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Claremont McKenna Official Resigns After Falsely Reporting SAT Scores

January 31, 2012, 12:21 am

By Eric Hoover

A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna College has resigned after admitting to falsely reporting SAT statistics since 2005, the college announced on Monday. In an e-mail to the campus (reproduced here), Pamela B. Gann, the college’s president, said the scores for each fall’s freshman class “were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each.”

Although Ms. Gann did not identify the administrator in her e-mail, Richard C. Vos, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid, is no longer listed as a member of the college’s admission staff. Max Benavidez, a spokesman for the college, said he could not name the official who had resigned, but he confirmed that Mr. Vos is no longer employed by the college.

Ms. Gann wrote that the administrator had been “solely responsible” for the misreported numbers. “At this time, we have no reason to believe that other individuals were involved,” she wrote. “If we learn otherwise, we will take prompt and appropriate action.” The college has hired a law firm to review how it processes admissions data.

Mr. Benavidez said the inaccurate SAT scores had been provided to all outlets that collect data from colleges, including the Department of Education and U.S. News & World Report. Test-score data is also collected and used by bond-rating agencies, which require sworn certification.

For the freshman class of 2010, Claremont McKenna reported a combined median score of 1410 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT’s math and critical reading sections, but the actual score was 1400, according to Ms. Gann’s e-mail. That year, the college reported a 75th-percentile score of 1510; the actual score was 1480.

In the most recent edition of Best Colleges, U.S. News rated Claremont McKenna ninth on its list of national liberal-arts institutions. Robert J. Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, said in an e-mail late Monday that the college had informed him of the inaccuracies earlier in the day, and that he had asked for “far more detailed” data going back to 2005. “So far,” Mr. Morse wrote, “they haven’t been willing or able to give me the old and new year-by-year … So, until we get a full disclosure of [the] extent of false SAT reporting, U.S. News can’t say what the real impact on CMC’s Best Colleges ranking is.”

In another e-mail last night, one admissions veteran told me he was stunned by the news. “Seems a sad tale,” he wrote, “of the pressure to compete.”

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  • whitakal

    I imagine this post will elicit some of the horror stories from the media about for-profit “diploma mills” that rip off students and government lenders. I don’t think that Prof. Vedder’s call for elimination of federal funding is likely not going to happen any time soon, especially given that in the last few years the feds have sought to take over the student lending market rather than liberalize it. Still, I am left wondering how not-for-profit recipients of federal lending or subsidies justify exemption from these regulations or, at the least, the demand that they come clean, institution by institution, about graduation rates, former student loan default rates, and employment statistics. I can see an institution (not a class) earning the right (though not a permanent right) not to have to report information, but only on the basis of evidence of outstanding outcomes. I can’t see how that exemption should be granted sight unseen. Alternatively, does anyone know of a consumer-oriented mechanism in place now or in development that would allow prospective college students to compare the graduation rates, former student loan default rates, and employment statistics of the institutions they’re considering, for-profit or not? Again, if not-for-profit institutions or their representatives seek a blanket exemption or reject providing information that would make such comparisons possible, what will people conclude but that their stance is based, as Prof. Vedder suggests, on a bias against private business and towards a tax-exempt mercantilist system? One can’t have it both ways: to reject transparency and yet claim a mantle of purity.

    Keith Whitaker, http://www.wisecounselresearch.org

  • betterschool

    Nice job. You might also have mentioned the definitional sleight of hand with respect to a for-profit “default” and the fact that the feds are charging poor students a higher margin on the federally guaranteed loans than the private sector was when they were loaning the money.

    I notice also that the Democrats in the house have issued a press release criticizing the rules and how they were developed.

  • drj50

    “Yet by regulatory fiat his Administration has just taken the most
    viciously anti-poor, anti-first-generation college student move made by
    this and perhaps any President.” Poor and first-generation students are not in any way helped when they are pressured into enrolling in expensive programs that prepare them for non-existent or low-paying careers.

    Why focus on for-profits? Because too many use high pressure sales techniques and misinformation to enroll students. I don’t know of any non-profits that call prospects every day as some for-profits have been reported to do (as as one friend who has worked in “admissions” — sales — for a for-profit has described to me). This is not hostility toward business and the market-place, but only hostility to those who rip off those who can least evaluate extravagant promises and least afford the cost.

    But, sure, let’s level the playing field to include all kinds of schools. Let’s limit federal loans and grants at schools with persistence rates below some threshold (provided that we can get good data on students who transfer to other schools or leave for other non-academic reasons — military, marriage, medical, etc.). And let’s limit loans and grants for students in programs that will not lead to jobs that will make repaying those loans possible. (I’ve seen students in theological schools borrow tens of thousands of dollars they will never be able to repay if they work in ministry. The schools wanted to the amount students could borrow, but the government would not allow them to.)

  • tgraham13

    Well said, Dr. Vedder. 

    Unfortunately your point of view, which has been conspicuously absent from the Chronicle during the critical period of debate, arrives too late to do much good.  It is analogous to a doctor reading a patient’s obituary rather than his chart.

    The GAO report was a work of political fiction, as internal GAO memoranda now conclusively confirm.  We have also learned that short-sellers wrote much of the new regulations themselves during their cozy period with the Department of Education, as documents grudgingly released by ED demonstrate.  (We are left to wonder about the contents of the tens of thousands of other documents ED has withheld.)  

    To students, debt is debt, regardless of whether their alma mater pays taxes.

  • mnprof

    I don’t necessarily disagree with the contention that for-profits shouldn’t be singled out.  But it’s potentially misleading (and hopefully not disingenuous) to refute that “student loan money goes disproportionately to students at for-profit institutions” by citing that “75 percent of [Pell grant] recipients attend nonprofit schools.” I have no doubt that only 25 percent of Pell money goes to for-profit institutions… but do 25 percent of all college students attend for-profit institutions?  A more compelling fact would be that students at for-profits receive a smaller share of money than the for-profit share of all college students, if indeed that is true…

  • drj50

    “does anyone know of a consumer-oriented mechanism in place now or in
    development that would allow prospective college students to compare the
    graduation rates, former student loan default rates, and employment
    statistics of the institutions they’re considering, for-profit or not?”

    Sure. The National Center for Education Statistics website has a College Navigator databasethat includes second-year persistence rates, graduation rates, former student loan default rates, and other data reported as part of the IPEDS annual reporting process: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/. You can easily compare data from several schools.

