What makes UCB, MIT, Standford, etc. so much better

[sakky]

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I have to disagree with the networking comment as a reason why top tier schools are automatically superior to (not surprisingly) USNWR lower ranked schools. If Harvard grads are the only people to have access to the network of Harvard alumns, then by that logic someone from Stanford will never have access to those possibilities. .

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<p>First off, I never said that networks were completely exclusive. School ties are obviously not the only way to build a network, and I never said that they were.</p>

<p>What I am saying is that school ties are one of the most powerful ways to build ties. Like I said in my previous post, it is quite undeniable that a lot of career moves happen through networking that is fostered by school ties. Again, consider how the founders and many of the early employees of Google all “coincidentally” happened to come from Stanford, or how the founders and many of the early employees of Facebook alll came from Harvard. </p>

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While I highly question the accuracy (or actual effect) of the 90% of jobs claim, experience should make much more of a difference than where you graduated from

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<p>Pick up any job-advice book or go to any job-advice website and inevitably they will tell you how important it is to use your network. Extensive academic literature has also been written about the importance of social networks in fostering job mobility and business success. To give you just one quote, from Elliott (2001) of the paper “Referral Hiring and Ethnically Homogeneous Jobs: How Prevalent Is the Connection and for Whom?” in the journal Social Science Research, and which gives you several other references which you are free to read yourself.</p>

<p>*“…answers to the distribution question focus on the salience of social
networks for finding employment (Aponte, 1996; Cohn and Fossett, 1996; Elliott, 1999, 2000; Kasinitz and Rosenberg, 1996; Sassen, 1995; Waldinger, 1997). Instead of emphasizing well-documented declines in blue-collar jobs, a social network approach highlights the functions that personal contacts play in the labor market. These functions are essentially twofold. At the most basic level, contacts can provide job seekers with timely information about employment opportunities that may not be widely or publically known. Second, contacts can refer, or sponsor, job seekers, thereby improving their odds of acquiring particular positions. This second function is especially relevant in cases in which the contact is already working for the prospective employer.”</p>

<p>*</p>

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While I highly question the accuracy (or actual effect) of the 90% of jobs claim, experience should make much more of a difference than where you graduated from.

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<p>We can say whatever we want about what should happen. But that’s not relevant. What is relevant is what does happen, and like it or not, experience often times does not matter as much as where you graduated from.</p>

<p>Consider this quote from Fortune</p>

<p>*For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon–America’s top engineering schools–even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. “If you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, they don’t want you,” says an employee. *</p>

<p><a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;