I could be wrong, but I think a lot of the state flag ships engineering programs are ranked higher than some schools that are considered elite for liberal arts.
I think it can matter in certain fields or at certain companies. On Wall St, it probably matters what school you go to. At my children’s school we have an administrator who graduated Honors from NAU. She has done well and moved up. A lot of it has to do with the person…
Personally I think @CP3forMVP states it the best and @coolguy40 shows that if you work hard you can overcome the limitations of your education.
The “90%” statistic in the thread title is pretty much meaningless without more context. What population of firms is being surveyed?
Small businesses apparently account for over 90% of US employer firms and about 2/3 of net new jobs in the private sector. About half of small businesses are home-based. Small businesses include automobile repair shops, dry cleaners, restaurants, etc. I don’t imagine many of these employers need (or are willing to pay for) your average MIT or Stanford grad.
In some jobs prestige can matter. Law, academics, or some financial careers. I’m sure there’s other careers on the list, but those are the ones I can think of. In IT, I haven’t noticed any limitations in my career. In fact, there’s a misconception that working for a fortune 500 company is the best place to work. That’s actually not true. Every company is different, and every job/department is different. It takes some trial and error to grow into a career and find the right fit with the right salary. There are small/medium size companies that are profitable and generous to employees. There are large companies that are cheap and poorly managed. My dad, for instance, got a big job at Valero some years back. He worked there for 2 years and hated every minute of it. He got a job working as a Database Admin at the local community college district and has been there for 15 years. No one in my family went to a prestigious school.
@shuttlebus 200k…300k. Investment banking analyst make about 30 to 40 per hour. But they work or are on call 80 to 100 hours a week… It’s like having 2.5 jobs. That’s why they last only a couple years writing reports.
Investment banking analyst is not the highest paid job right out of college; the potentially large payoff is years later after becoming a Managing Director, or leaving to join other lucrative finance fields. Many CS people make considerably more to start than investment banking.
@greymeer I wasn’t referring to IB in my post, but I have read that the schools matters for IB, too.
“The “90%” statistic in the thread title is pretty much meaningless without more context. What population of firms is being surveyed?”
Good point, I perused the article to see the source and it just said based on interviews with companies that hire, so not too revealing. Anyway one other thing is that if it’s an interview, very few people are going to admit they use rankings even if they do, it’s just not something that makes you look good (see the reaction on cc when people say they use rankings to determine what college to attend). Of course you’re going to say, skills, experience, fit among others.
Also it’s possible that you’d get different answers depending on if you asked a recruiter or hiring manager. Recruiters especially for b-school, law school, and grad schools in general will say they use rankings to bring in the candidates for interviews, and hiring managers will use the interview to figure out who gets hired or at least an offer. And hiring managers do not use rankings, at least in hi-tech, it’ll be answers to the technical questions and fit.
@shuttlebus then what job pays a math major 300k right out of college for 40hrs per week?
I worked at a tech startup where we only recruited at elite schools. The data engineers we hired were all trained on the job because the technology we were using was proprietary. All of them were productive within few months. There was one time we needed to use a commercial programming language and the only person who was available didn’t know the language. I told her about the project and it had to be delivered within 2 months for a client. She sat there quietly while I talked and I thought she was upset and scared. I asked her, “What do you think? It is ok if you don’t feel comfortable doing it.” She said, “It is ok. I think it is doable.” She did get it done without a lot of supervision. When she didn’t know how to do something she reached to people and she was comfortable in working with the client. I was accustom to give out assignments without a lot of instructions, and those data engineers just “made it happen.”
In the last few years I did something similar working at various insurance companies. They tended to recruit at regional public schools. I found I had to do more hand holding with some of those new graduates, from communication to problem solving. If it was something they have never done before, someone would need to show them how to do it and double check their work. There were few who could think outside of box or came up with solutions that wowed me. To be fair, insurance companies’ starting salaries were a lot lower than some of those tech companies, so maybe they were not getting top tier students from those regional schools. Few top hires we had left quickly after few years.
I wonder how well “90% of employers” correlates to “90% of jobs.” We are an employer but only hire about one college-educated person every other year. Anecdotally, our last hire has a degree from University of Phoenix.