    For the more data inclined, there are other “Data Tools” (see the menu across the top of the page). The “Peer Tool” is quite useful.

    The IPEDS data does not include employment data for graduates, but many schools survey graduates six months after graduation and post this information on their career services website.

  • wayoutwest

    You say this is the”most viciously anti-poor,
    anti-first-generation college student move made by this and perhaps any
    President.” Crystal clear that it’s “hostility to business and free-market
    capitalism” at work? Please. For-profit ed is an inefficient delivery
    system that needs to be reined in. You have complaints about accountability for
    Boise State? It IS a different issue. They should have a different standard.
    I’m a tax-payer and a free-market capitalist, and once Boise State enrolls
    500,000 students, gets the majority of their revenue from the federal
    government, pays recruiters per head recruited, saddles its students with debt
    (graduates and not), and fails to graduate gainfully employable students who can
    pay back said debt,  then we can talk
    about uniform accountability.

    As a whole, for-profit education does low-income students (and taxpayers) an
    incredible disservice. They advertise high salaries post college, take pell
    grants from the gov’t, saddle unprepared students with loans (that can’t be
    wiped out), and under-educate their student-customers who end up jobless and in
    deep debt. More regulation would have helped protect low-income students from
    predatory for-profit tactics. Continuing to allow for-profits to operate
    without better regulation (dare I say, attention to loan-default and gainful
    employment rates) would have forced the for-profit sharks to serve students if
    they wanted to keep making their enormous profits. These institutions aren’t
    serving the needy, they’re exploiting the unaware at their (and the
    tax-payers’) expense.

    I’m not opposed to for-profit education per se, but your argument that
    for-profit and not-for-profit should have identical standards doesn’t hold
    water. General Electric and your small non-profit shouldn’t have the same
    regulatory standards; evolution in the delivery of higher ed (and the rise of
    the for-profit bohemoths) has called for new regulatory standards that SHOULD
    apply disproportionately. The largest for-profit (University of Phoenix) is
    again in hot water for shady recruitment tactics. They paid millions from the
    first whistle-blower suit, and it’s happening again. When the largest player is
    a known abuser, you can’t construe the increased scrutiny to ideological
    bias. 

    Since for-profits purchase accreditation, they should be held to a different
    standard than those that earned/have kept it for themselves.

     

  • wayoutwest

    Broken link. 

  • drj50

    Sorry for link problems. I had put the link in parentheses and the software interpreted the final one as part of the address. The correct link is: http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/

  • _perplexed_

    “…but the nature of the ownership of the institution should be of no bearing in passing regulations relating to learning or vocational outcomes.”

    It seems to me that for-profit instituitions have a market-based incentive to enroll students regardless of qualifications, just as long as they can pay. Encouraging students to go into debt to pursue  a curriculum that offers few opportunities or chances for success is a way to increase profit.  It takes considerable insitutional integrity for a for-profit insitution to avoid exploitation of students; and I do admire those insitutions that pull this off.  What comparable incentive to exploit students exists among not-for-profit colleges and universities?

  • nacrandell

    Dear Darth Vedder,
     
    Your concern seems disingenuous. That people should be allowed to be taken advantaged of once more is a great opportunity, suggests that the ills of our nation can be found in the prolific influence of so called ‘think tanks’.

    The recent real estate bubble was created on the industry promoting home ownership to all, and questioned any who would deny this as a possible bigot, racist or worse, someone who didn’t understand economics.

    Thanks to the self motivated goals of the banking and real estae industries, and the inability for economists to suggest the probable outcome, we are living in life after the bubble pops.  The unregulated for-profits are now crying for equality for all and shame on those that deny opportunity – the opportunity for high CEO salaries, large student debt and tax payers assuming defaulted student loans.

  • willynilly

    This article is just one more piece of evidence of how desperate the not-for-profit scam operators are getting.  A person with any sense of ethical values or a decent conscience could not defend these fraudulent operations UNLESS they were being paid to do so; or had some beneficial interest in having the grand scam live on.  I wonder, Mr Vedder, how much you were paid by the non-profits for writing this feeble if not lame defense of the scam schools.

    Oh My, the poor picked on for-profits, the proposed new regs appy disproportionally to the scam schools says Mr. Vedder; but sir, they are the largest offenders.  Mr. Obama is anti-business, says Mr. Vedder, so the president is hard on the poor scam school operators.  Bur sir, Mr Obama is very strongly pro education.  Wouldn’t you think that when he saw a value he really believed in, he would take a strong position against any business enterprise who tried to scam those genuinely seeking an education?  The poor and minority individuals will be harmed if the proposed rules go into effect says Mr. Vedder.  But sir, the major reason for coming down hard on the scam schools is because the poor and minority groups are targeted by the scammers and burdened with debt that they cannot escape for the rest of their lives.  By the way, Mr. Vedder, how many minority students are enrolled at Ohio University?  What is their participation percentage against your full undergraduate enrollment?  Have you ever advocated for more minority enrollment at Ohio University?  Have you proposed reduced tuition options, or scholorships for promising minority and/or poor students?  What are you doing, other than praising the scam schools, to address the need for more higher education access for the poor and minorities at Ohio University? 

    Finally, Mr. Vedder breaks out the six year graduation rate data, and job salaries and then compares  his favorite scam school against several rather well known and long established colleges and universities which he selected - but certainly not the Creme de la Creme of American Higher Education.  But notice that Mr. Vedder conveniently omits his own Ohio University from the comparison.  Mr. Vedder, please write Part II of this drivel as soon as possible and include some comparative data on Ohio University (Minority Enrollment, Six Year Graduation Rare Data, Job Selection, Entering Salary, Employer Satisfaction Surveys, etc.) with as many of these adorable scam schools you care to identify. And, in the meantime, please keep up your loyal work for the not – for – anything – but – profit schools.  You are getting close to convincing large numbers of prospective students that it is better for them to enroll in the scam school sector than it is to enroll at Ohio University.

  • eberg

    Once again, Mr. Vedder reveals his true regard for U.S. institutions of higher education: “…the U.S. government…should not base restriction of that aid
    on the ownership structure of the institution. The overt hostility to
    this INDUSTRY (caps supplied) has been reflected in sharp declines in the price of
    for-profit company stocks.” 

    It is clear Vedder is incapable of distinguishing between the mission of U.S. colleges and universities and the incentives that drive a corporate business model.  He is indifferent to the two and can therefore see them playing on the same field.  This article is so wrong in so many ways.

