Okay. So has Harvard said they are moving away from using GPA and LSATs in their admission process? Or just that they were definitely moving away from cooperating with USNWR?
I guess I’m still confused by your original statement saying that the Jack Smith’s of the world might not be able to get into Harvard going forward? Is there any proof of that besides your inference into Harvard Law’s decision to bow out of USNWR?
P.S. I thought the winky emoji was a tip that the ‘unexpected school’ as holistic review piece was a joke…sorry it wasn’t clear.
Outliers who are admitted to law school with much lower stats than typical are primarily URMs. At some well known low schools, admission can be predicted very well by a combination of stats + URM status.
Every few years someone from a smaller or less well know school will win a Rhodes scholarship. UW-Eau Claire, College of Idaho, UMBC. The majority are still from the Ivy league schools, MIT, the military academies.
There are more applicants from the ‘name’ schools, and someone at those schools knows the process, but is it easier to win? Not sure. It might be easier for the Harvard student from Montana to win than the Harvard student from Massachusetts because the one from Montana can compete in his home region yet get the support from the experts at Harvard with the process.
In 2010, the WSJ ranked US universities based on interviews with recruiters from government, NGOs and private companies, and the results stood in stark contrast to USNWR rankings. Of the top 25, a healthy majority - I think 15 schools - were flagship public universities like UIUC, UT Austin, etc. In contrast, only one Ivy League school, Cornell, made the list because of its hotel management and engineering programs. In fact, some recruiters said that they avoided the Ivies because of their grads’ sense of entitlement and unrealistic expectations. Penn State came out on top in the survey.
Of course, a higher proportion of Ivy League grads were likely going to pursue masters and PhDs than state school grads, and the results would likely have been very different if the WSJ was focusing on prestigious consulting houses or investment banks.
There is finance, and then there is investment banking. Companies hire many state school grads into their corporate finance functions, and many investment managers hire from outside the Ivies (my nephew was hired by a financial manager as a newly minted BS Finance from Penn State). Now, if you are looking at big name Wall Street firms they may still hire mainly from U Penn, Columbia, etc., but is that because of the quality of the graduates, or the strength of the alumni network?
The student at Harvard has to compete with all the other students at Harvard to get the opportunities to build a stunning resume. The competition to do that at a less prestigious college is far lower. And many of these universities, especially those with honors colleges, have people dedicated to helping mould students into great candidates in order to boost the university’s profile.
D’s freshman year roommate at Utah won a Rhodes scholarship last year, she was picked out at the end of freshman year and had lots of opportunities handed to her over the following 2.5 years.
Yes there are universities that are bad at providing this level of support, but they aren’t always the places you’d expect: for example Berkeley and UCLA have been underrepresented amongst prestigious scholarship winners (compared to the number of top students) because they don’t provide help in building a resume.
You might be surprised. The proportion of Ivy League grads pursuing Master’s and PhDs shortly after graduation is often quite small. For example, I’ll compare Yale and UConn since they are in the same state and use the same reporting format/software for their post-grad employment. The class of 2021 numbers are summarized below. UConn has more than twice as large a portion of students pursuing such MS/PhD shortly after graduation than Yale. I did not cherry pick Yale as an outlier. For example, Harvard’s senior survey shows 15% continuing education – less than Yale.
Yale – 17.3% Continuing Education, 6.9% Master’s, 3.7% PhD, 4.0% Professional
UConn – 36.5% Continuing Education, 24.6% Master’s*, 8.7% PhD*,
*UConn groups professional degrees in these categories, Yale does not
@Twoin18 Your daughter’s experience matches my daughter’s as well. There are definitely students at less well known schools who are groomed from mid-year/end of 1st year on for programs like Rhodes, Fulbright, Rangel etc.
I think it is also sometimes hard to remember that academia is ultimately, a pretty small community when it comes down to it. Professors and administrators at those smaller, less well known (to the average college going person) aren’t necessarily unknown/less respected in academic circles. Indeed, often times those professors have well established, impressive networks they put into use for their top students (no matter what prestige level the college is).
Yes the professor who led D’s honors cohort was explicit about positioning students for these prestigious graduate scholarships and even puts it in his bio, I expect it was a key part of the pitch to donors too: https://education.utah.edu/alumni/profiles/l-jackson-newell.php
We seem to have a thread like this every few weeks…
Can some students from no-name schools become among the best in their professions? Absolutely.
Do students from prestigious schools (or prestigious departments within some schools) enjoy certain advantages over their no-name school counterparts? Yes, generally speaking.
Do some firms (or groups/departments within some firms) in certain industries look to hire primarily from some prestigious schools? Yes, often because they feel it’s a more efficient use of their HR and other resources.
