Based on my hiring experieces, for those graduating from college and looking for thier first job, yes the school they went to matters - there were target schools that we recruited from. But once you get in, its grit and resiliance that moves you up the ladder.
I have to admit, when, in the course of my practice I have done forensic work and have been deposed or testified on the stand, I think where I did my undergrad did make a bit of a difference WRT my credibility.
@jym626 Yes, if you are selling expertise or are bring paid for what you know/how you think, it will matter. This is particularly true if you are the head of the business. Strangely, at some point experience matters more, of course. But the school is an easy way for clients/people to tell what kind of student you were. It means a lot to many. Not that much to others. I do find highly educated folks from brand name schools seek the same in both where they do business and where they send their children.
Internships play a big role in hiring, and there are certain highly prestigious internships that are only available to students at certain Universities. One example: Go to a US school and want to intern at the Bank of England? Better be a Harvard undergrad. Iâm aware of other, similar opportunities that are limited to students at Yale, Stanford, Princeton and MIT. All highly prestigious schools with powerful alumni networks.
Getting those kind of internships is no guarantee of eventual job placement, but when a kid is applying in a crowded field at bulge bracket firms, consulting, etc., having internships on their resume with a huge âwowâ factor can really set them apart.
I did a LinkedIn search for past interns at Bank of England. Almost all attended colleges in the UK. I didnât see Harvard students among the few US interns. However, I did see various other US colleges. BoEs website also does not suggest Harvard (or similar) is a requirement.
That said, banking is a unique field in which prestige of college attended can an important factor in hiring decisions. However, banking/finance is the exception, not the rule. Hiring in most fields is very different and generally places little emphasis on college prestige, as discussed in a variety of references from earlier in the thread.
If I instead search for internships at larger companies that are typically thought of as highly desirable in the United States, such as Google, a wide variety of colleges are represented, usually with a variety of different prestige levels. Itâs never just HYP⊠Some particular colleges are over and underrepresented for a variety of reasons that depend on the specific company and field within that company.
@Happytimes2001 - while expertise may now matter more, my graduate school training happened to be from a university that is a sports rival of the state flagship here, so I think my undergrad school gets more respect! The grad program I attended is very well known/respected within the specialty (ie others in my filed know it is highly regarded) but as an expert witness, probably not so much.
What people seem to be ignoring here is the vast number of jobs and the vast number of people required to fill those jobs, versus the fairly small number of people who graduates from the colleges that are constantly being mentioned here, and the small number of jobs that are mentioned here.
Most employees in the financial sector arenât living and working in NY or LA, and most tech workers are not working in Silicon Valley. The median income of new college grads is about $48,000, and the biggest difference is between those and the workers without college degrees, whose starting income has a median of around $20,000.
Most college graduates are going to settle in a suburban or small urban area, and look for a job in the vicinity. They are not going to go to NY and looking for jobs Goldman-Sachs or go to Palo Alto and look for a job at Nvidia or Google.
That means, that, for most college graduates, the most important factors in getting a job are, first and foremost, that they have a degree, and second, far behind, whether the local employer recognizes the name of the college and has a good opinion of it. In general, local is better. In Peoria or Normal, IL, for most jobs, a degree from UIUC is better than a degree from Cornell. A degree from Williams, Pomona, or Dartmouth may get a a blank stare. Same for UCSD, Brown, or many of the West and East Coast colleges which have very small numbers of students from the Midwest. A degree Caltech or Columbia may get no more than a vague âI think Iâve heard of that collegeâ.
Where one goes to school matters, but not in the way that people here seem to think, based on their focus on a small section of colleges, a small section of the country, and a small section of the employment sector.
Again, if you are addressing a jury in Tuscaloosa, which degree do you think will add most to your credibility, one from Dartmouth College or one from University of Alabama?
PS. One should never advertise their U Michigan degree when testifying in Dayton. Just donât.
Have seen that local effect here in FL as well. A UF or FSU degree hols a lot of wait at local employers. Alumni is pretty fierce locally as well.
I think an important variable is what the graduate plans on doing and where those companies are. Not a lot of large companies in the Tampa area. Of the national brands that have major regional shops here, itâs only for certain types of jobs. So yes you can go to FSU and get a job in Tampa at Citi, but itâs a back office, compliance / ops type job. If thatâs what you want, thatâs fine. If you want to be doing something else, you need to work somewhere else (in this example). Thatâs where it gets dicey. Who has a better shot at the higher profile jobs in a different city, the kid who stays in FL or the one who goes to that market?
I agree though that the average kid is going to stay fairly local and find some employment locally.
@mwolf sounds like you live in a very different area than most on CC.
