<p>If anyone has already linked the article form the Higher Education Chronicle, my apologies. *The abstract of the article referenced is the top link *. The bottom line? Certain elite employers care more about which college you attended and your ECs than your academic record.</p>
<p>Lauren</a> Rivera - Faculty - Kellogg School of Management</p>
<p>For jobs on the Wall Street, most likely yes. A graduate from Harvard (even major in History…)and Dartmouth is almost guaranteed a job there. For other jobs, may be not. It all depends.</p>
<p>Hmmm–so the way I read the abstract–the golden ticket is super elite education and extracurriculars. I wonder if all extracurriculars count the same or whether participation in sports trumps all…</p>
<p>I don’t know why these keep getting called “elite” employers. They are just the elite employers in a few chosen fields. There are “elite” employers in other fields as well.</p>
<p>Yes, a better definition of "elite"is required here. In terms of earning, Wall Street seems to be the best, with whopping $144 billion bonus entire pool for all WS employees(CNBC News), that is a nice dough to bring home for any family.</p>
<p>I spent 25 years in 2 super elite management consulting firms. School matters. A lot of these firms are open to very few in terms of young hires. Yet this article strikes me as misguided. Most all ivies, Stanford, MIT, top LACs, and other peer schools are valued in my industry.</p>
<p>I dying to know what an elite employer is.</p>
<p>She focuses on elite occupations- law, IB, and consulting- rather than elite employers (I believe…though she may have also chosen a few of the dominant employers in each).</p>
<p>Hiring is a powerful yet understudied way through which employers shape labor market inequalities. Although a number of recent studies have demonstrated that hiring practices systematically disadvantage certain groups of applicants, such as women, ethnic minorities, and individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds, existing research does not adequately explore why such outcomes occur. In the following dissertation, I seek to remedy this gap by opening up the “black box” of employer hiring decisions. Specifically, I examine how employers in three economically elite professions—investment banking, management consulting, and law—recruit and select new hires. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers and ethnographic observation of one hiring committee, I explore the criteria of evaluation employers use to assess the merit of job applicants and how processes of evaluation vary by profession. The dissertation brings together developments in economics, economic sociology, and applied management with the literature in cultural sociology to illuminate how micro-level processes of interpersonal evaluation contribute to macro-level labor market inequalities. Each empirical chapter unpacks one micro-level mechanism of labor market sorting: signaling, homophily, and emotion. These three mechanisms worked in tandem to produce new hire classes that largely mirrored a firm’s existing employee base in terms of educational, occupational, and extracurricular experiences and socio-economic status. Consequently, I argue that the ways elite employers evaluate job candidates contributes to a cultural reproduction (Bourdieu 1984) and social closure (Weber 1958) of high prestige professions at the point of hire. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)</p>
<p>Be careful about blanket proscriptions about hiring at regular companies, let alone “elite” ones. The key to all these is to think when someone says “come out of X with a degree, any degree, and you can get a job on wall st” how they know that or whether there is data to back that up, and there isn’t, at least not where Wall St is concerned.</p>
<p>First of all, what part of Wall Street are you talking about? Are you talking as a broker, financial adviser, IT person? Are you talking an investment banker, and if so which firm? Are you talking about a trader at any of the above firms? It all depends on what you are talking about.</p>
<p>Yes, investment banking firms (and elite management consulting firms) and the like do tend to take young hires from top schools, but I would dispute that it didn’t matter what someone studied (with some caveats, read on). Investment banking firms generally take students, often with graduate level degrees, from the top business programs, at schools like Wharton, Kellog, Yale, Harvard, etc, but having worked in the industry for many years, the degree does matter (obviously, it isn’t always business, Economics especially at the grad level can open doors, but predominantly business degrees in my experience). There is a place where students with degrees in history and such can get hired, but usually those are the result of connections, which still plays a big role in hiring in investment banking and international business. Whether it is family connections, or someone knows Rich who is an MD because they went to Harvard together, some jobs come from this path. (It is why absolutes fail). </p>
<p>With management consulting firms, like Mckimsey, again it is usually the the elite business schools they turn to, they tend to hire out of the top 10 business programs, either grad or undergrad with an edge to MBA level. Yes, there are people who get hired out of others schools and programs, but it is much more tough sledding.</p>
