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Recruiters say graduates of top public universities are often among the most prepared and well-rounded academically, and companies have found they fit well into their corporate cultures and over time have the best track record in their firms.
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<p>The article goes on to elaborate on the benefits to corporate recruiting of focusing their resources on large Public Universities as opposed to smaller "elite" liberal arts colleges and/or "Ivy League" schools.</p>
<p>Interesting stuff. Not a bad thing to consider when choosing schools IF you know what your career objectives are before college. My sense, however, is that many do not...</p>
<p>I wouldn’t consider it too strongly. This article is based upon the number of recruiters and career fair participants that each school receives. On-campus visits and fairs are basically PR efforts - they’re not how companies actually manage their human resources needs. Obviously, there’s an economy of scale in sending a representative of your company to a school with 40,000 students over a school with 5,000. And the large state Us are the ones turning out the most candidates who are looking for entry-level jobs after their baccalaureate degrees - their counterparts at more selective colleges are going on in greater proportions to graduate and professional schools. The latter are likely to be better positioned for career success ten to twenty years later than the student with a bachelor’s degree who took an entry-level job after learning about a company from an on-campus recruiter. It’s like ranking the financial value of a college degree by the average income of graduates a year or two out of of college. Those who took entry-level jobs will have some income while those who are in med school, law school, and pursuing Ph.D.s will not. The resulting numbers may be accurate, but they’re very misleading when used to calculate long-term career prospects.</p>
<p>My kids, all of whom have now graduated from college, did not really know what they wanted to do for a career just out of HS. So picking a college on the basis of which large business recruited there would have been absolutely meaningless for them. I posted this article to see if there were some parents/students out there for whom this did indeed seem a meaningful indicator for where to choose to go to college.</p>
<p>Admittedly a biased mom here with a son at one of the elite schools but our sense is that the analysis is skewed by sheer numbers. Penn State, U of Illinois - those are really big schools compared to your typical private top school. Unless they controlled somehow for sample sizes then the analysis doesn’t look meaningful.</p>
<p>FWIW my DH has worked for three different Fortune 100s in positions where he regularly brings in college recruits to his staff. These companies have not made a big effort to recruit from schools like HYP because - according to those he knows in HR - they tend not to get those students. A lot of the recruitment targeting takes into account expected yield - a Whirlpool can expect to net a lot more acceptees from ASU than from Yale perhaps.</p>
<p>Of course, we want to look at it this way - we have spent a ridiculous sum to send our kid to his elite school. </p>
<p>Should be said in the end though that just landing your entry level seat in a cubicle does not always mean you’re set for the long haul. I was a kid with a very practical undergrad degree who found myself at a large corporation in an ocean of cubicles and I found it really miserable at 22. Went back to grad school at first opportunity . . .</p>
<p>Interesting article. Though I’d say at Harvard you’ll have those who are incompetent and lazy and who do not end up with strong employable skills just like at how at a state school you’ll have the same. And just like how at Harvard you’ll have motivated, skilled, hard-working brilliant people who will be eagerly employed in the best occupations right after graduation, you will have the same coming from state schools. It’s all about the individual’s work ethic, skills and motivation.</p>
<p>The elite crust of all schools are who get the best outcome. If you in the bottom 20% of your class and haven’t done anything regarding networking, building social and interview skills, internships, extracurriculars, etc [and don’t have family connections], it doesn’t really matter much if you’re at Harvard or a random state school for an entry-level position often times.</p>
<p>Also note that anyone who says (because I’ve heard this point several times in discussions about this kind of topic) employers ought to recruit more from state schools than elite private universities because those from state schools are more down to Earth and non-entitled ought to first look at and get to know the student body of many state schools before that. At every school you’ll have the entitled, lazy, uninteresting people. Often the percentages of entitled people at state schools and of those at elite schools are very comparable. </p>
<p>For example, would you rather hire the Harvard graduate from a low-income family who has held down part-time jobs to support themselves and their family while keeping a stellar average and still being able to get involved in extracurricular leadership, or the lazy kid from a rich family attending the flagship state school with an average gpa and little extracurricular involvement or internships while his family is paying full price?</p>
<p>Bright, accomplished people are going to want careers which offer them autonomy, intellectual challenge, and for lack of a better word-space. That is why the majority of an elite college class are going to be medical specialists, lawyers, tenure track academnicians, diplomats, and Wall Street traders, analysts and bankers. A highly strucutured corporate environment would be anathema to most of the class. Corporations know this and know that they will not find students in the numbers they want to recruit with the right attitude at the best schools. So it is not surprising at all that a top 25 list would have only one Ivy in it.</p>
