The vast majority of new grads across the country do not go to work for big companies. Most go to work for small to medium-sized companies who tend to hire from the local institutions. I worked in lab management for a mid-sized medical devices company in Orange County California and we hired chemistry grads primarily from Cal State Fullerton and UCI. For marketing and technical writing positions we hired English and science grads who could write and/or sell from mostly the same schools.
DH hires for an engineering (nanotechnology) company. He says the internships candidates have had and how they talk about the work they did in the internship is far more important than the college and coursework. But, I suppose most of the applicants he gets around here went to one of the UCs or Calpoly SLO, so they are all probably in the middle of the prestige range.
That’s fine and all, but what mooop really wants to know is if you are stunningly beautiful, witty, & charming…
I am none of those things, Hebegebe. But my stunningly beautiful, witty and charming friends (some from old money) are happier being married to men who were what they seemed to be while dating- kind, generous and hard-working; than my BWC friends who looked for the Wow factor while dating… and came to realize that Wow in a boyfriend can be a dud in a spouse.
As other posters have pointed out, much of the sorting is based on pure practicalities. My own experience has been hiring for a large Wall Street law firm and a bulge bracket IB, and the considerations were the same for both firms. Whether we were hiring first year law year associates, analysts or IB associates, we were trying to find the most qualified employees for the positions to be filled. The primary qualities we looked for were intellectual horse power, communication and interpersonal skills, energy and work ethic. The time and resources we had for hiring was limited. The selectivity and quality of education of various colleges, law schools and B schools acted as an initial filter for us. It was more likely that we would find a greater number of top quality candidates at the top schools than other schools. We sent 2 interviewers to each of Stanford and Berkeley law schools to spend a full day there, and maybe 1 of us would spend half a day at Hastings after pre-screening resumes and transcripts. I am sure there were some more highly qualified candidates at Hastings that we never saw than some we saw at Stanford and Berkeley, but as a business you allocate your time and resources to higher probability opportunities. This same type of resource allocation was applied to B school recruiting and undergrad recruiting.
As we got further down the funnel, the institution mattered less and the individual qualifications mattered much more. Although I would say, all other things being equal, a top quartile student from YLS or Stanford BS would be viewed much differently than a top quartile student from UCLA or UT law or business schools. @Sherpa’s son captures the process pretty well.
@blossom You are so right. People who marry for the right reasons often stay married. Kind, generous and hard working goes a long way in a long marriage. Looking good in a pair of jeans-nice but not as important at 50 as it was at 25.
There are lots of ways that a kid who ends up a school with low-recognition can get the attention of the people who make hiring decisions- even at company’s which are very prestige oriented.
But I’ve posted about this before and got a torrent of PM’s about what an elitist I am for working for one of those companies so I will cease and desist.
But suffice it to say- majoring in recreation management and getting a 3.0 GPA at University of Southern CT is not going to get the doors blown open for you at Bridgewater, Bain or DE Shaw.
Rigor matters. Content matters. Taking courses outside of your comfort zone matters. And writing a grammatical and coherent cover letter and resume matters. Taking down your “iampartygurl hotmail” email address and scrubbing your public social media profile to get rid of pictures of you on Spring break matters…
In UCB’s post, the section in quotes was a direct quote from a law recruiter, not the author. Ignoring that, the author is a Northwestern professor whose focus of research for the past decade has been hiring at elite firms. She’s written more than a dozen peer reviewed papers on the subject, as well as a 400 page book, which won numerous awards and is used as a textbook in classes at various other universities. Her research involved analyzing hiring practices at hundreds of “elite” companies in several fields, including interviewing hundreds of professionals involved in hiring decisions, as well as having them make decisions on mock resumes. I don’t doubt that her summaries suggest an agenda, but to say she is “completely clueless” based on personal experience at a much smaller number of companies is extreme.
@Data10, I noted that Law was the only industry that fit @ucbalumnus’s framework.
Though note that the traditional legal industry is dying outside of specialized fields like patent law that require a strong STEM background.
And here is the take of a few MBB consultants on Rivera:
http://theamericanscene.com/2011/12/07/how-elite-business-recruiting-really-works
The general view in MC is that she doesn’t know what she is talking about.
IB is more about pedigree though note that there are changes there too. There’s been a shift towards undergrad b-schools (which favors publics) who require less teaching and that whole industry may be disrupted.
However, if the people from lower tier schools don’t get the interview slots, that’s still a huge advantage to attending an elite school.
We all know that some companies do care about prestige at whatever level they hire. Going to a good high school helps, but it’s not absolutely necessary to get into a prestigious college. It’s easier to get internships from a college people have heard of. Many internships have a minimum GPA so you better also be successful at your college.