<p>These firms, like the white shoe law firms, also have resisted change through the years, though even they are changing. When I started working on Wall St, they tended to hire mostly men, and they tended to hire for the most part white protestant men, if you were Jewish, if you were Italian or Irish, it could work against you (again, not making this an ironclad rule, there are always exceptions, and firms that were founded by Jews, for example, like Goldman, were not exactly going to discriminate against Jewish folks), you get the drift. In the past 20 something years, that has changed. Management consulting firms, especially with the growth of Asia, are pretty eager to hire top candidates of Asian background because of the business they are doing in China, Korea and so forth, same for people with south Asian background in India and so forth. Investment banking firms will hire women, though from what I can tell there are still issues there, and these days they aren’t just hiring white protestant men,people from other background coming from the top programs get hired, so that has changed. </p>
<p>Trading, if you consider that elite, is different, the trading arms always tended to be a little less elite, if not lucrative, and was also a little more diverse back in the day. A lot of traders on trading floors and such didn’t go to ivies, they came out of a variety of places, and to this day that is still pretty true. Hedge funds are a mixed bag, depends on who founded the firm and the culture. I know of people running the show at a major hedge fund who never finished college (they seemed to have majored in parties), others who were blue bloods 7 generations at Harvard <em>shrug</em>.</p>
<p>In the end, what gets you in the door may be very mysterious, it depends on doing the hiring. If the hiring manager is an ivy alum, then going to the same school he did would be a big help, or if the firm tends to hire from a small group of ivies (which in turn means hiring managers came from those schools), then going there is obviously going to benefit you. You could also run into a situation where you go to hire someplace and don’t get the job, because while you went to a really top business school, the head of the department looks down on that school and that is that. </p>
<p>And in the end, what hiring managers anywhere usually look for, consciously or subconsciously, is people like themselves. Doesn’t necessarily translate into a particular race or religion or skin color (though those do play a role, even today, depending on the person), but rather someone they look at the person, look at their CV, and see someone who seems to share their outlook on things, in effect see themselves in the applicant as they were years ago themselves:). In terms of the “elite” jobs as mentioned in this thread, the way to look at it is if you come from a top level school, it loads the dice in your favor, if you have attributes that match the hiring managers ‘thing’ (played sports he/she did, went to the same school, knew some people in common, talk similarly) it loads the dice further in that direction; Have a connection to the firm, loads them even further towards being hired. Missing some of these things, and another candidate will be favored, even if on paper in same ways you were better (for example, you have a 4.0 but went to Dartmouth and played soccer instead of football, while another candidate played football and went to yale but only had a 3.9, but the hiring managers like football better and went to yale, well, latter person might get it). It also means, of course, that someone with the dice not as loaded gets hired because of other attributes, like the firm is doing business in China and a candidate comes in from NYU grad school who otherwise might be less attractive, but they speak Chinese and know a lot about the country and how it operates…</p>
<p>I remember the sadness in son when he was flown to NYC, SD, Mckinsey, etc–but never quite made the mark. He recalls being the only one from his college to be interviewed at several of these places. (In all honesty, a female also interviewed at M) In waiting room at a Wall St firm, there were a group from a certain college. They were greeted by alum from that school, and plans for dinner made. Its not that he wasn’t dined, flown out, given hotel, but he was an outsider. He probably looked too nerdy, less sophisticated. It was a bittersweet eye opener.</p>
<p>The kids I know of who got jobs in investment banking or consulting had extraordinarily high GPAs. </p>
<p>Perhaps they are exceptions to the rule.</p>
<p>Marian-
It depends on the candidate and their background. In general, a lot of the kids hired have high gpa’s who get hired in these places, but like any rule that applies sometimes and not others.</p>
<p>For example, if you have a 4.0 but it isn’t from one of the ‘top’ business schools, the chances of getting recruited, interviewed and hired is quite small, that I am pretty certain of, it takes a lot to overcome the bias for certain schools. </p>
<p>At an investment bank, and to a lesser extent management consulting firms, while many of the candidates have a transcript to die for from elite schools, even to this day a certain percentage of the hires are not hired because of GPA but because of who they know. Though a lot less prevalent then it once was, a certain percentage get hired because of what used to be called the old school tie, take a look at legacy students at the ivies, for example, and what ends up happening to them even though many don’t ‘burn up the firmament’, and you will see more then a few of them get into top notch companies even though they don’t particularly stand out but someone knows someone and so forth. </p>