  • rdifeliciantonio

    Spare me, Prof. Vedder, your transparent concern for the needy.  Seventy-five percent of federal Pell recipients do attend not-for-profits.  But NINETY PERCENT of the students attending for-profits are receiving federal aid!  In other words, the taxpayer has a ninety percent stake in for profits.  With that kind of public commitment, taxpayers have every right to tell for-profits when to jump and how high.  For a free market guy, one who sees Obama as hostile to the American Way, I find it curious you would defend an enterprise so blatantly slaking from the public trough.  If for-profits don’t hop to, I’m demanding my ninety cents on the dollar back!

  • leedav

    Can the government provide grants to incentivize academically qualified students to pursue disciplines that our society needs and that have a greater demand for labor in our economy, rather than whether the schools themselves are not-for-profit or for-profit?

    Why not put all of the U.S. colleges, universities, community colleges, vocational schools, etc. on transparent metrics of performance for the public to better judge their performance (veritas)?

    Why can’t the government give merit scholarships to academically qualified students pursuing careers and jobs in our national and economic interests, and allow the students to choose the best schools to attend to accomplish these goals?

    The government can set educational goals and incentivize (through grants and loans) qualified students to achieve them, but let the students decide the means to accomplishing the ends!

  • Hippopotamax

    I’m not inclined to take advice (much less moral chastisement) from an academic who served as a frontman for the tobacco industry.  Much to his chagrin, I’m sure, you can read all about his past as one of the “old faithful” economists willing to speak out for the cigarette lobby, often for cash: http://sciencecorruption.com/ATN186/00003.html

  • jefftylerpmp

    Finally, an objective look at the behind the scenes rationale for this action.  I wonder if the Gainful Employment Act were applied equally to non-profit (state supported institutions), not-for-profit (private elite institutions), and for-profit (profit based institutions) how much the not-for-profits (can you hear me Harvard) would squeal? :)

  • bbaicad

    Wayoutwest wrote: “For-profit ed is an inefficient delivery system that needs to be reined in.”  I agree they need to be reined in.  When that sector’s loan default rate is over 15% and the non-profit sectors is less than 4%, something is terribly wrong.  And Mr Vedder should look at the facts and stop being such an apologist for those schools.  It’s shameful.

    But I disagree they are inefficient.  The fact is that they’re extremely efficient – at generating profits for their owners, especially the publicly traded schools.  Last year EDMC made roughly $1,500 profit per student.  A couple years ago, before the downturn in the economy, they made more like $2,500 per student.  That money came from those lower income students’ tuition and went straight into the pockets of shareholders.  And because most of that tuition was underwritten by government student aid, that means that you and I are providing a share of that profit via our taxes.

    The efficiency Mr. Vedder likes so much comes from skimping throughout the delivery system.  They spend on average less than $3,000 per student on instruction vs. $15,000 in the non-profit sector.  Is it any wonder their students have a hard time finding jobs?  And how else can they afford to spend millions and millions of dollars on aggressive recruiting to lure those students in?  By definition, these colleges MUST make money for their owners.  And considering how hard it is to break even in the non-profit sector, those owners profits have to come at (serious) cost on the other side of the equation.

    Wake up Mr. Vedder.

  • bbaicad

    The problem with this post – and Mr. Vedder’s commentary – is that if these rules were applied to the non-profit or public sector the affect on those colleges would be miniscule.  Harvard’s default rate is about 1%.  And it’s extremely unlikely that on average graduates of Harvard would come remotely close to the income to debt measures.  So no squealing there.  Would a handful of smaller, non-profit colleges, or low-income-serving urban public colleges, fall under these rules if applied?  Probably.  But exceedingly few, compared to the large number of for-profits that might be affected.

  • bbaicad

    Just one other comment – lest anyone think these new “G.E.” rules are draconian.  Here’s a brief story from “Inside Higher Ed” this morning:
    The U.S. Education Department published a final version Thursday of its controversial rules requiring vocational programs to prove that they are preparing graduates for “gainful employment.” And while advocates for the colleges, Wall Street analysts, consumer advocates and members of Congress weighed in with widely varying interpretations of the wisdom and the likely impact of the regulations, nothing spoke louder than the reaction of Wall Street investors. Driven by the widespread sense of investor analysts and for-profit critics alike that the rules had been softened considerably from an earlier version, stocks of the 13 publicly traded higher education companies tracked by Bloomberg rose by 12 percent, the sharpest upturn since 2005, The Los Angeles Timesreported. No squealing here either!

  • betterschool

    I’m not sure what you base your claims on. Certainly not facts. jefftylerpmp has it right.

    This topic is Gainful Employment as redefined by ED in these new rules. If applied to independents, virtually every education degree would fail G/E, as would at least a half-dozen other popular degrees. Thus, these schools, Harvard included, would be forced to shut them down. 

    The math is rather simple. Multiply the average private school tuition ($36,000 I believe) by the average length of time it takes them to deliver a 4-year degree (say, 4.5 years to be generous, although the national average is 5.5 years); then, using the G/E formula, calculate the ratios against an average teacher’s starting salary of,say, $36K (this varies greatly by region but this is close enough, make it $45K if you want, you will get the same result).

    When you’ve done the back of napkin math, come back and restate your position. Even many public universities would fail G/E for many popular programs; they would always fail for out-of-state students where their average tuition is $20-40K. Recall, by the way that average for-profit tuition, nationwide, is less than 50% of average private tuition, nationwide.

    Default rates is a tangential issue. High SES students, whether attending Harvard or the University of Ohio, don’t default. Unfortunately, poor, ESL and or first-generation college attendees students do have a greater tendency to default, irrespective of their choice of institution, although only for-profits and community colleges will admit them.

  • polymathic

    “To the contrary, some 41 percent of the enrollment in the four-year for-profits is made up of Hispanic or black students, compared with 28 percent for all of higher education.”

    The inclusion of demographics on low-income, mature, and 1st generation college students would have been illuminating, as those concepts seem to be conflated in the author’s ethnic references.

    This smacks of predatory lending, where the information is so asymmetrical that one actor (the student/borrower) can neither evaluate the value of the credential compared to a less expensive one (e.g. a CC AA/AS/Cert.), nor the terms of loans, and therefore cannot act rationally. This is not just the general mystification that has been a part of college/university admissions for years, but hard-selling admissions “counselors”, demographic targetting, and barrages of advertizing in low-income neighborhoods. The subprime lending practices that crashed the world financial system, by preying on populations that lacked the literacy in finance to be a rational actor, used precisely the same tactics.

