakky you’re good</p>
<p>BB jobs at top consulting and wall street firms are reserve for MBAs from the top grad schools. If you are not from Harvard, UChicago, Stanford, Wharton and Northwestern you are nobody (kidding). Majority of MBA students who attend these five elite schools have undergraduate degree predominantly in hard sciences and they hail from all over but with majority of them from the top 10 U.S. News ranking school.</p>
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<p>ok, her qualitative research is designed not to come up with a numerical claim, yet it’s supposed to tell you how much your chances of landing a top job change. Sakky, you can’t really make a research statement about probabilities without some numerical or statistical basis. Nice try. </p>
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<p>no simple logic here: disagreeing with one hypothesis does not necessitate the opposite hypothesis. her judgment is that all targets are not created equal, and in particular that HYPS are created above other targets for banking, consulting and law. The null hypothesis is that until we have some hard evidence, we can’t really say which targets are or are not more advantageous. She’s provided you with some anonymous anecdotal evidence, but selective quotes does not a theory make. </p>
<p>Also as someone who’s involved with recruiting for a prestigious wall street firm, I’m providing you with contradictory anonymous anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>I’m not saying her study is necessarily wrong, but it’s pretty useless in the absence of follow up research. when someone comes up with a way to quantify her effects or even prove they exist, we can come back and argue this topic.</p>
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<p>But the question is also not about “observably distinguishable”. After all, the author in question did indeed observe - and interview - people who seemed to believe that certain schools are indeed better than others for the purposes of hiring. </p>
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<p>Uh, yes you can, and indeed, that is what qualitative research does all the time. The answer that she found is quite clear: the schools in question are better - read, provide higher probability - than other schools in terms of obtaining the jobs in question. Note again, she never once made a mention of how much better, for that is not what qualitatative research is designed to ascertain. She simply said better. </p>
<p>Now, if you have a problem with qualitative research in general, then that’s a different issue entirely. But again, it should be said that somebody needs to do the qualitative groundwork if we’re ever going to know what variables the quant guys should throw into their regressions. </p>
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<p>And she never claimed to have a theory either. Again, that’s not her job, at least not yet. It is the job of other researchers to more fully investigate the matter to devise a bona-fide theory. </p>
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<p>But that’s the point - your evidence is worse than hers. I thought you said that until you have hard evidence, you should continue to believe the null evidence - the classical skeptic’s stance. Fine, fair enough. The problem is that then you’re willing to believe your evidence which, frankly, is weaker than hers. She interviewed multiple people at multiple firms. </p>
<p>Adopting the skeptic’s stance is tenable only if you’re willing to discount all of the evidence that doesn’t pass your threshold of proof, no matter which way that evidence may point, not just the evidence that points to an outcome that you personally don’t like. </p>
<p>Furthermore, on CC, how many discussions thread questions are “resolved” where no evidence is ever presented that could meet a classical hypothesis test that could reject the null hypothesis with a low level of significance? Heck, right on the front page of the College Search and Selection section, I see people asking whether it is better to attend a HBCU vs. a non-HBCU, to compare UMiami vs. UDenver, East Carolina vs. UNCW, Bowdoin vs. Conn College vs. Holy Cross, and Idaho vs. Washington State. How many of these threads are ever resolved through a statistical rejection of a null hypothesis? Probably close to zero. Is somebody actually going to show that Idaho is indeed better than Washington State with a p-value less than 0.05? If not, then why aren’t you bothering them about their lack of statistical rigor? Why don’t you bother every thread with it, with the inevitable result that nobody could then ever discuss anything. </p>
<p>Again, qualitative research is not designed to produce numerical answers. That is the job of later researchers. Nevertheless, qualitative research is still perfectly valid research. It’s certainly a far stronger standard of evidence than the anecdotes that are commonly used on CC, yet nobody seems to be exercised about that.</p>
<p>To be clear, has the question been definitively resolved? Obviously not, and frankly, probably never will be. But we now have much more evidence than we had before as a result of her research. After all, people need to make decisions now about where they should go to college, and they can’t afford to wait until academia produces quantitatively rigorous answers before they make a matriculation decision. You can’t just say "I want one of the jobs in question, and I as a high school senior was admitted to both Harvard and to Cornell, but let me wait for a future quant study - which probably won’t come for years - that will allow me to reject the null hypothesis that those schools provide me with the same chances. Those schools aren’t going to hold your spot for you. You need to make a decision with the evidence that is available now. This study provides topical and important new information that will help you to make that decision. That’s far better than not having that information at all.</p>
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<p>and I question if she can even say “better”, as opposed to “some people told me they preferred or focused on schools X,Y,Z”.</p>
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<p>fine, I have a problem with a conclusion based on nothing but qualitative anecdotes. I don’t see it as worthless, but just useless to us until follow up research is conducted on whether certain targets are actually stronger recruited and by how much probabilities change.</p>
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<p>no, she does have a theory, it’s just based on weak evidence and not well-enough defended in my eyes.</p>
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<p>no, i was taking the classical skeptic stance and I’m not saying my evidence is worth much at all, but since you were all about anonymous anecdotes on which to base conclusions, I was offering you some.</p>
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<p>and that’s why this is college confidential as opposed to a newspaper article or research journal, we offer our opinions, we don’t pretend that those opinions form some “well-researched” theory.</p>