If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do:
1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places.
2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4.0. Better to graduate with 3.7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it.
That’s the upshot of an enlightening/depressing study about the ridiculously narrow-minded people who make hiring decisions at the aforementioned elite companies. The author of this study—Lauren Rivera, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University—gained inside access to the hiring process at one such (unnamed) business, and picked the brains of recruiters at other firms.
The portrait that emerges is of a culture that’s insanely obsessed with pedigree. These firms pour resources into recruiting students from “target schools” (i.e., Harvard, Yale, Princeton) and then more or less ignore everybody else. Here’s a manager from a top investment bank describing what happens to the resume of someone who went to, say, Rutgers: “I’m just being really honest, it pretty much goes into a black hole.”
What’s surprising isn’t that students from elite universities have a leg up; it’s that students from other colleges don’t have a chance, even if those colleges are what the rest of us might consider elite. Here’s what a top consultant had to say about M.I.T.:
You will find it when you go to like career fairs or something and you know someone will show up and say, you know, “Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School] but, you know, I am an engineer at M.I.T. and I heard about this fair and I wanted to come meet you in New York.” God bless him for the effort but, you know, it’s just not going to work.
There are exceptions, but only if the candidate has some personal connection with the firm. And the list of super-elite schools varies somewhat depending on the field. For instance, Columbia might be considered elite by some investment banks, but others describe it as ”second-tier” or “just okay.”
So going to Harvard is a prerequisite. But you also need to prove, in the words of the recruiters, that you’re not “boring,” a “tool,” or a ”bookworm.” This is where your leisure pursuits come in. Among the acceptable extra-curricular activities listed in the paper: traveling with a world-renowned orchestra and building houses in Costa Rica. It’s good to play sports, but they have to be the right ones. Being on the crew team is acceptable; being on the ping-pong team is not. Ideally, you should be a national or Olympic champion. And if you like hiking, you should summit some impressive peak.
When you read the accounts of recruiters at these firms, you get a sense of why they might choose these metrics. They have multiple stacks of resumes. They meet hundreds of applicants at career fairs. Rather than scrutinizing anyone’s resume it’s easier just to limit the pool to the top three or four universities. Do you really want to pore over the transcript of that kid from the University of Michigan? Wouldn’t it be easier just to call the Harvard grad? In essence, what they’re assuming is that the admissions offices at the super-elite schools have already picked the best of the best. Why second guess them?
You also can’t read this study without getting the feeling that the game is rigged. That obtaining a name-brand diploma matters more than actually learning something. That the gatekeepers at our nation’s most prestigious firms are pathetically shallow, outrageously parochial, and insufferably snobbish. The message is this:
It’s not what you did in college. It’s where you got in.
(Here’s the abstract for the paper. It was published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.)
17 Responses to Brown and Cornell Are Second Tier
emjlev13 - January 7, 2011 at 10:17 pm
this is one of the reasons our culture is so messed up. These rigid, ossified “codes” are beyond sad.
zagros - January 10, 2011 at 6:26 am
You might just add “elite university” to that list as well. Although MIT will score better in that category, if your PhD isn’t from one of the top 5 in your field, forget about it. The disdain for anything but the right pedigree runs deep: forget about it at many school (even non-elite ones) if you fail to have a PhD from a top 20 school. Mine is from a top 30 school and it took 7 years AFTER THE PhD to break into academia full-time. What I did have was 3 publications and a Fulbright when I graduated. Big deal. At the annual market, despite applying everywhere, I had all of 2 interviews, both for temporary positions. Others who graduated from my university met a similar fate.
In fact, it took 6 years and 10 publications (all while working full-time as a manager in government while simultaneously adjuncting 2-3 courses a semester at a local university at night) before I even started getting job interviews, and my first job was outside the United States in a developing world country (granted it was a doctoral level university in that country).
Three years later, I was back in the United States at a regional public university that has a teaching focus.
Today, I have 25 papers (including 5 books) either published or accepted for publication since making the transition to academia 8 years ago, with several of these papers in top-tier journals. Those individuals from top-flight universities are often washed out of academia altogether. We might use universities as a screen for quality but we often screen out even higher quality when we do so.
dhenderson46 - January 10, 2011 at 7:56 am
Oh. Are these the same “elite” firms that invented the creative (and rapacious) abuses that brought us the great recession? Perhaps new hiring policies are in order.
eck29871 - January 10, 2011 at 8:23 am
Sounds about right. These people almost tanked our economy.
mchag12 - January 10, 2011 at 8:33 am
Enron, anyone?
maggiecase - January 10, 2011 at 8:38 am
Sadly, the gatekeepers elsewhere can be just as parochial, pathetic et al. Let us not forget those who put the vitas of for-profit or online school school graduates into the “black hole”. Snobbery and elitism – as well as anti-intellectualism against the “bookworms” – is alive and well at all levels!
quidditas - January 10, 2011 at 10:01 am
“Enron, anyone?”
