I wonder what it was like in the 1980s and early 1990s.
I can’t imagine college admissions being like this.
Back when Harvard accepted 100s of transfers a year and freshman acceptance rates were much higher across top colleges.
I’m probably in the minority (on a site like CC), but I think kids should do things they enjoy in HS instead of worrying about how their ECs will look to colleges. Sure, do your best in school and take rigorous classes (that work for YOU) but don’t make eventual college acceptance the goal of your high school career. Yes, college is important but it is only 4 years of your life. Where you attend school doesn’t define who you are or determine what success you’ll have.
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Where you attend school doesn’t define who you are or determine what success you’ll have.
People say that but nobody actually believes it.
Top employers only recruit at top colleges → this whole cycle of getting into a top college matters.
Top employers have to stop recruiting so heavily at certain colleges before people stop putting this much weight on where you go to college.
On some of the admitted Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Wharton posts on reddit, people are already aiming for consulting or financial jobs before they’ve even started college lol.
It was a different world. I attended college in the 80s - before widely available PCs, cell phones or the internet. Every college application was unique and had to be painstakingly typed or filled out long hand. I applied to 6 schools and couldn’t have imagined applying to any more. Was accepted at 4 and rejected at 2. Took the SAT once (no prep - no one did) and had the typical HS activities – as did all the kids I knew (including those that went to Yale & Princeton). No one was starting businesses, doing research or getting internships. It was a much simpler time.
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every single year it’s been getting harder and harder. I personally hear of some of my peers having hired college admissions counselors, essay “proofreaders”, connections to get into selective programs and summer opportunities, thousands of dollars to pour into tutoring and test prep. when you compare students who have all these resources with students whose parents have never been through this process nor have money to pour into admissions, you find a huge disparity.
It’s fair to say that college admissions are business now, not education. Kids now need to “do it all” and it’s frankly just so exhausting…
yeah trying to find an activity you genuinely, truly and really enjoy is just lost. at this point everyone does everything and everyone has “passions” for x,y, and z when it’s just a narrative to convince college admissions officers that they can do it all. and honestly I don’t even blame students because they’re doing what they’re told to do
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Yep, a friend of mine’s sister got into Harvard this year and she literally was taking part in every single competition she could (from mock trial to debating to poetry) just so she could win competitions. She didn’t win them all but she managed to get 2 ‘wins’ on a national level.
She ran for student body president because she knew that Harvard looks at that as a positive. She pretty much used the rating system that Harvard disclosed as part of their case a few years ago to try and do as many extracurriculars that would either be a 2 or a 1 on their EC rating.
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she’s obviously a super accomplished and intelligent individual. now imagine she spent that effort on an activity of focus that she truly enjoyed and dedicated her time to
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Do you have a source for this? On campus and school specific recruiting is not a large proportion of total recruiting, including for IB and consulting jobs.
If what you were saying were true, there wouldn’t be not-insignificant numbers of students from schools like Fordham, Baruch, Marist, Bryant, UGA, IU, Howard, etc in these jobs.
Data generally show (Dale and Krueger) that for many students the college they go to doesn’t matter. Data show attending a highly rejective school can matter for some limited income and/or URM students.
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yeah… hearing that employers are starting to place more emphasis on where you completed your undergraduate is terrifying. For students like me, who will not receive a seat in an elite college (because my academics are considered average), but also literally cannot afford it, it seems like social mobility is turning into a joke. it’s like pay to win 
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There are many avenues to success beyond where you attend college. As one anecdote, my husband was a mediocre high school student, attended a directional state school I’ve never seen mentioned here yet is more successful than all our Ivy League/MIT grad friends. His ambition, tenacity and work ethic is what made him successful -not the name on his diploma (and he came from a very modest background so he didn’t make it because of connections).
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“DarkMatter565, post:67, topic:3636335, full:true”]
Top employers only recruit at top colleges → this whole cycle of getting into a top college matters.”
This is simply not true.
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Here is an HBR article from 2015 that describes this phenomenon at “elite professional services (“EPS”) firms.”
I hope these practices have changed since then, but I have not seen evidence of this.
In the EPS world, on-campus “school lists” have two tiers, based largely on prestige. Core schools are typically the three to five most elite institutions in the country from which employers draw the bulk of their new hires. Firms invest deeply at these campuses, flying current employees from across the country — if not the globe — to host information sessions, cocktail receptions, and dinners, prepare candidates for interviews, and actually interview scores (or even hundreds) of candidates every year.