You left out one very pertinent fact. The best paying jobs will ALWAYS recruit the best candidates possible. Just basic supply and demand. So sorry if you/your kids are looking for a 40k job then maybe the bar is purely local. But HR is usually a function of the corporation. So that company has to be local and pay low wages. If not, people will apply from across the US.
Saying that people in some small town have never heard of Dartmouth or Williams is just insulting. I live in a very small town. And everyone knows those schools. Today, kids and parents look at USNews. So many people have good knowledge about colleges.
Btw, many amazing companies are located in unusual places. They still get top people to work there. Your argument might be valid if you are talking about unwillingness to move.
How would we know unless we graduated simultaneously from two different schools?
This is all anecdotal.
Yes someone may be taken more seriously on the stand from x versus y school as an expert. We think. Or we perceive. But itâs still conjecture.
We donât know what anyone else is thinking.
Maybe the thought was that someone is an expert because they were on the stand as an expert. Maybe the jury wouldnât know the difference.
Maybe everyone was actually thinking about whatâs for dinner?
How far down the so called ranking does this matter?
For the 325000000 million Americans less a few million grads and minute number of status conscious employers, and CC posters like myself, most would be impressed with a degree period. A degree from a top 50 or 100 school all sounds like out of reach. Most would actually know the football and basketball powerhouses as the great schools.
Itâs all full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
You can make it in this country from anywhere. You can get a running head start from a great school.
Also access to members of Congress would not be a selling point to most teens. Lol.
The current speaker went to a school Iâve actually never heard of before. So thatâs a bit inverted if the reason why h is so much better is to have a chance to meet a woman from auto admit small u somewhere is a bit backwards.
H s p and m are the only ones that might matter in this regard imho. If at all, outside of cc and the groups referenced.
@Happytimes2001 and @privatebanker, you can mock, you can âconjectureâ, but from at least my n of 1 over the past many decades, professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) are quite familiar with top LACs and other elites. My undergrad school name got me credibility, maybe less so with a jury, but for sure with the attorneys who hired and/or deposed me, or if I simply was a treating doc that saw a client now involved in litigation.
As someone above said, it perhaps set a bar that there was some level of âintellectual chopsâ (for lack of a better phrase) from having graduated with honors from such a school. They read my resume, they had my vitae - my credentials and expertise to qualify me as an expert read into the record. All this occurs well before testimony in a jury trial. Most cases settle well before then and the credibility is a helpful component well before any potential juror is ever involved, if at all.
And as another anecdote, my sâs both work in SV. S#1, who went to a top 20 school known well to ccâers but maybe less so in the âreal worldâ, had multiple interviews for the initial job he had out there. The final interview (of 9 or more) was with a high level employee at that company⊠who happened to have the same undergrad degree⊠and from the same university⊠as S#1. It couldnât hurt. As we say, for some of these schools, many of those in the know, know.
Now all that said, do I think students âneedâ to go to a top school? Of course not. But can it be helpful? Of course so.
As mentioned above, my graduate training was from a sports rival of the local flagship U. That led to an occasional wisecrack, but never, ever did I hear any flippant comment about my undergrad. school.
No mockery at all. Just opinion. Same as the one you just provided. Valuable and worthy of hearing. Doesnât make it fact for all man kind.
Just like mine doesnât either. In your case it mattered. In others it didnât. Not conclusive to me.
The mocking was the other poster, but if the shoe fitsâŠ
What I shared was decades of personal experience, not âopinionâ . No matter.
No it doesnât. I just thought by stating it to both you werenât particularly clear or accurate. I wanted you to be sure that was the case. And I wasnât even replying in reference to you prior to being called out. Mine was the to the cc universe only.
So perhaps for some it needs to be spelled out⊠word. for.word⊠For others they can understand.
So, back to topic - sometimes where you attend college can matter, (as in help open doors, provide some baseline âcredibilityâ, etc, ) and sometimes it matters not.
I am so sorry that you feel the need to feel insulted in the name of a couple of super wealthy colleges which serve the wealthy, because I didnât genuflect before I mentioned their hallowed names.
I wish that people were so quick to jump to the aid of poor people, women, or PoC when they are attacked as they are to jump to the defense of colleges with billions in endowments, and a student population of who the majority are in the top 20% by income. I guess that the wealthy do need our support and compassion as they try to navigate through their harsh world of awful privilege, horrendous unearned benefits, and and the terror of a vast array of benefits that are not available to the majority of kids. The horror! The horror!
You seem oblivious of the fact that $40,000 jobs make up about 40%-45% of the jobs that new college graduates get. Why are you dismissing social workers, counselors, school teachers, nurses, in fact all the people who actually help the world move, as being so unimportant?
