Scandal, resignation, fallout: all perpetuated by the #rankingsgame. What will it take for us to reduce the dependence on #USNews? #highered

Except that they might realize that many elite employers make such superficial decisions as “Is Swarthmore better than Oberlin” when they decide who to interview and hire.  I went to one of the NESCAC liberal arts colleges, ranked in the upper middle of that league, and there is a world of difference between where the grads of Williams and Amherst end up employed or in grad school on one end, and where the grads of Conn College and Trinity end up on the other end.  It cannot be overstated.  In fact, I would put it out there that a summa cum laude econ major from Conn or Trinity could not get an interview at a consultancy that hires 2.5 GPA art history majors from Williams and Amherst all day long.  Compare their on-campus recruiting schedules, if you can find them.  One might as well compare Harvard to Bunker Hill Community College.  There’s not much to like about this reality, but make no mistake: this is the reality of 21st century liberal arts grads.

Sure, elite employers like IB firms and consultancies account for a very small number of employers, but these days, most organizations would vastly prefer random biz admin or managment majors from Any College USA than a liberal arts grad, because the former signals that they do not require training, and corporations are taking a tremendous axe to that labor cost.  I have had major financial institutions in greater Boston tell me point blank that they would rather hire a biz major from [public institution with ~1000 SAT average and nearly open admissions] than someone like myself, because I might need a week to settle into a role and learn whatever software systems might be necessary for the job.  These days, the choices for non-ultra elite lib arts grads are 1) grad/law/biz school, 2) retail work, or 3) unemployment.  Plain and simple.

[rest deleted]

As http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565 points out the academic or other rankings of Cornell and Brown don’t matter. 

It is interesting that I haven’t seen anything indicating any current value of the “old boy/girl network” for private colleges below HYPSWA.  Did they all get downsized by the HYPSWA grads during the last few years?

[deleted]

Even when the data represent the college in a great light, some admissions/marketing idiot has to lie. Typical of too many admissions administrators I’ve had dealings with during 35 years of teaching in colleges and universities.  It is bad enough that much of the data are not even consistent depending how the reported data are calculated: highest in each area, each test time, combined? Simple, yet so scandalized.

“Better” is not the issue.  “More likely to find a job/career in this very anti-humanities age” is the issue.  Beyond banking, consultancies, and the non-profit world (which is hardly on a hiring binge these days), there really aren’t many options for lib arts grads these days.  Many more banks and consultancies interview/hire out of Am/Sw/Will than Oberlin; ergo, they are safer choices these days, unless you want to become a musician, in which case Oberlin stands far above the others.

There are lots of superb colleges – some dozens, at least – and their graduates FAR exceed the number of decent entry-level jobs out there.  Grads of superb colleges are legion, fungible, and many of them will never find a decent line of work.  Hence the ever-increasing emphasis on only hiring from the top x colleges – HYP+S/Chicago/MIT/Caltech/Williams/Amherst/Wellesley/whom you will.

I was shocked that Williams was not taken to task for rescinding their no-loans policy.  I mean, I think Andover, Exeter, and a few other prep schools managed to keep their no-loan policy intact through the recession; there’s no reason Williams couldn’t as well. 

A lot of hiring people at elite firms, including members of my extended family, hire strictly on the basis of “prestige.”  See, for instance, the infamous “Brown and Cornell Are Second-Tier” synopsis on this very site about 18 months ago.

Some law firms have inhouse complementary specialists – forensic accountants, consultants, trust administrators, scientists, etc.  My guess would be that the firm in question has such internal capacities necessary to handle the investigation, and the school finds it simpler to deal with a law firm rather than a law firm + KPMG, for example.

@Unemployed_Northeastern:

The “Brown and Cornell are Second Tier” article you mention is based on such thin anecdotal evidence, at least as reported, that I’m amazed that a serious publication like The Chronicle published it.  As a socialist, I’m the first to denounce elitist old-boy-networks, but I have to point out that they are far weaker today than they were in decades past — it only appears otherwise because of the Wall Street meltdown which has drastically cut hiring at Wall Street investment banks and Wall Street law firms. 

The exception, as always in recent decades, is found in anxiety-ridden colleges and universities which fear hiring from any but Ivies et al. and have a flood of applicants anyway. But even there, the above-noted example of the academic pedigrees of the presidents of HYPSM shows that things are not as the “Brown Cornell Second Tier” article might imply. (In answer to your point, the HYPSM presidents were all named fairly recently, and most wouldn’t even have been considered in prior decades. For a start, three are women, and one is African American.)

1.  Top law firms DO NOT limit themselves to Harvard and Yale, as my other post, citing the concrete example of the firm where I work, indicates. 