    Calling the G.E. rule an ideological attack on free-market capitalism is ironic, as this column could not be more so. Market capitalism is an extant economic system integral to American political economy and governance. “Free-market” capitalism is an ideology only a few decades old, that ignores the important role that government plays in the economy in the facilitation of commerce, providing infrastructure, garaunteeing the value of currency, and hundreds of other ways that benefit business. Without federally-funded student aid, these “free-market” colleges’ customers wouldn’t have the PELL grants or access to debt (at a reasonable interest rate) to even consider attending for-profits.

  • bbaicad

    Here’s my version of the math….  First, the average tuition at non-profit schools is about $28,000.  Second, the GE rules only apply to federal loans and the maximums an undergrad can borrow over four years is no where near the full tuition charge.  Third, the monthly payments on the typical federal loan debt at graduation is only a few hundred dollars per month. Your $36,000 a year teacher would have to be paying more than $600 per month to trigger the rules.  And the rules only apply to the “typical” graduate, suggesting that it’s all about the program’s average, not any specific individual.

  • AlanCollinge

    Vedder is quick to push for discouraging lower class/ borderline high school graduates from pursuing  higher education, while comletely failing to the real problem here:  That COLLEGE IS SIMPLY TOO EXPENSIVE.  Vedder and his buddies clearly do not like the thought of having an education citizenry, and this is a pathetic, paranoid, elitist, and arrogant opinion, but it is his, and we all have them. 

    However, to fail to recognize and acknowledge the obvious systemic reasons for the tuition inflation we have seen for decades running, namely, the removal of fundamental consumer protections including bankruptcy and others, which turned defaulted debt from a money losing outcome to a money MAKING one for the lending system, borders on dereliction of duty.

    What really angers me, about this, however, is hat Vedder claims to be an economic conservative, but why, then is he so quick to grossly ignore such an unprecedented stripping of a fundamental free market mechanism such as bankruptcy.  He’s no fool, but he owes us a reason.  I suspect whatever he could say to justify this will cause Adam Smith and Bill Buckley to roll over, but would love to be proven wrong, here.  So let’s hear it. 

  • AlanCollinge

    Forget gainful employment.  This is a rule designed by someone outside the Department, and shoved down their throats, and never had a chance of doing anything good for students even if passed as originally written, because the Department has been MAKING, not losing money on defaults for years.

    What needs to happen is the swift and full return of bankruptcy protections for federal loans.  This will force the Department to actually have a reason to want students to succeed, rather than fail.  With this in place (and the termination of OFSA staff who so badly failed the students in favor of the banks for so many years), the Department of Education would, of their own colitin come up with a dirth of efficient and effective feedback mechanisms like GE, but they would actually work, because the institution would WANT them to work.  This is the good government solution that the borrowers and voters have been requesting…no…DEMANDING FOR YEARS, but which faux, beltway “conservatives” like Vedder have looked past.  Again, and again, and AGAIN.

  • swarmster

    Wow, this is shocking to read.  It makes me wonder if Richard is on the payroll of the for-profit schools?  He comes across as being so arrogant that I actually had a hard time making it through his very short post.  I would like to direct people to an article that paints a very different picture of the for-profits http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/MJ/Feat/yeom.htm

  • swarmster

    This is a good point and just makes me wonder what else he is misleading us about? It just comes off as a PR campaign.

  • swarmster

    I called it before I even saw this post about his payola type journalism!  I read Vedder’s elitist  article and just assumed he was being paid by the for-profit industry.  It’s clear he thinks very highly of himself and thinks we’re all dumb and should just take whatever he says as the truth. So sad…
    http://sciencecorruption.com/ATN186/00003.html

  • mbelvadi

    One huge difference between non-profits and for-profits is the former have a “discount rate” and for the most part, the latter don’t. So it’s meaningless to look at the non-profits’ “sticker price” because very few students actually pay it, even including loans, whereas almost all for-profit-attending students pay the sticker price (including their loans).  Include that in your calculation and see where it gets you.

  • dr_mcmom

    There should be a disclosure – a conflict of interest statement – for every article this guy writes.  He is a part of the Texas Public Policy Foundation – the conservative think tank whose 7 solutions are aimed at dismantling the state’s two research flagships.

    Snake.

  • berthold

    One could dismiss all this studies as being plain stupid and written by “experts” who never made in to a top tier University.

    Nevertheless there could be more behind these attacks, they
    seem to be to well orchestrated. Especially if “professional experts” like Vedder get involved (he also worked for the Tobacco industry).

    Given that many of the “education experts” of the TPPF and similar “Think Thimbles” are connected to the commercial education industry, an industry which according to some could be the “new health care industry” (in terms of potential growth), I am really wondering why do these people go especially after the big State Universities, which still offer a top education at affordable prices (not only in Texas but also in Colorado and Oklahoma)? Is it because they cannot compete, and need therefore to dismantle State Universities, before they can make their own institutions
    competitive?

    Several of the “breakthrough solutions” could indeed be
    interpreted to have the aim to level the difference of the standards between State Universities and Commercial Colleges:

    1) Separate research from teaching (commercial colleges do not hire researchers, and do not have the capacity to introduce students to research).

    2) Give incentives to teach large classes (which would mean to have to eliminate many senior courses and therefore reduce the breadth and depth to a level which is more like a commercial college).

    3) Abolish tenure (which is a tremendous hiring advantage for State Universities, commercial colleges want and need to be flexible, they hire most of their teacher semester by semester).

    4) Change the accreditation procedure for State Universities (which most commercial college
    cannot comply with).

    I hope this new Senate oversight committee could shed some light on that.

  • http://twitter.com/jvward John Ward

    Alex Cox is either conveniently forgetful or willfully ignorant of history when he waxes about the wonders of British socialism in the 1970s.  Has he forgotten that the economic reality in Britain was so dire that by 1976 the Callagahan Government had to request a loan from the IMF, conditioned upon a reduction of twenty percent of budget expenditures?  As Margaret Thatcher famously said, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money to spend.

  • 11164975

    Mr Cox should see “Midnight in Paris” then think again about the 70′s being so great. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=504382859 Peter Storandt

    Sorry to hear this. A black eye for the profession.

  • chronanon

    In the rankings game, if you aint cheatin, you aint tryin.

