You can viewer further back at https://www.erikthered.com/tutor/historical-average-SAT-scores.pdf . SAT score averages remained relatively constant from in the 1950s and early 60s, then started dropping near 1965 and stopped dropping rapidly in the mid 1970s. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the rapid drop period coincided with the Vietnam draft and 1965 Higher Education Act, when the portion of kids taking the test rapidly increased.
Luckily, there is another test that kids have been taking for a few decades, the ACTs. If one looks at the ACT scores from 1995 to 2019, they remained pretty steady until 2020. There has been a drop since the pandemic started.
If, as people keep on claiming, “Standards have dropped in schools, that’s why the SAT needed to be recentered in 2016”, this would also have been seen in the ACTs. That is not the case.
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Re-centering of SAT compressed scores at the top end. ACT scores, on the other hand, have always been more compressed (than SAT), which make many testers feel better about themselves. The reason for re-centering of SAT was because of the increasing popularity of ACT.
Agreed. I was recruited by Ford out of UIUC. Corporate America goes to large publics to fill entry and mid level management jobs. Interestingly, the schools that produce the most CEOs are a mix of top-tier state schools and Ivies/elite privates. According to CEO world, the #1 school for producing Fortune 500 CEOs is Wisconsin Madison, followed closely by Harvard. The top 10 is rounded out with Cornell, UofM, Stanford, UPenn, UC Berkeley, Purdue, Texas A&M, SUNY, Lehigh, and MSU.
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One key related difference between SAT and ACT is the ACT marketed itself as being a tool states could use to measure knowledge of HS subjects and track changes over time, which led to a variety of states requiring all HS students to take the ACT to graduate. At one time ~half of US states required HS students to take the ACT to graduate. When students of a variety of abilities take the test rather than just the biased selection of those who plan to attend 4-yeard colleges that require the test, you are less likely to see variations in average scores over time.
For example, Illinois started requiring ACT in 2001. /A summary of how average score changed in Illinois is below. During the period where near all students took ACT, the average score remained relatively constant – always between 20 and 21. However, when the test was no longer required and only 4-year college bound students took the test, the average score shot up.
Average ACT Score in Illinois
– ACT Required –
2002 – 20.1 (100% take ACT)
2004 – 20.3 (100% take ACT)
2006 – 20.5 (100% take ACT)
2008 – 20.7 (100% take ACT)
2010 – 20.7 (100% take ACT)
2012 --20.9 (100% take ACT)
2014 – 20.7 (100% take ACT)
2016 – 20.8 (100% take ACT)
– ACT No Longer Required –
2018 – 23.9 (43% take ACT)
2021 – 25.2 (19% take ACT)
Recruiters go to a variety of colleges to fill a variety of positions, but I doubt that they are hiring many new grads as mid level managers. Such positions usually go to persons with more employment experience.
Which colleges employers choose to recruit at is based on a lot of factors. For example, a key one is location. It often cost less to recruit from colleges are nearby, and students at nearby colleges are often more likely to favor staying in the area after graduating. The number of grads in desired majors and reputation of college in the major/field are also influential, as are past hiring/networking. Some colleges also form unique relationships with specific colleges, leading to special connections.
For example, I live and work in the San Diego area. The largest private employer in San Diego is Qualcomm. According to LinkedIn, the colleges with the largest number of alumni working at Qualcomm SD are as follows. If I search for managers, engineers, interns, or any other keyword in job title, the list is similar. Regardless of position, there are a huge number of alumni from the San Diego schools UCSD and SDSU working at the largest SD private employer – Qualcomm SD.
Colleges with Most Qualcomm SD Alumni on LinkedIn
However, the connections and benefits go further than just having hundreds of alumni working at the company and a large number of potential alumni contacts . UCSD and Qualcomm are located practically within walking distance of one another; Qualcomm was founded by a former UCSD professor (the UCSD school of engineering is named after him); UCSD also has professors with unique connections at Qualcomm, such as consulting and past employment, has special opportunities for UCSD students to get Qualcomm mentors; UCSD classes I have taken emphasize Qualcomm-tech and Qualcomm way of doing things; etc. I’m sure persons involve in Qualcomm hiring are also aware of things like UCSD/SDSU grads being more likely to be enthusiastic about living in the SD area and taking a job if offered than out of region kids, generally having a lower recruiting cost due to less travel + large number of potential hires, etc. If you want to work at Qualcomm or in the SD area in general, attending UCSD is likely to be advantageous to that goal. I expect many other state schools have similar relationships with area companies.
Note that this is for undergrad. If you include grad/professional schools, the list will look quite different. I’d find in hard to conclude that attending Wisconsin for undergrad notably increases chance of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO decades later, but it certainly does not eliminate one from the running.
10/500 CEOs did their undergrad degree from Harvard.
That’s 2% of CEOs who graduated from Harvard College.
But only 0.036% of the US population living went to Harvard College.
Obviously, there are lots of other factors that go into being a CEO so it’s not the Harvard degree alone but correlating factors.
490/500 CEO’s didn’t go to Harvard. Going through life pretending that a denial at Harvard was the make or break moment for the rest of one’s life is self destructive. And inaccurate.
490/500 CEO’s didn’t go to Harvard. Going through life pretending that a denial at Harvard was the make or break moment for the rest of one’s life is self destructive. And inaccurate.
Who is saying it is?
It clearly isn’t the ‘make or break’ moment for the rest of one’s life.
It significantly helps though.
These types of lists are too far separated from anything resembling cause and effect to draw such conclusions.
The list doesn’t tell you if high ability students interested in business/CEO type paths are more likely to apply to that college, if the college is more likely to favor such students in admission, if students who have connected parents that can start their kid as an executive at Fortune 500 are more likely to attend, etc. This type of list is not enough information to suggest the undergrad college name is the driving force or even a notable contributing force. It’s also a very small sample composed of students who are extreme outliers that generally graduated decades ago.
