No, I claimed, “While there are a small number of companies that focus their hiring on highly selective colleges, it’s far more common for companies to focus hiring on nearby colleges.” Nearby refers to near to where the positions you are interested in are located, or in a general sense near to the divisions that hire the largest numbers of employees and/or interns. This is not synonymous with corporate headquarters in GE’s case. Yes, if you want to be precise it’s not literally every nearby college. For example, a company is not going to be doing a lot of hiring for engineering positions from a college that doesn’t have an engineering program, regardless of distance. It’s more doing a lot of hiring from the local non-flagship state school instead of the elite college or bust attitude that is common on this forum and has been brought up in this thread.</p>
<p>Not true at all. I actually saw the list of Qualcomm core recruiting campuses distributed by Qualcomm HR last week. The list includes CMU, Stanford, MIT, U Michigan, UIUC, Purdue, USC, UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UCLA, UCSB, UCI.</p>
Do you realize how large Qualcomm is? Qualcomm has tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of active interns, and hires a large number of employees each year. Hiring 2-4 persons from a school in a year is more indicative of a school with little representation than a school with a lot of representation. I’m not saying that they only hire from local companies. I’m saying there are a lot more Qualcomm hires who went to nearby colleges like UCSD and SDSU than further away colleges, higher ranked colleges, like CMU and UCB.</p>
<p>I made mistake about SJSU and corrected it.</p>
<p>Qualcomm hired 24 students for full-time and internship positions from U Michigan. I am pretty sure that Qualcomm has no plant in Michigan. How do you explain that?</p>
<p>I doubt that that Qualcomm hires more than 4 from SDSU each year unless you can show.
SDSU is not even on Qualcomm core recruiting list.</p>
The list below shows the colleges with the largest number of Qualcomm employees on LinkedIn with the word “intern” in their job title. I included both current and past.
UCSD - 537
SDSU - 342
USC - 263
Stanford - 210 (Qualcomm has a division in SF Bay area, believe it is 2nd largest div.)
Mumbai - 207 (Qualcomm has a division in Mumbai, India)</p>
<p>Note that the list is dominated by the area of colleges of UCSD and SDSU. USC is also within driving distance. Lists of current interns, current employees, recent grads, or any other combination all show the same pattern.</p>
<p>UCSD and SDSU are local to San Diego therefore there are more interns from these schools throughout the year. Other colleges can only participate in summer internships. Part-time internship throughout the year does not mean students will be hired after graduation. Full-time summer internship is more serious. Housing for summer interns is provided free by Qualcomm.</p>
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<p>Well, Qualcomm only hired 2 from UCB, and nobody from SJSU although these 2 schools are in the Bay area.</p>
While internships does not mean the student will be hired, it’s a safe bet that colleges with a lot of internships have a lot of hiring, both due to hiring interns and due to tending to recruit for jobs at colleges where they recruit for internships. If I look at current employees, rather than just interns, 4 out of the 5 top spots are identical.</p>
<p>Employees
UCSD
SDSU
USC
NC State (3rd largest division is in same city as NC State)
<p>It depends on the angle from which you are looking at. A design engineer is different from a test engineer or a lab assistant,…Of course, Qualcomm will only spend money to hire key positions from far way colleges.</p>
<p>"They stubbornly insist that H or S just aren’t that great, the rankings are silly,</p>
<p>and amusingly enough some people who make these arguments comment that they would be so dispirited about attending a state flagship that they may even have dropped out. "</p>
<p>Since that’s directed at me, I’d appreciate if you’d represent my position accurately. I have never said nor will I ever say that “H or S just aren’t that great.” Nor did I say “a” state flagship; I meant <em>my</em> state flagship (Mizzou) which isn’t a particularly renowned one. Anyway, the world doesn’t step down from H or S to Mizzou; there are a lot of shades of gray in between, and a lot of places that are pretty indistinguishable in the bigger picture from H or S in terms of having an extremely qualified student body and offering tons of opportunities. .</p>
<p>There is a flaw in the assumption that ONLY people listed are hired. A company can make offers to many fresh graduates across the spectrum of colleges but not all join. Qualcomm may offer a job to an UCB graduate to come and join in San Diego and the UCB graduate may simply accept a second offer at XYZ company in Bay Area because they prefer to stay there.</p>
<p>“Interestingly, S was a senior at a lower Ivy when the economy tanked. Some prominent companies that used to faithfully recruit there, decided to leave his school off their circuit that year. It could have been due to the school’s size, or perhaps due to their location farther from a major metropolitan area, or maybe even their relatively lower prestige. Regardless, some large companies somehow narrowed down their list of targets to save manpower and money.”</p>