  • 514montreal

    This just speaks to the  disease of treating colleges and universities like their sports teams.  “Cornell’s No. 4 ranked wrestling team takes on No. 14 ranked Iowa State this weekend….” 

    So to fall out of the top 10 of liberal arts colleges is to be consigned to outer darkness — according to the US News & World Report, a publication few people took very seriously when it was still publishing.

    If you, dear graduating high school senior, don’t have any better basis for choosing between Claremont McKenna and Swarthmore or Oberlin, or neighboring Pomona for that matter, or Brown or Cornell or Berkeley or Stanford, you are coming to this major decision very poorly prepared.  I feel sorry for you.

  • http://twitter.com/JLewisHarding Jeffrey Harding

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

  • chronanon

    Consolidation of the industry.  You can’t have 4000 entities in the same market without cutthroat rivalry.  See Porter’s five forces.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    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.

  • thedoctorisin

    It is sad to see that the responses so far blame things like the ranking system, U.S. News & World Report, employer hiring preferences and industry consolidation–all excuses or weak justifications. Not a word about a lack of personal responsibility and integrity in higher education these days.

  • bscmath78

    [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?

  • bscmath78

    [deleted]

  • bscmath78

    [deleted]

  • bscmath78

    [deleted]

  • bscmath78

    Interesting LSAT requirements.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Law school is a disaster for nearly all that attend, but it still draws an enormous number of unemployed lib arts grads because they don’t really have anywhere else to go.  Ditto for lesser biz schools.

    Prep schools aren’t dumb – they know that the MA/MS and PhD academic markets are WAAAY oversaturated, and poach accordingly.  Just about all of the private schools around Boston look for AT LEAST a master’s in whatever subject is to be taught.  And why not?  They pay a lot better than adjuncting just about anywhere, so it makes sense that they would have similar standards.

    I don’t know much about private tutoring, but as an antecdote, the three or four main LSAT prep operations – Kaplan, Princeton Review, etc – all require their tutors to have tested in the 92-95th percentile or above on the LSAT.  Intelligence is cheap these days.

  • 514montreal

    I work for a large and prestigious international corporate law firm with major offices in New York and Washington, among other places around the world.  I can assure you that people here get hired from lots of other places beside HYP.  Just a few real-life examples:  the lawyers near my desk did undergrad at Wake Forest, Chapel Hill, U of Michigan, Villanova, Cornell (ILR), Brown, Swarthmore, Binghamton, Princeton, U of Chicago, Albany, Seton Hall, Geneseo, Emory, Cornell (Arts College), Bowdoin, Hobart, Amherst, Fordham, Stony Brook, Williams, Brandeis, Brooklyn College.  Law schools include: Georgetown, Columbia, Penn, Columbia (again), U of Michigan, Cornell, Harvard, University of Virginia, Georgetown (again), UVA (again), St. Johns, Duke, and several from NYU.  For some reason, nobody in the immediate vicinity from Yale.

    Yes, there is an East Coast and near-midwest bias, simply because hiring teams from the New York and Washington office can’t visit every school, and because they also hire from other east coast law firms and from US Attorneys offices, etc..  The California offices hire more from Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA law schools, after undergrad at those schools and Pomona, Reed, UC Santa Cruz, USC, UC Davis, and, yes, Claremont McKenna — among others that I am unfairly leaving out.

    I agree with some of the complaints here, but as you can see, not entirely.  Ironically, supposedly “second-tier” colleges in this country are more heavily laden with Ivy League (not just HYP) and similar schools, so that the faculty looks top-drawer.  And no question, law firms also fear being relegated to the second-highest drawer if they take too many people from less prestigious schools.  It’s just not as bad as you say.

    People in the real world really aren’t all such slaves to the US News and World Report idiocies as some high school students (or their parents, especially from abroad) appear to be.

  • 514montreal

    I work for a very large and prestigious international corporate law firm with major offices in New York and Washington, among over a dozen other places around the world.  I can assure you that people here get hired from lots of other places beside HYP.  I’ll run through all the lawyers on this floor: Queens College undergrad/Columbia Law; U of Michigan undergrad/Georgetown Law; Villanova undergrad/Columbia Law; U of Chicago undergrad/Penn Law; Cornell undergrad/U of MIchigan Law; Emory undergrad/Seton Hall Law w/ Masters of Law from NYU; Notre Dame undergrad/Cornell Law; Stony Brook undergrad/Harvard Law; Boston College undergrad/American University Law w/ NYU Law Masters; Brooklyn College undergrad/U of Buffalo Law w/ NYU Law Masters; Williams College undergrad/Harvard Law; Wake Forest undergrad/University of Virginia Law; Brooklyn College undergrad/Columbia Law; Hofstra undergrad/GWU Law; Washington University in St. Louis undergrad/Columbia Law. That’s it. That’s all the lawyers on this floor. There are people from Princeton, Swarthmore, Amherst and Oberlin, although none on this floor.

    Yes, there is an East Coast and near-midwest bias, simply because hiring teams from the New York and Washington office can’t visit every school, and because they also hire from other east coast law firms and from US Attorneys offices, etc..  

    The California offices hire more from Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA law schools, after undergrad at those schools and Pomona, Reed, UC Santa Cruz, USC, UC Davis, and, yes, Claremont McKenna — among others that I am unfairly leaving out.

    I agree with some of the complaints here, but as you can see, not entirely.  Ironically, supposedly “second-tier” colleges in this country are more heavily laden with Ivy League (not just HYP) and similar schools, so that the faculty looks top-drawer.  And no question, law firms also fear being relegated to the second-highest drawer if they take too many people from less prestigious schools.  It’s just not as bad as you say.

    People in the real world really aren’t all such slaves to the US News and World Report idiocies as some high school students (or their parents, especially from abroad) appear to be.

    The problem is not that law firms are only hiring from HYP. It is that they haven’t been hiring at all since the Wall Street meltdown. That certainly has been disastrous for a lot of graduating law students — but it hasn’t spared grads from Harvard and Yale.

  • 514montreal

    Why does anybody think that Amherst/Swarthmore/Williams is better than Oberlin?  There is no real basis for this, other than the inane US News & World Report standings that — with no evidence provided — have consistently listed ASW as the top 3 (in fluctuating order) for a decade or so.  And why do they do that?  A lot of these listings are based on per-student endowment, but that doesn’t tell a graduating high school senior very much. 