But you know most people don’t want to work at Bain, or whatever other places Blossom mentioned. (I’ve already forgotten the names!) Architects hire mostly from the local architecture school - my Columbia degree was worth squat when I went out to California to join my boyfriend now husband. Lots of companies are happy to take the local talent.
Med schools take kids from all over, but the GPAs will get scrutinized more if the admissions committees don’t know your college.
I think my son’s Tufts background helped him with IR internships, though both internships were most interested in what he’d done with Excel on a summer job, and what he’d done organizing some sort of database at an internship in Jordan.
“However, if the people from lower tier schools don’t get the interview slots, that’s still a huge advantage to attending an elite school.”
It’s an advantage. Like I said before, however, life doesn’t end at undergrad. MBB hire PhDs. Both MC and banks hire from MBA programs (and master’s programs*). Big Law hires from the T14. MC takes industry veterans who actually know something (IB does too). You have to be stellar enough to get in to a PhD or T14 or M7 or be a heavy hitter in a field but you’d have to be stellar at some point anyway.
In any case, MC and (especially) IB and (very especially) Big Law aren’t the end-all and be-all.
*One guy I met went to Columbia’s Teacher’s College just to land something on the Street. He ended up in S&T at GS.
There are lots of ways that a kid who ends up a school with low-recognition can get the attention of the people who make hiring decisions- even at company’s which are very prestige oriented.
But I’ve posted about this before and got a torrent of PM’s about what an elitist I am for working for one of those companies so I will cease and desist.
But suffice it to say- majoring in recreation management and getting a 3.0 GPA at University of Southern CT is not going to get the doors blown open for you at Bridgewater, Bain or DE Shaw.
Rigor matters. Content matters. Taking courses outside of your comfort zone matters. And writing a grammatical and coherent cover letter and resume matters. Taking down your “iampartygurl” email address and scrubbing your public social media profile to get rid of pictures of you on Spring break matters…
I hired many faculty members when I was department chair or on recruitment committees in a social science department. I never knew what high school any job candidate attended, and I didn’t care. I rarely knew and didn’t care what undergraduate college they had attended, but I might notice what they majored in. I cared most about the quality of the PhD program the applicant studied at, who she worked with (major professor), what skills she had (language, statistics, computers), her research and publications, her teaching experience. I didn’t care about GPA or test scores. I paid attention to letters of recommendation.
Now it could well be that applicants from the better PhD programs tended to come from more selective undergraduate institutions. We know that some colleges are feeder schools to doctoral programs. But it would do my own department no good at all to search for or prefer students who came from particular undergraduate institutions.
What’s the “traditional” legal industry that’s dying?
I’ve read there are too many law grads for too few jobs, but not that there is less need for lawyers of all types.
@OHMomof2: “I’ve read there are too many law grads for too few jobs, but not that there is less need for lawyers of all types.”
Automation/AI is killing and will replace more law jobs. Say “lucrative legal jobs are drying up” if you like. It’s the same effect.
Purple- I think a more accurate description is that the middle market legal jobs are drying up.
There are still plenty of jobs at the high end, high billing white shoe law firms. There are still plenty of jobs in the public sector/public defender/immigration lawyers who work with the indigent.
But the mid-sized firms, the four lawyer/one para and a receptionist model is feeling the heat. The days where a 7th year associate who wasn’t going to make partner at a big firm could waltz into an in-house counsel role for a hefty salary-- these are the kinds of job feeling the pressure from AI, the outsourcing of a lot of low end clerical e-discovery work, etc.
It is not that consideration of which PhD program the applicant studied at implies consideration of which undergraduate school the applicant studied at, but that it carries an implicit consideration of *how well the applicant did as an undergraduate/i, since that affects which PhD program was willing to admit the applicant.
Obviously, this is not to say that recent achievements during and after PhD study are not highly important, since they obviously are for faculty hiring.
@ucbalumnus:
“It is not that consideration of which PhD program the applicant studied at implies consideration of which undergraduate school the applicant studied at, but that it carries an implicit consideration of how well the applicant did as an undergraduate (regardless of which undergraduate school), since that affects which PhD program was willing to admit the applicant.”
Do you consider that surprising or wrong?
Though it’s not quite true that only undergrad matters. I know of too many examples of people who effed up undergrad but turned it around later, doing well in a master’s program or somewhere and got in to a PhD program or med school and became a renown prof/doctor.
But yes, you would have to be stellar at some point to attain an elite position.
Is that shocking or wrong to you somehow?
We currently are outside observers of grad school admissions. Our ds’s very serious girlfriend that he met at an REU (at an elite school) is a physics UG at ND (both of her parents are drs.) Both applied to the exact same list of physics grad programs and their acceptance list is a mirror image of each other. So one applicant is a full merit scholarship attendee at Bama and the other is from a higher SES background at ND. They have both been accepted to some top depts.