Target schools, by contrast, include roughly five to 15 additional institutions, where firms host a handful of recruiting events, accept applications, and interview candidates, but on a smaller scale. Prior to the start of recruiting season, firms typically set quotas for each school, with cores receiving far more interview and offer slots than targets.
So even before applications are received, employers allocate jobs based on alma mater, skewing opportunities toward (and against) students from particular campuses.
This leaves most students from nonlisted schools out of the game. Of course, the firms I researched did accept résumés from students at other universities. However, in contrast to candidates from core and target schools who submitted their résumés to a designated review committee (or “school team”) at a firm, nonlisted students needed to apply directly to a firm through its website, usually to a general administrative email address. These applications were placed into a separate stream and were not considered as seriously as those of core and target candidates, if they were considered at all. Often, no one was charged with reviewing them. In the end, a personal connection to an existing employee or client was one of the few shots nonlisted students had at getting interviews, especially at organizations that were the highest status in their field.
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Do you have a source for this? On campus recruiting is an insignificant proportion of total recruiting, including for IB and consulting jobs.
Well, I have both anecdotal evidence and a source.
My firm only takes on 4 undergrads per year across fixed income and equities (we’re on the buy-side so we don’t churn out undergrads like a bank - our model is to retain undergrads unless they don’t perform) → we disproportionately hire from elite schools.
I’ve got a friend who works at Blackstone → his team are disproportionately from elite schools.
LinkedIn usually gives you a good background into who firms generally hire. Note that some colleges pop up but it turns out that those kids are often working in different groups.
But I’ll give you the biggest culprits: management consulting firms.
Elite schools (H/Y/P) love management consulting and management consulting loves them.
McKinsey disproportionately hires from Harvard/Yale/Princeton. Something like 22% of Harvard’s class ends up going into consulting.
And Mckinsey/Bain/BCG return the favor if you look at who their ‘business analyst’ intake is:
https://■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/company/mckinsey/people/?facetGeoRegion=103644278%2C90000070
And it starts very, very, very early. From the moment kids step foot in college, we’re already starting to identify talent.
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and that’s awesome and I look up to people like your husband. I totally believe you when you tell me his story because it was possible when your husband was studying in college.
however, i believe it’s different now. it’s not as easy to advance via mainly work ethic, as the name of colleges is starting to get much, much more influential. in my honest opinion, it isn’t accurate to compare undergraduate colleges ~20 years ago to now. even though you are right that there are ways to succeed despite your undergraduate college, there’s increasing emphasis being put on it which limits what opportunities you can take up.
The vast majority of students are not going into these careers.
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40% of Harvard graduates are.
Add on technology (product management etc. ) and you’ve got nearly 60% of the Harvard class going into those 3 fields alone.
As I said, check out the r/ApplyingToCollege subreddits and you’ll see kids who already know they want to work in financial services before they’ve even left high school.
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with STEM I feel like there’s more avenues to success/career satisfaction and more companies that want to seek talent in a wider variety of schools. that being said, high school and undergraduate are still going to make a huge impact on success for the vast majority of people.
why do people agree to pay upwards of 80k a year for undergraduate anyways?? this is most likely why. they probably aren’t doling out so much money just for other colleges to also provide the same opportunity. there obviously is a preferential factor when it comes to elite schools for companies …
And from this Forbes article from 2019.
Facebook hires more than 80% of its employees from elite colleges, and more than half of Facebook employees graduated from a top 10 school. Apple, Microsoft, Boeing, Deloitte and IBM have all hired more than 10,000 employees from top 100 colleges. Even at Google, which famously declared in 2015 that “there is no relationship between where you went to school and how you did five, 10, 15 years into your career…so we stopped looking at it,” more than 80% of employees attended top 200 schools.
Employers behave this way because they believe top talent is best (or only) found at tier-1 colleges and universities. Indeed surveyed hiring managers, and 29% preferred only hiring from elite universities, while another 48% said the caliber of the institution played a “somewhat important role.” Only 4% said they didn’t care. In the same survey, 43% of C-level executives agreed with the statement “top performers generally come from highly reputable/top institutions.”
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Whew! I guess it doesn’t matter that my kid is picking a T150 (well, actually a T151) vs a T40, then, if these schools are all the same according to these people 