    For example, a higher endowment should allow the college to be much more generous in financial aid.  Swarthmore leads the pack in that regard, according to the Princeton Review.  Ironically, Williams (currently at the top of the USN&WR listing) is the only school that has bailed out of its earlier commitment (which the others have maintained) to make it possible for students to leave school debt-free at the end of four years.

    Oberlin is a superb school, the same as Haverford, Pomona and many others.  As one contributor to the Columbia Daily Spectator recently remarked, all this is like being told what is the best flavor of ice cream.

    And a lot of people in hiring positions really do know that, as law firm hirings (mentioned above) indicate.

  • 514montreal

    I understand your point, but it is simply inaccurate that only a tiny handful of schools get students over the threshold.  Just for examples:  the president of Harvard did her undergraduate work at Bryn Mawr, and got her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.  OK, Seven Sister and Ivy, but not HYP. 
     
    The president of Princeton, a native of Canada, did her undergraduate work at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario and got her PhD at Temple. 
     
    Yes, the president of Yale did undergrad at Stanford and PhD at Yale (with Oxford thrown in along the way) but the president of Stanford did his undergraduate work at Villanova and got his PhD at Stony Brook, in computer science.
     
    And for those who think that “HYPSM” are the only schools that can confer the proper prestige, the president of MIT did her undergraduate work at the University of Rochester and her doctoral work at the Georgetown University School of Medicine.

  • heywhynots

    Horrible but really should a median score of 1400 vs 1410 really alter the ranking that much? Do all schools report the same way? How do they handle students who take the SAT multiple times? I know schools differ for admissions purposes.

    Just shows how silly the rankings are.

  • caveat

    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.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    @514montreal

    So, everyone on your floor went to a top 20 or 25 law school?  I find that not surprising at all.  I might add that I have met unemployed graduates from nearly all of those law schools, plus Harvard, BU, and BC Law, at networking events around Boston.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    “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.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    I hear you, and would like to believe that there is still that degree of socio-academic mobility, but the goalposts have simply been moved since those college presidents graduated.  Past performance does not predict future returns and all that.  40 years ago, just about any college could get you on the ground floor somewhere.  Just about any college could return a ROI.  Not today.  40 years ago, one could work their way from the mailroom or factory floor to the boardroom.  Today, the mailroom is ethereal, the factory is in Indonesia, and there is a firmly installed ceiling between middle management and the ex-McKinsey consultants and HBS grads who inevitably come for a few years to run the show and scoot off with enormous bonuses for oft mortally-risky short-term gains.  40 years ago, corporations trained their employees.  Today, they expect four unpaid internships in the same field/vocation, plus a directly applicable major (not to be found at a liberal arts college), winternships, and they are still more likely than not to offer you a blatantly illegal postgrad “unpaid internship.”  The times have changed, and not for the better.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    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.

  • evansolomon

    Those of us from schools like Grinnell and Carleton are sitting back, observing this debate with the knowledge that we are the ones turning out graduates who will make the world a better place.

  • 514montreal

    @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.

  • bscmath78

    [deleted]

  • bscmath78

    514montreal,  I have no disagreement with your points “4. Law firms and banks are not the only places for jobs.. . .” or  “5.  Finally, the Wall Street Journal published a report a year ago . . .”. Which tend to back my pro public institution comments for the 99%.

    In fact, the 19th post on Sept 26, 2010, in the thread at http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Modest-Proposal-Searchin/26949/
     
    is my post which includes:
    —————————————————————————————————————–
    “Paths to Professions” is a Wall Street Journal series of articles, published September 12-14, 2010, based on a survey of corporate recruiters.

    With articles like:

    * “Penn State Tops Recruiter Rankings”
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704358904575477643369663352.html

    * “Rankings by Major”
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703376504575491704156387646.html

    * “Employers Favor State Schools for Hires”
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703597204575483730506372718.html

    the series seems to be at least a first step in producing some potentially useful information, . . .
    —————————————————————————————————————–
    I defer to Unemployed_Northeastern on your other points. 

    [rest deleted]

  • 514montreal

    @bscmath78,

    Thanks for your response.  I am a socialist and not a lawyer.  I work here as a legal assistant and translator.  It’s just a job-job.  I write as an independent journalist mostly on Latin American and Southeast Asian politics.  The publications that I write for can’t afford to pay well.

    I was hired before the dot.com bust.  A lot of my friends, excellent workers, have been laid off since the Wall Street crash, and nobody much is doing any hiring.  Unemployed_Northeastern is certainly right about that.  (A lot of lawyers were let go, too, not just staff, and no more at this firm than at others. And summer associates who had been promised jobs didn’t get them.)

    The complaints about the academic world are accurate.  I went to Cornell as an undergrad, studying in its Southeast Asia program, an area where it is the world leader, but even for Cornell SEAP grads, academic jobs were hard to come by after the Vietnam war ended (I wasn’t looking for an academic position, fortunately, and didn’t stick around for a doctorate). 

    As I’m sure you know, this didn’t just happen in Southeast Asian studies.  I have friends with excellent doctoral degrees from top Russian studies programs like U of Illinois, having published a couple of books on the new “stan” states in the former Soviet south, an area where few people have experience or linguistic competence — and the best they can get are poorly paid jobs at satellites of state universities, while hoping for something better.  U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign doesn’t have the instant prestige for a high school kid that Columbia or Harvard have, but specialists in the field know it is unsurpassed in Russian studies, with a world-renowned library.

    I think the “Brown and Cornell Are Second Rate” article appeals to people who went to HYP and want to gloat that they lucked out; high school students looking to get their ticket punched in the right place; socialists and other reformers who object to growing stratification; and highly qualified unemployed like Unemployed_Northeastern who are looking for what has gone wrong.  My point in taking issue with the article is not just that I went to Cornell but my belief that the gap between the 1% and the 99% is not really based on HYP connections — especially on Wall Street, success has gone to the toughest and the fastest and the meanest (and the luckiest), certainly not the most qualified.  But I am happy to look at any evidence that contradicts my view.

  • 514montreal

    @bscmath78,
    Thank you for the heads-up about the Chronicle Sept 26 2010 post — your research is excellent and your analysis thoughtful and rewarding to read.

  • bscmath78

    [rest deleted]
    My other posts in the Sept 2010 “A Modest Proposal” thread illustrate that I believe that there are many ways to judge an institution and its graduates that are not economic.

    I still especially like my Oct 12, 2010 post which includes:
    ——————————————————————————————-
    That night, the strike force quietly scaled the fortified hill. Atop, the soldiers slept. The guard dogs slumbered.

