<p>This article doesn’t ring true considering the large numbers of I-bankers, top biglaw firm lawyers/paralegals, and consultants I’ve known in my work, HS alum network, and family. </p>
<p>The article also seems to severely downplay the level of self-selection involve in whether the graduates of a given university/college even WANTS to go into those career paths in the first place. </p>
<p>For instance, some colleges like Columbia, Amherst, or Williams have much more pre-professional oriented student bodies which gravitate towards those fields whereas others like Brown, Reed, or Oberlin aren’t as much. </p>
<p>I would think that accounting for this factor is one reason such firms use to determine where to allocate their on-campus recruiting resources.</p>
<p>I don’t find this to be the case at all. It’s completely true that some firms have preferences, yes, but I haven’t heard of any rejecting non-HYPS Ivies out of hand. Or schools like MIT for that matter. In fact, many firms are trying to recruit as much quantitative talent as possible.</p>
<p>To the extent that there is any truth in the article, I would have to say that the admissions practices for STEM students at HYPSM–i.e. hobbies such as juggling, rutabag-growing, and ceramic-frog collecting make a student memorable and more likely to be admitted–wind up being beneficial in an unexpected way.</p>
<p>If top STEM undergraduates, evaluated purely in terms of scientific potential, are turned away from the schools that funnel students to the “best” IB positions, then STEM grad programs have to look at all comers–as in fact, they do. They can’t use undergrad institution as a proxy for scientific promise. I think this is all to the good, and benefits students who hit their strides during college, as well as those who may have chosen a public research university for financial reasons.</p>
<p>Separately, I think it will be interesting to follow the effect of the Dragon voice-recognition sale fiasco on Goldman Sachs. Not enough time to recapitulate it here, but there was a long article in the New York Times a few months back, and I believe the trial begins soon–maybe Monday. Let’s just say that all of those sharp students going to the “top” firms did not exactly cover themselves with glory for their performance on this one.</p>
<p>That’s the flip side of the coin that only gets rarely mentioned: you become a 6-figure wage slave working 80+ hours a week, always at your master’s beck and call. And a non-insignifigant portion of that extra money goes toward much higher living expenses than you might incur elsewhere in the country. Then, after making such sacrifices, it may become difficult to ever risk questioning a ruthless boss, even when a situation looks less than fully ethical.</p>
<p>These are serious quality-of-life tradeoffs. Money and prestige aren’t everything.</p>
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<p>Best post I’ve read today! Some well-deserved green-square points coming your way!</p>
<p>It seems like this approach to personnel selection is not restricted to consulting and investment banking, and that the practice may continue to spread:</p>
<p>HYPS people go on to work at successful law firms, where they hire more from HYPS.</p>
<p>Same with investment banking.</p>
<p>Same with faculty positions.</p>
<p>I’m sure the list goes on. Individual merit is important too. But you only have a few spots, yet so many applicants. You might as well save some time and pick from the cream of the crop. I’m sure the “second tier” schools have their own niche. Hell even my school have companies that keep coming back for more recruits.</p>
<p>When Dartmouth S was interviewing for IB jobs and doing the banking boot camp programs, he didn’t encounter as many Yale students as expected. He saw no Brown kids, and only MBA’s from Penn Wharton interviewing for the same jobs as he was. Cornell was well-represented, however, as was Princeton. In terms of non-Ivies, UT Austin, Washington & Lee, and Wellesley were represented. A student we know recently did a boot camp program out west. A little over half the participants were from Stanford, and the rest were from U Cal Berkeley.</p>
<p>If Goldman Sachs only hired at HYPS, why would it recruit at “37 firmwide target schools and more than 30 divisional target schools”-- see the [Goldman</a>, Sachs & Co. Recruiting Profile](<a href=“Bloomberg - Are you a robot?”>Bloomberg - Are you a robot?) at Businessweek.</p>
<p>It is absolutely true that the most established/prestigious law firms have a pretty restricted list of schools from which they will recruit, although the list will vary somewhat from firm to firm, and often include slots for top students from third-tier locals. The person who is #1 in his class at Fordham Law School can probably get an interview and a job offer from many/most of the top New York firms. On the other hand, they barely care about undergraduate degree at all.</p>
<p>I know for a fact that top consulting firms and investment banks recruit (and hire) at colleges other than HYPS. Especially at MIT and Brown, but also Chicago, Dartmouth, and several others (including Michigan, Berkeley, UVa). The list of MBA programs from which they recruit may well be much narrower, however. I wonder if that’s what the original article was looking at.</p>
<p>Not necessarily depending on the field and geographic region. </p>
<p>For instance, in the field of Philosophy, the top 3 schools aren’t HYPS, but NYU, Rutgers, and UPitt according to several classmates who are Philosophy grad students or on the tenure-track in the field. </p>
<p>In the field of Engineering, only P and S will probably be considered within the first-tier on the basis of reputation ranking. However, they’d still have heavy competition from PhD graduates from MIT, Caltech, CMU, Berkeley, UMich, etc. Incidentally, in casually perusing the Engineering faculty listings in a friend’s elite engineering school many years back, I saw far more UWisc-Madison and UIUC PhD holders than H or Y.</p>
<p>Lehman had the same hiring practices as any other BB afaik. But ironically, Bear had a well-buffed reputation as the firm that didn’t care for pedigree in the hiring process, and prided itself on the most diverse set of hard-scrabble characters. And though Lehman dominates the headlines, don’t forget that Bear not only failed earlier, but arguably sold more crappy MBS than anyone else on Wall Street.</p>
<p>Moral of the story: having more open hiring policies isn’t necessarily better.</p>
<p>Many Lehman employees had great loyalty toward the company. It was probably one of the nicer firms on the street. It was hard for them to have the Lehman indices named Barclay indices.</p>
<p>Regarding the question posed in #32: I have no knowledge of GS specifically. But from what I’m told of how it’s done at the bank where S works, for the prime, high salary jobs HR recruits at the top schools. For the less prestigious, lower-paying “back office” jobs, there is a broader group of schools from which they may recruit.</p>