Somehow, these topics always seem to evolve into talk about finding and selecting the elite of the elite of the elite (often in a specific area) among students and colleges and sometimes employees and employers.
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You might be right although my understanding is that doing well requires creative thinking and insights rather than simply pure knowledge.
One facet of Oxbridge interviews is that they will push you until youāre stuck and then see how you manage through it (and asking for help/engaging the interviewers is actually perceived to be a strength!).
I think that is often true.
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Although this has been ascribed to me by more than one poster, I have never claimed this. In fact, Iām an advocate of just the opposite. Colleges are absolutely different. I have a preference for schools with small class sizes, minimal reliance on TAs, with a penchant for project based learning. I have a long history of support for schools like that, and have shouted it from the trees, probably ad nauseam.
What Iāve said, that gets misconstrued, is that for certain majors, mainly engineering, the average earnings at two years, as catalogued by College Scorecard, are essentially the same.
As a result, Iām not saying all schools are the same, but that many, certainly not all, schools lead to the same point.
Some also mistake my advocacy for price consciousness as claiming all schools are the same. Again, they are not. Given though that for most engineering degrees final earnings outcomes are similar, it isnāt worth leverage that will hinder a student or their family to buy up to a ābetterā school.
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And how they become that way. Is it intrinsic or is it the institution? Iām a believer that itās the former.
Iād bet $ that U of Alabama kid was a national merit. Not surprising at all. And the kid likely went there on a free ride. I agree, people donāt know that certain fields exist particularly if they come from a low SES. In addition to not knowing about particular fields, some canāt break into these careers which place merit on elite schools but more importantly exclude on the basis of common interests. You will find more lacrosse players( and other elite sports), kids from top 1% SES and other financial excluders than in other careers. So if youāre kid looks around they will find not only the elite name of the college but the elite upbringing of her co-workers.
Not sure if this will change in the years ahead with more 1st gen, low income going to college. My guess is, things will change only slightly esp in finance.
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This is a strength of my oldest. I donāt think many US based educations try to build this skill. Some private schools/public schools and programs do this esp. debate do try to develop the skill. My kids used to do debate and one of the best skills they learned was thinking on your feet and responding to other people. The second and more important skill was recognizing that someone elseās opinion is valid and being open minded enough to hear another personās arguments. Was worth every penny on that account.
The issue with most US education is that there isnāt enough room for discussion in the classroom. Classes can be too large and teachers stick to a pre-defined curriculum. So these skills arenāt developed over K-12 in most schools. This is unfortunate as they are critical skills in the workplace and at University.
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There are industries where the name makes a difference. Finance is certainly one of them. Itās probably more about confirmation bias though than actual skill differentiation attributable to the college. The analyst from UA is a great example.
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Thatās correct. Knowledge isnāt what tests like IMO are about. Calculus isnāt even needed, let alone knowledge of higher levels of math. Theyāre more about creativity and ingenuity in problem solving.
The advantage of an academically focused interview is to see how an applicant approaches and tackles a problem, her/his thought process and ability to deal with them when encountering difficulties.
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IMO, schools are accepting the students they want. If Caltech and MIT want āmathyā students, thatās who they accept. If a school wants to concentrate on writing skills (even for engineers), the AOs will spend more time on the essays. I used to type papers for an engineer (then in law school) who didnāt use commas because the didnāt look nice on the paper - they āhung below the lineā. His engineering school obviously didnāt care about writing (and he was a terrible writer).
Foreign schools admit based on numbers. Thatās who they want to admit. American schools are more of a mixed bag. I donāt think that makes an engineer (or the school) better or worse. Are the employers favoring one type of education over another? Are engineers from both types of schools able to do the work?
NOBODY who hires for a living in finance claims that it is skill differentiation. And it is not confirmation bias either (thatās quite a logical leap btwā¦). It reflects the fact that banks are profit-generating organizations, which means they are conscious of costs in every single function- whether client facing or not. And the marginal cost of sending a team to U Montana and Southern Illinois State is likely higher than the additive value of finding the three students in Montana and the five students in Southern Illinois who want to relocate to NY, London, Charlotte, etc. for their first job AND want to work the lifestyle of a newbie banker.
Despite what folks on CC continue to post- the top tier banks hire from Wharton et al because thatās where the talent is thick on the ground, and you donāt need forensic level skills to identify it, interview it, and meet your recruiting targets
End of story. Nobody in hiring thinks its at all about skill differentiation- just that thereās so much of it. And living an urban, new banker lifestyle is not off-putting to a large percentage of the class.