<p>For someone without the old school tie, though, a high GPA is going to be de rigeour, I can almost guarantee that for these kinds of jobs.</p>
<p>Thanks for the insights, musicprnt.</p>
<p>I have long lived in the NY and global world of consulting and banking. What I can say without pause is that while school continues to matter, in the last decade I’ve seen an enormous shift away from the well connected to the truly brilliant in terms of getting elite jobs.</p>
<p>As the top schools have become decidedly more clear meritocracies, so have the top jobs in their own way. </p>
<p>As a woman in this world I was waiting for this. When would the day of the top prep school to top college to top job require more than being born into the right family? To a large extent that has happened, yet there are still inequities without a doubt.</p>
<p>And yet the clients who pay the mgt consultants – to whose tunes they must dance – aren’t necessarily elite grads themselves. And they are the ones with the money in the first place.</p>
<p>Musicprint, I dare you to find a single person hired by a management consulting firm (top tier- McKinsey, Bain, BCG) who was hired for “who they know” vs. the strength of their resume which includes their GPA/transcript and leadership in EC activities. I have worked in recruiting for top tier corporations for over 25 years and these firms simply do not care what connections you have. If you don’t have strong analytical, communication and leadership skills you will not get the job period full stop.</p>
<p>My company sees resumes all the time from top schools around the world- GPA matters to a huge extent, but tempered by other factors such as major, degree of difficulty within the major, etc. </p>
<p>This article sounds like an axe in search of a stone on which to grind.</p>
<p>I have colleagues who run recruiting at the large I-banks, the elite consulting firms, and top companies in consumer products, technology, VC firms, and private equity firms. There are many inefficiencies in the labor market-- but to claim that it doesn’t matter how you do once you get to college flies in the face of all the empirical data about elite companies and who and how they hire.</p>
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<p>I agree. How you do in college matters a lot. 20 years down the line yes at that point nobody really cares, but for your first few steps into the real world it’s very important.</p>
<p>I’m occasionally involved with recruiting and see CVs from the country’s top schools all the time. A strong school is certainly a plus but ultimately the person has to have the goods… I’m not going to hire someone because of where they went to school and neither would my colleagues in other leading businesses. That doesn’t even make sense. </p>
<p>As for “connections” yes it can help… but only at the very beginning of the process. Having connections on the inside might get your CV a second look or help with getting a first interview but beyond that point your on our own. Again, if you don’t have the goods you’re not going to get hired regardless of who you know.</p>
<p>As for the article, I agree it sounds like someone has an axe looking for a stone. And based on this sort of ridiculous language:</p>
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<p>…it sounds like they could do with learning how to express their ideas without sounding like an academic that is hopelessly out of touch with the real world.</p>
<p>I read this thread and I smile.</p>
<p>How do you decide between qualified candidates? </p>
<p>A freind of mine who worked for one of the elite banks told me of a time when a decision had to be made between two very qualified candidates. </p>
<p>The one with the bigger breasts got the job. The guy who made the decision said, “I am going to work with the new employee, so I might as well choose the more attractive candidate”.</p>
<p>I think physical appearance is a huge determinant for many jobs…even elite jobs.</p>
<p>^ Depressing but probably true. The high GPA average at ‘elite schools’ suggest the variance is small…and probably even moreso for those interested and applying to industries that care about GPA. So the school and GPA are a given…so who gets chosen beyond that is probably based on all kinds of nonsense. Just like how the elite colleges themselves have way too many top scoring students, so they just have to pick among them looking at the entirely subjective stuff.</p>
<p>Funny you say that Dstark. DH, who has long participated in recruiting for his bank, and I were at an ivy earlier this year, DS and I tagging along for a look at the college. I attended a cocktail event with his top picks and commented on how dramatically the look of the group had changed. </p>
<p>They weren’t all 6’3" plus georgous WASP males! There were more pimply, short boys!! Impossible in our day. We talked about how much the interview process had changed from then. Interviews have become incredibly substantive with candidates given challenging scenarios to address. They used to be casual discussions about sailing and Nantucket.</p>
<p>We’ve always been more substantive in consulting:)</p>