No, not Enron. Goldman Sachs.
tgroleau - January 10, 2011 at 11:20 am
Sadly, this article doesn’t surprise me. Several years ago I had a speaker on campus who was a corporate officer of a Fortune 100 company. He told me that when he and his peers were involved in hiring new MBA graduates they would consider only seven schools. I don’t remember the exact list but it included Harvard, Yale, Princeton, a couple schools from the state the company was located it, and a couple other well known schools. Essentially it was the schools that the corporate officers had attended themselves.
I’ve heard many times that the real value of an “elite” school education is the alumni network. I wonder what proportion of Prof. Rivera’s finding can be linked to alumni connections.
contreras - January 10, 2011 at 11:24 am
Did the study cover only hiring at top law firms, investment banks and “consultancy” firms? That is a remarkably tiny speck of the U.S. employment market for college graduates.
The choice of such firms by the researcher suggests that these jobs are considered “preferred” for some reason. Are they better jobs in the sense that they pay more? Allow more time off? Give access to a wider set of professionally interesting opportunities? Have in-house child care?
The idea underlying the study is a good one, but it needs to be replicated using a wider variety of major firms, e.g. electronics, manufacturing, natural resources, publishing. The sorry fate of those who are unable to secure work at a handful of law firms or investment banks is not very significant or interesting.
tombartlett - January 10, 2011 at 1:07 pm
@contreras These jobs pay very well and often come with substantial signing bonuses. And while we’re talking about a small number of employers, we’re also talking about some of the most desirable jobs for recent college grads. That the process is so weirdly skewed seems both significant and interesting. At least to me.
midevilprof - January 10, 2011 at 4:29 pm
But what about those of us who never wanted to work at “elite” firms–or “elite” universities? For those of us settling for other, simply successful firms, smaller/regional companies, or teaching schools, does the pedigree hurt? I mean, somebody is working at these places.
melinh - January 10, 2011 at 4:53 pm
These conclusions bolster the egos of those with desired credentials but fail to serve the rest of us.
raymond_j_ritchie - January 10, 2011 at 9:38 pm
This is better called “Old School Tie” or in Australian English “The Mates Club”. Then the meritocracy sham falls away and it is seen for what it is. Correspondents are right that it has nothing to do with what they learn at university or anything as crude as ability or merit. It has everything to do with employing only people with a “born to rule” mentality and think a piece of paper justifies it.
The consequences for the US are predictable enough: just look at Wall St and the quality of governance of the country.
tgroleau’s story about the recruiter is bemusing. I bet that despite what the recruiter told you about only considering candidates from a few schools the recruiter was invited back rather than told to tell their employer that their representatives were no longer welcome on the campus.
11161452 - January 10, 2011 at 10:19 pm
In my subfield of music, we have a version of the above phenomenon which determines who gets jobs. There is a short list of maybe half a dozen cronies who basically run the profession, and if you manage to get into their grad programs, you will get whatever top jobs are out there in a given hiring season. Jobs are filled with a phone call.
As someone else mentioned, the current market conditions don’t help things. If a committee has to weed people out of a stack of 200 applications, the pedigree is a quick (and dirty) method of winnowing the list without bothering to look at other aspects of the applications.
Choose your graduate program carefully and with full knowledge that you will be sealing your own fate before you even hit the campus.
lexisaro - January 12, 2011 at 11:05 pm
I suggest that future job candidates sending in their resumes just make this stuff up. Why not? I imagine a lot have done that already and really, that is about as much respect as it deserves anyway. These industries are largely built on such facades.
Just pick your hobbies well so documentation is difficult, and skip actually climbing everest or building houses in the third world. You can just read about it and fake your way!
:)
jeff1 - January 21, 2011 at 1:13 pm
So I hire dozens of people each year (faculty and staff). I am going to do my part to help the equity and NEVER and I mean NEVER hire a Harvard, Penn or Yale graduate! Second, I think I am going to ask the companies we do business with where the CEO has earned his/her degree and count that against them if it is Harvard, Penn or Yale!
I have hired a few of them in the past and they were good but there are plenty of good people out there not from these institutions. Please . . . they are not that good . . .
jaysocrates - January 23, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Just to give a different perspective… I graduated from Harvard Law School a year or so before the economy tanked. I was in the middle of my class. I thought getting B+’s at Harvard would be as good as getting A’s at some lower-ranked schools. Wrong! I received ZERO offers from the big firms where the top-of-the-class people ended up, and after applying to about 50 jobs in public-interest-type positions, I finally ended up in a rural public defender’s office. Mind you, I love my job and am glad I didn’t sell my soul to Big Law, but the point is it’s not just “Cornell” students who aren’t getting the “good” (i.e. lucrative) positions; it’s also people at the “elitest” schools who don’t manage to graduate summa. Sometimes those of us in the “bottom 50%” at Harvard are twice-screwed: we aren’t good enough for the highest-paying employers, but we’re looked down upon by other employers like jeff1 who think we’re snobs just because we managed to get into someplace like Harvard. You just can’t win for trying these days…