<p>Recruiter rankings often favor schools that are strong but don’t convey a sense of entitlement or create high starting salary expectations. I’ve seen a bit of the same trend in rankings of business schools, which are particularly prone to the latter problem due to published salary data.</p>
<p>Lots of rationalizing in some of the above posts. As a part-time recruiter for an S&P500 company and MIT grad myself, the truth is many of the nations “best and brightest”…undergrad and graduate…can be found at the publics in the WSJ list.</p>
<p>When my kid graduated back in May from an elite school, most of the graduates were going either to Wall st, graduate school, law or medical school. I saw very few going into industry for example.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that most of these state business schools have separate admission requirements that put them in “elite school” territory. Few allow direct admission as a freshman. Most require a separate application for sophomore year with high gpa requirements.</p>
<p>I am a graduate of a large state university with a top business school but I certainly would not put it in “elite school” territory. It definitely puts you above the rank and file of the rest of the university, but not “elite” by any means.</p>
<p>My Fortune 200 company consciously does not recruit at any Ivy because its graduates expect higher wages than graduates from big publics. Sad but true. </p>
<p>That said, I think it makes sense for recruiters to target big publics where the pool of talent is simply bigger. Though maybe also cheaper, if the approach of our HR department is anything to go by…</p>
<p>Not sure about the other publics mentioned, but if you look at the stats of kids admitted as undergrads to Michigan’s Ross School of Business they’re almost indistinguishable from those admitted to Penn’s Wharton School.</p>
<p>I think the point of the article, though, is that in a tough job market large employers are focusing in on kids with practical skills in fields like engineering and business, rather than liberal arts generalists. And most of the top engineering and undergrad business programs are at state schools. I doubt that an English major coming out of Penn State has any kind of advantage over an English major coming out of Penn or Swarthmore; probably just the opposite. But all those English majors are going to have a tougher time selling themselves to private sector employers than the business school or engineering grad coming out of Penn State, because the latter is going to come in with practical skills ready to hit the ground running, won’t have an inflated sense of his worth to the employer (and therefore won’t expect as big a starting salary), and is likely to stick around longer than the graduate of an elite liberal arts program who may be off to grad school, law school, or business school after two or three short years on the job–at a huge cost to the employer.</p>
<p>WSJ: Companies favor big state schools for recruiting</p>
<p>If we’re talking about BA/BS grads, this is natural; there are far more grads to choose from at the Big U, and a larger percentage of LAC grads are not yet qualified in their fields (they tend more to need graduate degrees). If we’re talking about MA/MS/PhD grads, there are hardly any coming out of LACs. Passing on Ivies is a different issue.</p>
<p>Well, my Penn English major kid jumped right to the top of the interview pile at several large companies that he targeted (and that did NOT come to Penn to recruit) and managed to sell himself quite well to private sector employers. If you think most of the Ivy grads are expecting high salaries in this company, you under-estimate their intelligence. They expect to be able to earn enough to support themselves in the usual northeast cities where they wind up (my son chose a different part of the country with a lower cost of living) but they have no delusions that the high salaries of old await them.<br>
Also, many of the kids from the highly-selective schools have plenty of practical experience and have had jobs and internships.<br>
I don’t know what planet you are on with this tiresome view of the Ivy (and comparable schools) students. It gets old.</p>
<p>If you are an elite college graduate and at the end of the day you are not off to law, medical, top 10 MBA or top 5-7 PhD school, in my opinion, you will actually have a harder time joining Fortune 1000 company X with the hopes of being a division controller or regional sales manager in seven years. Your peers will be uncomfortable around you and your superiors will be suspicious and many will perceive (and that might not be the reality at all, your attitude might be totally corporate and great) that you are different since you appear to have options everyone else doesn’t have (and that is probably not the case as well).</p>
<p>^^That is exactly the kind of BS that I’m talking about. I work in a Fortune 200 company and we embrace hires (and senior executives) from a variety of schools. As I said, my Penn grad son is doing just fine and is not a “threat” to his fellow employees. His company hired about 40 students this year and they came from Purdue, UVA, Vanderbilt, CU, Michigan and Penn (him) along with a number of other schools.<br>
You are projecting what you “think” might be the case and in reality- you are dead wrong.</p>
<p>Shockingly, grads from highly selective schools like to drink, go to professional sports games, mountain bike and go to the gym just like the grads from state schools or community college! Imagine that!</p>
<p>I have to challenge one assumption that seems to be endemic within this thread. The narrative expressed by many posters of this thread, and I suspect shared by many readers, is that graduates from top schools feel improperly entitled to high salaries and exciting work opportunities, which means that recruitment discrimination against those students to be justifiable. Mentions of compatibility with the culture naturally then implies not demanding higher pay and better conditions than what the other employees in the company are receiving. </p>
<p>To that, I must ask: exactly why is that improper? Why don’t graduates from top schools deserve higher pay? Lest that remark be taken as elitist, let me broaden the discussion: why don’t graduates from all schools deserve higher pay? </p>