    It fell to the sacred geese to honk the alarm, rousing a defender to fling the lead invader from the ramparts of the Capitol.

    Each August 3, the grateful citizens held a triumph bearing geese on luxuriously cushioned litters. Others had failed in their: duty, jobs, trust and responsibilities. But not the geese. Amateurs vs. Professionals?

    How would the geese have fared under the spirit underlying the 3 proposals? Would an ancient Roman economist have said?:

    - What have they done for us lately?
    - They don’t even goose-step, let alone in formation.
    - Have you seen the price of cleaning the purple and gold cushioned litters?
    - Productivity drops each August 3.
    - Have you seen the price of feed?
    - A goose in every pot.

    Or later, upon learning of the Goose that laid the golden eggs:
    - Cut it open now and let’s get all those golden eggs, now!
    - Bonus, read the entrails for leading economic indicators.
    - Second bonus, roast goose with giblet gravy!

    Silly Goose? Not in this case.
    —————————————————————————————————–
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/a-modest-proposal-searching-for-an-academic-bottom-line/26949

    The earlier posts appear with the proper formatting at:
    http://chronicle.com/blogPost/A-Modest-Proposal-Searchin/26949/

  • 514montreal

    @bscmath78,
    Thanks for your note, and thanks to Unemployed_Northeastern for very thougtful and useful comments.

    “Toughest and the fastest and the meanest” would probably mean “most qualified” for a civilian in the midst of a mob of other civilian refugees trying to flee an enemy army.  It might mean most qualified for somebody trying to escape a sinking ship by pushing his way into a lifeboat.  Or not — it might just result in everybody drowning in the panic.  (But hey, in “Titanic,” Rose’s odious capitalist would-be husband did use an oar to fight off people trying to get aboard the upturned lifeboat on which he was standing, and he survived and they didn’t.)

    But the toughest and the fastest and the meanest on Wall Street brought down the world economy — and then demanded a government bail-out.

    In that context, it seems to me that educational institutions should be thinking, not about how to jigger the results for the foolish US News & World Report listings, but about how many engineers the society needs in the next 10 years, and work to help prepare them — not just thinking about how to push others from the path.  Graduates should probably be thinking about the same thing.

    That is probably the worst thing about the US News & World Report listing.  It makes each school the enemy of every other.  For Penn to go up in the list, Columbia has to go down.  The collaboration between schools, productive, mutually beneficial and often affectionate, goes out the window.

  • 514montreal

    @bscmath78,
    I do like the goose story – especially nice, and most useful.
    Thanks.

  • 514montreal

    Hi, bscmath78,
    Sorry, I didn’t see this message until now.
    I live in Manhattan and work for the Manhattan office of a major law firm.

    I picked the moniker 514montreal because I like the town.  I lived in Montreal for a year, doing some research on the history of the “revolution tranquille” or “quiet revolution” in Quebec in the 1960s that transformed that province from the most conservative, indeed reactionary, province in all of Canada to the most progressive on just about any issue, economic, social, etc.  (For example, the largest popular majority in favor of same-sex marriage of any Canadian province, the strongest labor movement, the most generous social welfare programs, day care centers for all, etc.)  I was interested to know how this had happened.  And it’s all unknown in the US, where people consider Canada too boring to study. 

    As for California academic institutions, I think they are very well regarded in the west, but are not so well known in the east — not that they are viewed as in any way inferior.  Even quite well-educated people in the east have never heard of Pomona College — just as the same sort of people in California know nothing of Swarthmore.  That is a longstanding problem for LACs.  The lawyer at the firm where I work who went to Williams and Harvard says that in Washington where he usually works, people think he’s talking about William and Mary.  I heard somebody from the east confuse Amherst with Andover, asking, “Isn’t that a prep school?  Isn’t that where George W. Bush was a cheerleader?”  Maureen Dowd, no doubt writing her NYT column hastily under deadline, confused Wellesley and Wesleyan (corrected before the print edition hit the street).  I don’t think people would confuse Columbia and Cornell. 

    Stanford, I know, feels ignored out on the West Coast when East Coast journalists write about HYP.  But academic anxiety is nothing new:  Yalies famously and humorously have an inferiority complex because their school has only the second largest endowment, the second largest library, etc.

    As for the failure to hire more Berkeley and Stanford, etc. attorneys in the East Coast offices of major law firms, that appears to be partly due to interview teams visiting campuses.  This firm’s NY and DC teams visit Harvard, UVA, Georgetown, Penn, Columbia, NYU, Cornell and Michigan.  I don’t know what they have against Yale.  There is probably also an old-boy-network, in which existing partners have an interest in strengthening the prestige of their alma mater by interviewing there.

  • 514montreal

    Sorry, 2 other points.  Yes, this firm starts salaries for its associates well over $120K, and it would definitely be considered white shoe.  It is one of the top law firms in the country, with an especially strong Washington practice.  It has offices in western Europe, Moscow, Beijing, and the UAE, among other places.  I’d be happy to mention it but I haven’t asked anybody whether it’s ok.

  • bscmath78

    514montreal, thank you for your information.

  • bscmath78

    514montreal, it is most likely best to keep it a secret.

  • bscmath78

    514montreal, I’m glad you found it useful. I hope others do as well.

  • 514montreal

    Hopefully I’ll run across your comments and Unemployed_Northeastern’s in the future.  They are both quite good.

  • bscmath78

    Thanks.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Thanks.  If you ever want a cynic’s perspective, head to the closest unemployed attorney.  We  tell it like it is!

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    @chronicle-f44c9c63679369c2f3040d73e61fd4fb:disqus 

    Just saw your quite thoughtful response.  I will try to ramble less than upthread.

    1.  “Brown and Cornell Are Second Tier” is highly antecdotal, sure.  But we all know firms, institutions, and colleges that act as such.  The Caravath System is alive and well.  At your firm, surely you have noticed the standards for entry-hiring increasing with the recession.  OCS at my law school have fallen off a cliff from what I’ve heard, although I’m sure the school would say everything’s fine, everyone graduates with fame and fortune, and please continue borrowing $70,000 plus per year to attend.  Sure, firms hire from more than just Harvard and Yale now, but to say that it is egalitarian for them to hire a small number of grads from 20 or 25 law schools out of the 200 law schools in this land is just silly.  Bureau of Labor Statistics: 45,000 annual law grads for 25,000 entry legal jobs, at any salary, including part-time and temporary work.  Rather underwhelming for seven years of college.