Best example that comes to mind right now- BYU. It has always had a strong finance and accounting orientation. If your early career programs are primarily domestic- even if you are a global bank- there is no reason to add BYU to your target list if youāre happy with the numbers you are getting elsewhere. But if you need the flexibility- or itās part of your strategy- to take high performers and send them to Hong Kong or Frankfurt or Shanghai or Mumbai for two years- youāre going to start recruiting at BYU. Thatās the Venn diagram you are looking at. Youāre not declaring that kids who graduate from Rhodes who are fluent in German and who want to work in finance are somehow defective. Itās just MUCH easier to cherrypick the resumes of the BYU kids who did their mission in Germany (or in 80 other countries and are multilingual) AND have some degree of confidence that they understand that working overseas isnāt some version of summer camp or junior year abroadā¦
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āEliteā investment banking is more the exception than the rule. Few employers emphasize eliteness of college reputation in hiring decisions, and few employers limit recruiting to āeliteā colleges. Instead when employers do not have the time or resources to recruit everywhere, they consider things like location, how many quality hires they are likely to get, and past history with the college. For example, it might be less time and resource intensive for a hot SV startup to attend a San Jose State career fair than to travel to Harvard, even if SJSU is not perceived to be as āelite.ā
Iām not particularly familiar with University of Alabama, but I expect they get a disproportionately large number of Alabama employers at their career fairs. And I expect the UAlabama student body contains a disproportionately large number of kids who grew up in Alabama, have famliy/friends in Alabama, and would prefer to work in Alabama after graduating. If a kid wants to work in the Alabama area after graduating, I expect UAlabama offers a variety of unique benefits. This does not mean that only Alabama companies recruit at Alabama. Larger companies often attend career fairs at a variety of large colleges all over the country, including many flagships. Itās more that there is a regional bias in which companies attend a career fair, particularly at public colleges.
In general, Iād expect Ivy+ accepted kids who choose UAlabama to save money to also have great outcomes, even if the specific employers and career paths may differ. If you anecdotally look at a particular kid with a great outcome, itās difficult to know whether the outcome would have also been comparably good, had they they attended a different college.
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Itās also the case that most CS and engineering careers which contribute to those āaverageā earnings are not particularly prestige sensitive (perhaps with the exception of raising money for a startup).
Arguably a higher proportion of math careers, whether in academia or in places like quant finance, are more prestige sensitive (and there are generally fewer of them).
So it makes sense for outstanding math students to cluster at a smaller number of schools compared to outstanding engineering or CS students.
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My guess is that this feeds into the Putnam Exam. Otherwise, I would think a more productive use of brainpower/time would be getting involved in some original research with a mathematicianā¦ Contests donāt really have much impact on society; theyāre more an individual endeavorā¦
The original research by a mathematician, or would-be mathematician, is to solve some as yet unsolved mathematical problems, isnāt it? And the ability demonstrated in solving highly challenging problems in contests is a good preparation for solving those problems, isnāt it?
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For grad school, I tend to agree with this. Senior levels at banks are heavily weighted with Top 5/Top 10 business school grads.
Undergrad, not so much. The better state schools have been making inroads into Wall Street and certainly the commercial banks for about 25 years. Maybe Goldman or Morgan Stanley are overloaded with T10 grads at the analyst level, but the mid-market banks cast a wider net.
One of the reasons for this is that Goldman or Morgan Stanley like pedigree and also want people that are smart, they can train them how to do the job no matter what their degree. The mid-market and smaller banks donāt have as robust training programs, and they need grads that can actually do the job without a lot of training, so they need finance and accounting majors.
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100%
Itās pedigree 1st, everything else 2nd in that world. Which is why I know Theology / Italian / History / Classics / etc grads at the top tier banks.
I have worked in corporate finance for my entire career. There are FAR fewer humanities degrees at the analyst levels today than there were 25 years ago. The point I am making is that maybe Morgan Stanley or Goldman will take a classics degree from Harvard over a finance grad from Illinois, because Morgan Stanley and Goldman can do whatever they want, but it is a lot less likely that a mid-sized bank would do that today. The kids coming out of the state business programs today are so well-prepared for a career in finance, they just donāt need the training that a traditional banker āfeederā school graduate does.
The degree is increasingly becoming more important than the school in hiring, because employers donāt need to train some grads anymore like they did 30 years ago.
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Indeed. But, itās not only the state Uās in flyover country. I used to know a recruiter from Goldman Sachs and she only made one trip to the west coast to visit the top b-schools, such as Stanford and Cal-Haas. I used to kid her about east-coast (and Ivy) bias, but she said the issue was more of efficiency, as the west coast kids were harder to recruit (offer yield) and wouldnāt stay as long (wanted to return to CA to work in a start-up). In contrast, a kid attending Columbia was more likely to be an east-coaster to begin with, and could thrive in NYC.
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The maximum that Oxford pays for āBurseriesā, which is their term for financial aid, is Ā£3,200 a year, from tuition costs of Ā£9,250. Everything else is āfor unexpected hardshipsā for second year and up.
The colleges have 25%-50% off of accommodations for poor kids, and 25% off of season meal tickets for dinner (for breakfast and lunch, youāre on your own).
A full pay student at, say, Oxford, will be paying Ā£3,200, or 34.6% more to the university than the poorest students. They will pay something like Ā£5,000 less a year to the college, but admissions to colleges is a different process which happens once a student is accepted to the university.
The Crankshaft scholarship is not paid by the university and comes from an outside donation earmarked for that particular purpose.
The financial incentives to accept a full pay students at Oxbridge over the poorest students are pretty minor, overall.
Of course, your college name, to the extent it is not chosen by your parentsā financial circumstances and choices, is based largely on your high school academic strength. That means that an employer focusing on college name of college graduates is implicitly choosing people for hiring based on how they did in high school.
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