There are opportunities for everyone everywhere. Just like many students fight tooth and nail to get into the top colleges, many people really want to work for a top firm. My daughter is at a pretty elite school and has been interviewing and having NYC super days and MOST of the kids are from elite schools, but every super day she has been to there have been some kids from state flagships. Not as many, but some. You can still apply to companies that don’t “target” your school, but being at a target school might make it a bit easier to get that interview.
I am a hiring partner and differentiate schools by range, but don’t care about ranking. A kid with a high GPA, great interpersonal skills, and active on campus from the state flagship beats the kid with a lower GPA and lesser soft skills from the slightly higher ranked private university. Everything counts.
Plenty of highly selective colleges post results of salary surveys, and nobody ever reports starting salaries that high. For example, a recent one from Yale is at https://ocs.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/OCS%20Stats%20pages/Final%20Class%20of%202017%20Report%20(6%20months).pdf . More than 99% of graduates reported starting salaries of under $150k. None were reported above $210k. I’d expect the less than 1% who were above $150k almost always had some kind of special circumstances, such as years of work experience in CS or starting as upper management at dad’s company.
This article link does not work for me. However, the conclusion does not seem surprising… Several other surveys of employers hiring new grads have come to similar conclusions. For example, in the survey of hundreds of employers in a variety of industries at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf , college reputation was listed as the least influential factor in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions. Instead the focus was on relevant experience and having various desired qualities/skills. Employers as a whole said they favored grads from flagships over elites by a slim margin. Of course, there will be specific companies and industries with different recruiting preferences, in many cases favoring nearby colleges or ones with a good past history of hires.
Similar to @oldfort my first job was at a tech consulting firm that almost only hired Oxbridge STEM PhDs straight out of college. They wanted top math skills but also the ability to write and present that you learn doing a PhD (but often not as an undergrad in the UK). They paid handsomely to get them (~50% above market) and gave them immense amounts of responsibility within a few months to just “make it happen”.
Their particular niche was writing software models that were sufficiently complex that while a single very capable person at that firm could develop it, any of their competitors would have needed to assign a team which of course introduced huge inefficiencies and additional costs. I still remember the war game I worked on that (essentially) used quantum mechanics to model observed vs unobserved states for the various assets.
Their main challenge was that many of the people they hired were sufficiently ambitious and capable that they left to set up their own companies to do similar work. On the other hand some extremely intelligent people struggled and were pushed out (for example one friend in that situation had been Stephen Hawking’s research student).
25 years later they are still so well known amongst potential employees that when I met an astrophysics PhD at my old college and he told me he’d had a summer internship with a tech consulting firm, it was immediately clear to both of us that it was the same firm. But nowadays I’m sure they face a lot more competition from hedge funds etc for those quant skills.
@ljberkow just curious about how you look at GPA. Do you take into consideration the difference in rigor of schools or majors? For example, a finance major at a business school that enforces a curve may have a 3.5 but that’s a great gpa for that school…vs. a liberal arts major or econ major at a school that doesn’t have a curve student that has a 3.8? Or even within the same colleges? My daughter is doubling in finance and accounting which is a much more rigorous program than kids at the same school as her that are majoring in Econ. Just curious how you look at these differences in major/rigor?
Some people may think econ courses(with heavy math) may be more rigorous than finance and accounting. They are different types of learning, one is more applied and another is more theoretical. Most employers do not differentiate between majors. On the other hand, when D1 was interviewing, as a math major with GPA just barely over 3.5, she got just as many interviews in banking as students with 3.8+ GPA from the business school.
@collegemomjam IME when hiring for a fortune100 financial development program for recent grads, we did not delineate by school ranking, perceived school or major rigor, or have any knowledge of schools that curved classes. Having a double major would be a plus. The first step was getting an interview, which could be earned by successfully interviewing on campus or applying online. Cuts were made by factors such as GPA and internship experience, but students came from many majors, finance, econ, marketing, math.
Once a student had an interview, everyone was pretty much on equal footing, be it a Northwestern math major, Kelley finance major or BYU econ major. What mattered from there was how the student packaged their academic and/or internship experiences and their soft skills, there were no questions or tests about math, or finance, for example. Hiring managers generally had the assumption the interviewees could all do the work and hired the grads they liked/clicked with (significant when spending 60 hours/week together) and could see themselves fitting into the program and company.