It’s because some folks like absolutes. They don’t like to hear that certain schools don’t have a monopoly on certain outcomes. Then there are those who are angsty about college choice. College is expensive and elite schools are super competitive to get in these days. So families need to hear that it’s ok if junior doesn’t get into an elite school or the family can’t afford it, that they won’t be doomed to an unsuccessful and unfulfilling life.
It is fascinating…as I think these type of interactions/programs do a lot of pull back the curtain on what a university or specific academic area within a university is prioritizing.
And I think you are 100% right about part of the priority is to appeal to donors/raise the profile of the school/program in question.
As I’ve watched this particular type of sausage get made from the sidelines, what interests me is realizing how incredibly important a student’s very first interactions with a college are to their personal trajectory, and how crucial course selection can be to making the connections necessary to be placed on this path towards this type of grooming.
To bring this back to the larger conversation on this topic, opportunities are only available if a person knows they exist and also have the necessary skills/background to qualify for those opportunities. I think medical school and law school are professions very well known to most college focused people and therefor it is easy to imagine those as goals - hence the large numbers of pre-law and pre-med freshman.
In the same way, well known/prestigious schools make it easy for a student/parent to imagine themselves in a successful future. Graduates of Harvard are wealthy! And become President! MIT grads are the scientists of tomorrow! Duke produces great Basketball Players.
It can be harder for many to see the possibilities at the less well known/unknown school. Because most average college applicants/families don’t have a quick heuristic to understand what those schools offer and why those unknown opportunities might actually position an individual better than the known heuristic would.
Jack Smith’s trajectory from SUNY Oneonta to Harvard to the Hague to being entrusted with the position of Special Counsel is a good example of how to show students more places and starting points for their imagination. I hope students will see that the work/ability to graduate summa cum laude is rewarded no matter what the prestige of the starting school. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t work towards it.
Yes, there was a student from Utah on CC a few weeks ago wondering about transferring to a more prestigious college because he felt it was the only way to get to a top grad school. He’d just hadn’t figured out where the sources of resume building opportunities were.
Conversely I pushed S towards all of this and he very much enjoyed doing the Truman and Marshall applications (I was friends in grad school with a Marshall scholar so was very aware of the long term benefits of these scholarships). He got very little support in the UC system, but was able to plan things out successfully to build his resume because he knew about it from early on in college.
This forum is in no way representative of typical college students or typical American families. At typical high schools, most students who attend colleges attend state schools, and relatively few apply to or seriously consider attending Ivy+ type colleges. I expect the overwhelming majority of students attending publics like Oneota do not assume that their education is going to limit them due to lack of prestige and do not need to see that Jack Smith attended to Oeonota for undergrad to know that their lack of prestigious undergrad is not limiting possibilities of success.
Graduating Summa Cum Laude is important for law school admission because law school admission is primarily based on LSAT + GPA stats (prestige of undergrad college has little, if any influence). However, the same is not true in most other fields. Employers often use GPA as basic screen, rather than focusing on pinnacle of highest GPA with 3.9x cum laude vs a more common 3.8. Once you cross the GPA screen, employers tend to focus on non-stat criteria like relevant experience, major, skill set, etc.
Of course there are individual exceptions (the post used wording likes “tends to”, “in most other fields”, and “often”), but the vast majority of employers meet the description in the overwhelming majority of industries. For example, the survey at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf asked hundreds of employers to relative importance of different criteria for evaluating new grads. Among all surveyed criteria, college reputation was ranked as least influential, and GPA was ranked as 2nd least influential. When broken down by industry or field of work, employers in all surveyed industries showed a similar pattern (“elite” finance was not one the listed industry groupings).
However, while GPA is as a whole ranked less important, a large portion of employers do use GPA as a way to quickly screen a large number of applicants. For example in the NACE Job Outlook 2022 survey at Use of GPA as Candidate Selection Tool Falls , 46% of employers report using GPA as a screen, with the most common threshold being 3.0. 3.1 GPA passes the screen, and 2.9 GPA does not. GPA screens were far more common at larger companies than smaller companies.
My point is that there are employers in a vast array of fields using a wide range of employment practices. The biggest employer in the country is the federal government. State governments employ lots of people too. Education employs large numbers from higher Ed to high school to elementary. Health Care is a major employer, hiring not just doctors and nurses but others with varying skill sets. There are engineering jobs in all kinds of settings from Silicon Valley to construction management. There’s been a lot of talk about IB, MBB, and consulting in general, but there’s a whole world out there that goes way beyond that. Both personal experience and common sense tell me that these employers do not all use the same hiring practices.
