<p>R- I agree with you 100% about how parents should be emphasizing ethical behavior, being a good citizen and all that good stuff. However, your company’s hiring practices are not universal (although they sound wonderful and holistic and I’m sure yield terrific results.) Both my own company as well as others I have worked for focus quite narrowly on a certain set of schools in their recruiting. Some functions are much looser and others are quite narrow, but it would not be accurate to say that a person from U. Montana has as good a chance of getting an entry level or mid-level job as a person from Swarthmore or Princeton.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, an exceptionally persistent and talented kid from any place could talk themselves into an interview (and we do ask GPA, SAT scores, and yes, we know which schools are grade inflated and which ones are not. And yes, a 3.3 from Cornell Engineering is much better than a 4.0 from Dickinson in Sociology). </p>
<p>However, it is much harder for that persistent and talented kid to get that interview. To be blunt, recruiting is just a numbers game, and it’s much more cost effective for us to go where the “fish are biting” than to send teams of people all over the country where they may interview 200 seniors to extend 1 offer. We’d rather be at Stanford or MIT or Yale- not because the kids are morally superior or smarter or whatever… but because whatever qualities it takes to have a 4.5 GPA at MIT (they use a 5 point scale) jives nicely with what it takes to be successful here. Call it long hours, tough quantitative problems, the need to work well with your team mates-- it’s just more efficient for us to go where a large chunk of the class exhibits those skills, rather than a place where we are striking out most of the time.</p>
<p>Is this right? I’m sure not in the macro sense. Does it make sense for us? Absolutely. We could spend millions more in recruiting than we do now, but it’s not clear that our shareholders would benefit. </p>
<p>I think your company’s policies are terrific, but they are not universal.</p>