<p>Leaving aside the notion of “lower Ivy” (are silver and bronze medals in the Olympics “lower medals”?) – have you ever actually hired for a company? Because taking a school off the list doesn’t mean that the employer has suddenly decided that the school “isn’t prestigious” or doesn’t have smart students or whatever you’re so deathly afraid of. Companies streamline what they do for a bunch of reasons. Maybe travel budgets have tanked. Maybe the new head of HR really likes the town that College A is located in. Maybe the existing alums of College B are eager to go back to interview on campus. Maybe they’ve found that they have a hard time convincing people in College C to relocate to their location. It’s not just about “reputation and prestige.” It’s possible that the reputation and prestige is exactly the same - but employers are increasing their efficiency. </p>
<p>Tell me, if you decide to go from shopping at 2 grocery stores to shopping at one because you find the prices and service pretty much the same, do you think that the store you dropped is all of a sudden “less prestigious”?</p>
If I search for employees with the word “engineer” in their job title, the order is the same. If I search for quality job titles with a significant sample size, most spots remain the same. For example, for “software engineer” UCSD, SDSU, and USC remain in the same top 3 order, but Visvesvaraya (in India) gets #4. No matter what job title I choose, local colleges dominate when there is a significant sample size. </p>
<p>It’s been said repeatedly in these selective school discussions, that where a student goes to for undergrad is useless except for a small minority of specific majors. Is this discussion about undergrad or grad? If it’s about undergrad what’s the point? I don’t know what the statistics are for students at these selective schools to also land admission to a selective grad school, but I’m guessing it’s not high. I’m also misunderstanding the notion that Stanford is now rising and taking it’s place as the end all be all institution it deserves to be. I’m 41 and I’ve known about Stanford forever. It’s highly regarded around the world, Many people (myself included eons ago) thought it was an IVY (some still do if you ask the average person to name the IVY schools). In general the name of a school is important to most (why lie that’s the truth). People want others to recognize their school upon name and bow to it. (or be in awe whichever). As someone said these hordes of applications don’t come from all these students who have done years of research and come to the conclusion that this University is the best for them (when we know several at the undergrad level will do). Lets’ not forget the parental pressure as well. They need to be able to brag to the Johnsons next door.There’s brilliant students at these schools and there are some big time head scratchers as well. The mistake those who get all riled up make, is that they assume that those institutions hold the former and none of the later.</p>
<p>PG, the career office told the students the decision was budgetary, but it doesn’t matter why his school was removed from the recruitment circuit. The point is that it will be a truly rare day when Harvard is taken off the list of those companies. If they need to tighten their belt, if they don’t want to travel as far to go to X other school, if a new manager doesn’t like Brown or Dartmouth or Cornell, then those schools can be eliminated without a peep or call to justify.</p>
<p>I specified lower Ivy because I was setting up a contrast with the likes of Harvard. And yes, silver and bronze medals are in fact lower than gold medals, though still quite exemplary. Consequently, athletes with gold medals receive better endorsement deals than those with silver or bronze. </p>
<p>TVenee, I dislike when people claim undergrad doesn’t matter, because that assumes most people plan to become a doctor or lawyer or professor or PhD researcher or whatever other lofty profession requires that advanced degree. In reality, many people just get a job after their 4 years, so that undergrad degree is all they end up having. Only 10% of Americans have graduate degrees.</p>
<p>Again, not sure why discussing a low selectivity index at S equates with saying there are no “head scratchers” at S. So many straw men being set up here.</p>
<p>“PG, the career office told the students the decision was budgetary, but it doesn’t matter why his school was removed from the recruitment circuit. The point is that it will be a truly rare day when Harvard is taken off the list of those companies. If they need to tighten their belt, if they don’t want to travel as far to go to X other school, if a new manager doesn’t like Brown or Dartmouth or Cornell, then those schools can be eliminated without a peep or call to justify.”</p>
<p>You don’t get it - any school can be eliminated at any time, not because anyone is making a value judgment on the caliber of the students / school, but because things change. </p>
<p>And again, so what if company X decides one day to eliminate Brown or Dartmouth or Cornell? Is company X the only company on the planet? At the same time, company Y may be saying - hey, let’s add B / D / C to the list, and there you have it.</p>
<p>These schools all have an embarrassment of riches to offer their potential students. You really approach this whole thing from a scarcity mentality, not an abundance mentality. </p>