Most people in the USA donât make more than $100,000 a year. Most people in the USA donât send their kids to expensive private prep schools. Most kids in the USA who are looking at colleges arenât thinking of working on Wall Street and making $85,000 ]as an entry salary. Most kids in the USA arenât vowing âIvy or Bust!!!â or "My Kingdom for an Elite Acceptance!!.
Newsflash: most parents donât obsessively look through USNews rankings and salivate over the âT-20â colleges like a dirty old man with a centerfold, nor are they choosing the colleges to which they send their kids based on the USNews ranking.
Then here is something upon which you should ruminate: at most 1% attend of the kids from families in the bottom 80% of the population attend an âeliteâ college like Williams. The chances that a kid from 80% of the population has a friend or family member who has attended, or even knows somebody who has attended, an âeliteâ college is tiny.
Newsflash #2: most HR specialists are from the bottom 80%. So they will not hear about places like Williams from their own friends and family, and are unlikely to have seen many resumes from Williams. Overall, there are very few Williams alumni around the world*, so the chances of anybody hiring a Williams alumni are low.
Yet you seem to think that all of these should somehow have heard about a college because you deem it important, based on itâs USNews rankâŠ
Like many here, you seem oblivious to how little the rest of the country know or care about the vast majority of the âeliteâ colleges which people here think are so renown and revered worldwide.
Dartmouth is not much better (there are maybe twice as many Dartmouth alumni as Williams alumni). I am pretty sure that most of the USA would not be able to tell you the names of more than 4 Ivy league universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and maybe Brown or Columbia. Most will forget that Cornell is an Ivy, and most will not know of Dartmouth and UPenn (or confuse UPenn and Penn State). Iâm in academia, and I have been know to refer to Dartmouth as âthat other Ivy in the mountains, you know, the one that they call a âcollegeâ, even though itâs a universityâ. Weirdly, more are likely to have heard of Wharton than have heard of UPenn.
Sorry, that is simply how life is - the colleges for whom you are willing to challenge me to a duel at dawn for impugning their honor, are not important enough to most Americans to memorize their names and locations.
BTW, the 24,000 applications that Dartmouth received are a drop in the bucket of all applicants out there.
PS. My kid has a lot of privilege, and our contacts and connections will allow her to pursue her career goals a lot more easily that it would be for a much lower SES kid. She is attending an excellent college, which almost nobody in Chicagoland seems to have heard of, but she would be able to do the same had she attended UIUC or UMN. her next salary will likely be lower than $40,000, since that is what a graduates TA makes.
- There are more undergraduates attending UIUC now (almost 34,000) than there are total Williams alumni living (30,000). There are 450,000 living UIUC alumni, and only about 65,000 living Dartmouth alumni, BTW.
and, @privatebanker, you wrote
right after my discussion about my experience as an expert witness and being deposed or called to testify. But you werenât referencing those posts? That seems rather disingenuous⊠Maybe you were talking about âpeople in generalâ? Maybe you were talking about a plumber who was testifying about a plumbing-related incident in a building Sure. Ok. ?
Yes one can talk about experts in general, but right on the heels of one person sharing their experience⊠as they say, a. reasonable person would assume /see the association,
So rather than bicker about semantics, lets be real. The vast majority of students travel no more than a few hundred miles from home for college. There are several thousand colleges/universities and only a handful of elite, ânameâ colleges/LACs/universities. And as someone said, many are small. So of course the vast majority of students are not going to attend the âelitesâ. But, bottom line, can in some situations the name of the college one attended âmatterâ (as the thread title asks?) Yes, in some circumstances, it can.
Just an added thought⊠Depending on location, sometimes where you go to school gets very diluted because there are so many grads in the area. When we lived in Central NY after graduation, there were hundreds and hundreds of Cornellians in our alumni association. Saying you went to Cornell was a whatever. (And most Cornellians I know just say they went to school in the Finger Lakes).
I live in Evanston now, 1/2 our street went to Northwestern for either undergrad or grad school. There is no âwowâ factor.
That said, I do think in some areas, like IB or politics, it can matter where you go to school, especially grad school.
As a funny aside, my D did shadowing at one of the NASA sites. She sat in on a meeting with some of the higher ups and when she was introduced as being a Purdue student, 1/2 the room yelled âBoiler Up!â She is finding that for engineering, Purdueâs reputation is opening doors. Probably not what people are thinking here when they talk about the âelitesâ.
@jym626 Donât know where you got me on the side of mocking excellent colleges. I have always been and will always be a person who believes that the school matters. And like you, I believe in many fields it is entirely necessary. You cited being an expert witness and I cited getting clients who look at the education before hiring ( many tell me this thatâs how I know). Yes, many can do great things from any school. But some colleges open more doors. I think you have me confused with another poster.