<p>Let’s face it: the average college graduate doesn’t really make that much money to start. The average liberal arts graduate makes only $35k a year, and including the more lucrative engineering and business majors bumps the average starting salaries to only $48k. Since these are average salary figures, many people must be making much less. To place those figures in perspective, I know some girls who never went to college at all but just became waitresses and made at least $25k-30k including tips in their first year right out of high school, with many making significantly more. I know others who did go to college while supporting themselves through part-time waitressing who’ve remarked that their entry-level jobs out of college represented a step down in pay from their waitressing jobs on a per-hour basis, and at least one who quit her entry-level job in favor of simply becoming a full-time waitress because not only would it pay better, but crucially, offered better working conditions. As a waitress, the more shifts she works, the more money she makes. Yet this particular post-college entry-level job demanded that she work nights and weekends for no extra pay. {Granted, this is a region noted for a plethora of high-grade restaurants, but still, it begs the question of why local employers don’t raise their pay levels to compete with what is available at the restaurants.}</p>
<p>Similarly, I know some guys who never even graduated from high school, but simply picked up some information technology skills such as basic Cisco router/switch and MS/Linux server configuration, along with some simple programming. By the time their former classmates were graduating from high school, they were already making ~$10-15/hour as low-level computer techs, and they were probably making over triple that by the time their former classmates were graduating from college. I remember one of them laughing at their ‘foolish’ former classmates who decided to stay in school and are now making substantially less than they are. </p>
<p>The real problem is that companies simply do not want to increase the salaries of their entry-level college-educated employees. If we as a society can afford to pay $25-30k+ to waitresses right out of high school, or $10-15 an hour to high-school dropout novice computer techs (and triple that with experience), why exactly should the average liberal arts college graduate be paid only $35k? </p>
<p>What exacerbates the problem is the ‘cultural fit’ argument which manifests itself through resentment expressed by established workers towards any new hire who demands higher pay than what they’re receiving. This pernicious, spiteful attitude is akin to ‘crabs in the bucket’: any captured crab attempting to climb from the bucket in which they are placed are pulled down by the other crabs, ensuring that none escape and all are eaten. The far more constructive attitude is that all of the crabs should help each other to rise and escape. Similarly If you notice a new hire making higher pay than you, then rather than castigate that person as a cultural misfit, you should seek higher pay yourself. </p>
<p>To the argument that companies simply can’t afford to pay employees better, I’m afraid I have no sympathy. Corporate profits and employee productivity are at near-record highs, while the ratio of pay between CEO’s and the average employees in their companies quadruple that, in real dollars, the ratio in the 1980’s. To be sure, I have no problem with CEO’s who perform well becoming rich. Yet even poorly performing CEO’s - including those who wrecked their companies - are paid well regardless. Dick Fuld, Jimmy Cayne, Martin Sullivan all steered their companies into the ground while pocketing millions, and they’re not giving any of it back. Heck, Fuld now has a job at a boutique investment bank and Sullivan is now deputy chair of an insurance broker. Meanwhile many of the employees of their crashed companies are still out of work. </p>
<p>To be clear, I am hardly a socialist champion of the proletariat. After all, there are plenty of employees who, frankly, are unproductive. Anybody who’s ever held a job has run into some coworkers who aren’t really doing anything. They should be terminated, or never hired in the first place, and their salaries should be redirected to boost the salaries of productive workers. For example, instead of hiring 100 entry-level workers at $35k each, half of which turn out to be productive and half who aren’t, just hire the 50 who are productive and pay them $70k each. Or, if that’s too difficult to determine within the hiring process, then hire all 100 to start, but fire the unproductive ones after a few months and boost the pay of the productive ones. {Sadly, what companies usually do instead is hire all 100 in the beginning, fire the 50 unproductive ones, but not increase the pay of the productive ones.}</p>
<p>Perhaps the most egregious example is regarding companies who plead poverty whenever confronted with demands for higher employee pay… but then always seem to have boatloads of money to hire top management consulting firms. Instead of paying millions to McKinsey to fix the problems in your company, why not instead hire better employees and pay them properly so that you don’t have problems in the first place? McKinsey’s business model seems to be reselling - at nosebleed markups - the talents of highly motivated people who would never consider working for your company as a regular employee. But if you could attract those people, you wouldn’t need McKinsey. </p>
<p>The bottom line is that all entry-level employees (or at least, the productive ones) are probably entitled to far higher pay. Yet it’s the graduates from the top schools who feel they have the bargaining power and confidence to actually demand it. Keep in mind that corporate recruiters are not your friends. Given the choice, they would like to pay all employees as little as possible, and even worse, to convince their employees through cultural arguments that that measly pay is normal.</p>
<p>Hence, I certainly understand why companies tend to prefer to hire people who will not demand what they probably deserve, but are content with a mediocre work conditions and mediocre pay. The real problem is that those people are not only willing to submit to those conditions, but even deride as undeserving cultural misfits those who aren’t willing to submit.</p>