2.  A half-century and more ago, top law firms (known then as “white shoe” firms) DID limit themselves to the “white shoe” (i.e., Harvard and Yale) law schools, much more than they do today.  They also did not hire Jews, causing Jews to form their own law firms and banking houses, and their own college fraternities that served as old-boy-network conveyor belts into those law firms and banks.  In the last 40 years, many of the Jewish law firms and Wall Street banking outfits have elbowed the old clubby WASP firms aside, and partners with top family and school connections have actually been fired or forced out when they couldn’t produce and were not even good “rainmakers.”  This began in the 1980s and really came as a shock to people whose lives had been guaranteed since they were in prep school, or more exactly since they were born. Many of the Jews came from places like Cornell, Columbia and Penn (and Harvard) but many also came from places like NYU and “Jewish Ivies” like Michigan, which at the time were considered “not the right sort of place” (no longer). For example, the 4 name partners of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm (not the firm where I work): undergrads at NYU, Penn (Wharton), CCNY and Brandeis. Law school for all 4 was NYU, with one getting a masters of law at Harvard.

3.  I can’t speak so knowledgeably about the Wall Street wheeling-dealing-reeling “investment banking” crooks — except to say that they like to hire immigrants from places like India, with, yes, business school degrees from Harvard, etc.  One of the questions they asked of an Indian immigrant friend of mine (with Yale School of Management diploma) was “Are you hungry?”  “Hungry for what” he asked.  “Money?”  “Uh, well, challenge, stimulus, and well, yes, money,” was the reply.  In other words, somebody who was not only willing to work unbelievable hours but for whom making money was the most important thing in his life.  They had found that the WASP old boy club did not cultivate sufficient money madness. 

4. Law firms and banks are not the only places for jobs.  Silicon Valley hires heavily from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, U of Washington.  They, too, have a flood of applicants, especially now, and find arbitrary ways to reject people without an interview.  Google was recently accused of rejecting without an interview all the people in the waiting room who were overweight.  (My source for this is a guy who is overweight, but I don’t doubt his story.)

5.  Finally, the Wall Street Journal published a report a year or so ago that found that corporations around the country (not Wall Street investment houses) hired mainly from state universities and suchlike.  The only Ivy League school that made their list was Cornell, probably because of its strengths in engineering and hotel administration.

Hard to argue with anyone. While these are positive steps it is like treating a common cold or a dog chasing its tail. We need to simply acknowledge what we are really dealing with and then maybe we can make reform work or make it what it is supposed to be (likely impossible). It is a business and in the business model that we have the players should share in the revenue and be able to control their own marketing rights. Don’t focus on academics–it is not what we have. Let players go to school if they want to and take as many hours as they want. Then there is no facade and there would not be much of a use for an enforcement system that still really will not kill the beast and still be incredibly unfair and unamerican.

And the disease is money. Simply remove the TV network contracts and all you seek will come true. Unfortunately, now the conferences all have their own networks or are seeking to create them so it is moving in the opposite direction unfortunately.

+1  Well said

The idea of requiring athletic compliance departments to report to the academic officers of the university is a good one in principle, but requires that those officers not themselves be infected with the “sports-above-all” bug.  This isn’t always the case, as we have seen in the recent Penn State scandal that brought down the university’s president among others.

Frankly, I’m skeptical that presidents and provosts can sufficiently distance themselves from the glory reflected from athletic success.  I learned this lesson at commencement in my first year of teaching: students with impeccable academic credentials walked across the stage and received their diplomas from the president without any special recognition; then a football all-American, who had barely been able to pass my freshman-level composition class *as a senior* (!), got a big smile and a hug.  Clearly, the president knew who he was; did he know any of the others?

Despite this skepticism, requiring key reports to go to the academic side seems to me a step in the right direction, if only because it will make it impossible for presidents and other authorities to claim ignorance of shenanigans done by the athletic department in the university’s name.

my roomate’s mother makes $62/hr on the computer. She has been without work for nine months but last month her pay was $19052 just working on the computer for a few hours. Read more on this site ⇛⇛⇛⇛► http://hirebestfreelancer.blogspot.com

I’d be a lot happier with the summary of the U21 ranking system if “ability of system to produce an educated workforce which meets labor market needs” had read “produce” people of character, a well-informed and thoughtful citizenry, AND “an educated workforce.” I am not one of those who decry “careerist” educational objectives, but I agree with them that education should be about more than that. Just look at the original mission statements of early land-grant and teachers colleges — vocational training if there ever was any — that not only sought to prepare people for jobs, but also develop character and engaged citizens. Societies, democracies, and the marketplace (see almost daily headlines from business debacles) will fail without character and civic engagement as surely as they will without workers.