    2. See my point above: white shoe firms are a teensy bit more inclusive, so that you might not be completely screwed if you “only” went to the 10th or 14th best law school according to the legal HR holy book that is USNWR (their power is ungodly in the legal arena).*  One of my hands is clapping; hear it? 

    3.  Consultancies swear by the Cravath System.  For the more technical and statistical roles, sure, they like to hire folks with ferocious mathematical skills, but otherwise, “Brown & Cornell 2nd Tier” is right on base: all they want are sociable, upper-class background, upper-class athletic (squash/crew/lacrosse/polo/etc) lunks from HYP+S who have the precocity and implacable hair necessary for a 22 year old sociology major to claim that they are, say, a telecomm specialist, and then tell 50-year old engineers and MBA’s at Verizon how to fix their business model.

    4.  Are you aware that you are still listing a bunch of top 40 universities out of around 4000 colleges and universities in the US, not including the Devry’s and U Phoenices of the world?  Granted, I should have applied and gone to one of them instead of my Little Ivy-esque liberal arts college (where maybe 10 employers came to campus my senior year, and only if you count the Greenpeaces and Peace Corps in that total), but the problem with hindsight is that it is never really around when you need it.  Nevertheless, what about those who did not get into the top 1% of colleges? To take your Silicon Valley example for a second, the Zuck came back to Boston to recruit last fall. Lo and behold, he only visited, and accepted resumes, from candidates at Harvard and MIT. There are more than 100 colleges in Massachusetts, plus some major institutions right over her borders (UCONN, Brown, UNH, etc), but evidently only two of them can teach how to code.

    5.  I saw that WSJ article, but it cuts in both our favors.  For you, that law/finance/consulting/academia/the feds comprise but a smattering of employers here in the US.  For me, that most employers don’t give a hoot where you went, so long as your major is directly applicable to the job at hand.  In that regard, it is not surprising that Penn State – an enormous school that probably has more types of business and engineering programs than my liberal arts college had majors altogether – was the most recruited institution.  Way back in the 1850′s, a certain grandson and great-grandson of presidents lamented that his classical Harvard education was hopelessly obsolete in the age of railroads, regular intercontintental trade routes, and the telegraph, a sentiment he later recalled in his famous autobiography “The Education of Henry Adams.”  The market has finally caught on to Adams, although of course Harvard and a few others still get a pass.  For the rest of us, though, one’s major determines one’s future to a frightening degree.

    Un_No

    *If law school didn’t cost >$200,000 and if ANY other sector of law hired fresh grads these days, we wouldn’t have such an insane focus on getting jobs that have such awesome work-life balance that only 80% of associates at the largest 250 firms quit within five years.

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    I concur.  Knowing attorneys like I do – sadly, I am one – I would recommend keeping your firm anonymous, and maybe even redacting a couple of those foreign offices and the salary info, ‘cuz that figure is well below market for NYC (and will make it easier to ID the firm along with those foreign offices).

  • Unemployed_Northeastern

    Yale law students are, perhaps self-selectingly, much more interested in becoming USSC clerks and/or law professors than they are in becoming little cogs at a multi-thousand attorney law firm as they tend to be at Harvard/Columbia/Chicago, and it is a very small law school besides.  That is very likely the reason your firm does not recruit there.

  • icanhazphd

    Oh my, this will give them something to discuss while sipping their brandy at the Claremont Club.

  • icanhazphd

    Oh my, this might sour the brandy they are sipping at the Klaremont Klub tonight.

  • jaysanderson

    I find no fault in an organization that looks to better itself. Seize the opportunity when it appears or watch from the sidelines. Go Tigers!

  • pianiste

    The University of Memphis is going to better itself by joining the Big East? The Big East is just C-USA under another name: a bunch of unrelated schools, in it only for the TV money, scattered all over the country (can’t wait to see all those SMU students in New Jersey for that big traditional rivalry game with Rutgers!), with some members football-only, some just for lacrosse and tiddly-winks, etc. Yeah, right: Go Tigers!

  • janebuck

    The spell checker should have caught the “eggregious” error, though.

  • 22108469

    Anyone who has written/typed a lot of copy knows what the most dangerous words are. “Public” is definitely a dangerous one, especially because of its frequent appearance in the names of well-known institutions.

  • helenv

    Auto correct will do it everytime! LOL!

  • observer1951

    The error did not originate with the printer. No way — another error on the part of the University. Printers rarely read what they’re printing, and materials are never sent to the printer with the expectation that the printer will generate any of the text.  Grant the impossible and the final responsibility still rests with the University — not the printer.  

    It’s a transparent case of passing the buck.  They should have recalled The First Law of Holes:  When you find yourself in one, stop digging.  

  • studentteacher

    Have received more than one cover letter for internships where autocorrect changed the misspelling of definitely to defiantly: “I defiantly have the skills for the job.”  I kind of like it ;)

    My favorite is the resume where the degree was “English Ligature.”  Still not QUITE sure if that was a typo or autocorrect or good old Freudian slip for English Literature…

  • 22122118

    The “First Law of Holes”? Please. In this context?

    In fact, I loved it.

  • thewhirlpool

    I don’t think that was a slip. LBJ was big into pubics. I read it on the internet. originally his last two initials were GJ for Lyndon George Johnson. But, he changed his middle name to Baines just so he could have BJ in his name. He was quite the tramp. 

  • 11274135

    This error is so common that it almost has to be missed on purpose. My personal favorite currently is deficate spending.

  • dank48

    Hear, hear. Anyone who has anything printed without proofreading the copy first is responsible. Blaming the printer is even more pathetic than relying on a spell checker.

    Beverly Sills’s autobiography Bubbles had the same typo, in the first sentence on the first page, years before spell checkers. 

  • pflady

    I remember a typo in my hometown newspaper that went the other way, yet perhaps had more than a bit of truth to it.   A dancer in a local strip club was arrested for lowering her G-string and exposing her “public” area.

  • 22277599

     Delaying moving on for a moment, I always have to be careful of typing “curse” for “course” and “faulty” for “faculty.”  Perhaps, at times, it is a curse, rather than a course, and the instructor is faulty.

  • 11331315

    Our college catalog came out several years ago with the college’s name misspelled on the cover. The budget could not afford a rerun, so it was distributed anyway. Not a lot of people noticed.

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