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The top 30 colleges listed in the article produced 164 CEOs. That means 336 (the vast majority) came from lesser known schools.
Looking at # of CEOs of a Fortune 500 company is a red herring. That is a 5sigma event for most people. I am not a believer of market inefficiency — ie that all these people are making stupid decisions. For a given level of work, either in school, or on the job, in areas of the country that I want to live in, assuming that I am not going to become a CEO, what are some professions that will check a reasonable number of boxes on my Maslov’s need hierarchy is an analysis that most people go through subconsciously, even if they are unable or uninterested in articulating it to the general public.
The article looks click-baity to me. Like hundreds of its kind that are published regularly.
The article is supposedly written by a professor but surprisingly they don’t seem to understand correlation vs causation. A school like Harvard has already screened for applicants that have significant achievements (academic and otherwise), demonstrated leadership traits, etc. There is therefore a higher likelihood one of these students will become an organizational leader. Just as an elite basketball academy (that only accepts talented players) is likely to produce more NBA players.
Of course, there’s a lot more that needs to happen to land a CEO job. Being in the right place at the right time, having particular skills and experience that are needed by a firm at that particular time, having influential sponsors, a bit of luck, etc.
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Given this discussion, I found it interesting that this weekend one of of Ivy’s admitted student day optional faculty lectures was on, “College Prestige: Where Does it Come From and Should It Affect Your Decisions.” To be clear, this wasn’t one of the Admissions Department discussions – this was one of three sample lectures, this one given by the dean of social studies. The other lectures were on Synthetic Yeast and Shakespeare’s Othello.
The number of Harvard alumni are irrelevant, since they mostly were not in the corporate world, and the number of people in the USA is meaningless since fewer than 1% of these people even applied to harvard. SO dividing the number of Harvard alumni by the number of people in the USA is a useless exercise.
The percent of Harvard alumni who are Fortune 500 is meaningless in the context for which you are using it, since you have no idea what the pool looked like.
You would have to compare the number of Harvard alumni Fortune 500 CEOs divided by the number of Harvard alumni who went into the corporate world to the number of alumni from each other colleges who are Fortune 500 CEOs divided by the number of the alumni of that colleges who went into the corporate world.
Even then, you’d have to control for factors like SES, family connections, etc.
Since you do not have those numbers, you actually do not know whether that 10 is impressive or not. You also do not know whether that 2% is impressive or not.
This is, actually, Probability & Statistics 101.
Here is another nice statistic: Harvard has the highest percent of alumni who have died of all the Ivies, and probably of all other colleges in the USA. It’s dangerous to attend Harvard!!
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Thanks for the details.
In terms of future career success, I think that the elite schools perhaps offer more to kids who are good but not the best of the best. If you win a Rhodes scholarship it doesn’t matter where you did your undergrad, and everything else being equal you are more likely to win honors like that at a college where you are exceptional and have lots of attention lavished on you. Even getting into say a Stanford MBA or Harvard Law School is probably easier if you are the best in your class at a lower ranking college than if you are one of many at an elite school. But if you are very good though not truly exceptional then elite schools can smooth your way into elite jobs: S saw that first hand at a famous think tank where most interns were from elite schools and were good but not exceptional and had got their positions through their professors’ contacts with the research fellows.
I went to an elite college, but what gets remarked upon 30 years later about my resume (excluding work experience) is the much more unique grad program, not my undergrad degree. Likewise, many of the most impressive people I know are recognized for their MIT PhD or Stanford MBA, not for their undergrad institution.
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Yes, 100% agree - as someone on the opposite as you: I attended a non-elite undergrad, but have a grad degree from an elite private and two other grad degrees from an elite public (if that’s considered a thing? Maybe a bit of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean lol).
And…no one ever asks me where I got my undergrad degree.
And…I was able to attend elite grad programs because I was able to be a top student at non-elite undergrad school. So everything you say rings completely true to me.
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Even here, I don’t think that it’s clear how much is due to the name recognition of the college versus SES. Big Name college tend to have more students who are connected, or have other advantages.
I think that this is discipline specific. It’s definitely true for political science, law, and financial, but a lot less so for STEM.
Actually, I’ll revise that. It’s true for all fields, but the colleges which are considered “elite” change. So attending a college like GTech, UIUC, or Purdue may not help for White House internships, but will help for FAANG internships.
That’s very true for academia - except for faculty hires for liberal arts colleges and and a handful of universities (in specific fields), your undergrad is not important. LACs prefer to hire people whose undergrad was from a LAC, but it generally doesn’t matter how prestigious it was, just that it was a LAC.
On the other hand, your undergrad does matter for being accepted to the more “prestigious” PhD programs, and the same thing kicks in. A person from an undergraduate college which is not “prestigious” really has to accomplish outstanding things to be accepted to a “prestigious” PhD program, while a graduate of a “prestigious” undergraduate program has to be really good, but not as good.
It’s along the lines of - if you attended a “prestigious” undergrad, you have to be in the top 2% of graduates from your program, but if you attended a less prestigious program, you have to be from the 1% of all the applicants. For reference, I’m not talking “top 2%” or “top 1%” by GPA.
I think that’s aligned with what I said: if you are “the best of the best” you are going to be in the top 1% of applicants. And you are likely to be treated better by a lower ranking college where you are singled out as the outstanding student in the year who has the potential to bring honors to the university.
That will often produce more opportunities to do “outstanding things”: a good example was D’s freshman year roommate who was picked out at the end of freshman year to be their Rhodes candidate (she did win in the end) and offered all the opportunities necessary to achieve that (work with the University President, research and on/off campus internships).
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