Brown, Cornell and MIT Grads not considered good enough by recruiters | Hacker News Reader

Brown, Cornell and MIT Grads not considered good enough by recruiters

huffingtonpost.com

26 pointstrustfundbaby39 comments

The article starts, "Think your Brown, Cornell or MIT degree carries weight in the professional world?" But what on earth is the "professional" world? "Top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks."

In other words, what is being said here is that employers that emphasize pedigree and polish like to hire from schools that emphasize pedigree and polish.

Next week, somebody can publish a study saying that employers of, say, computer programmers, actuaries, and petroleum engineers actually love to hire from MIT, Caltech, Cornell, or CMU. And that would surprise me equally little.

From Gladwell's Outliers:

In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line law firms of New York operated like a private club. They were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan, in and around Wall Street, in somber, granite-faced buildings. The partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools, attended the same churches, and summered in the same oceanside towns on Long Island. They wore conservative gray suits. Their partnerships were known as "white-shoe" firms – in apparent reference to the white bucks favored at the country club or a cocktail party, and they were very particular in who they hired. As Erwin Smigel wrote in The Wall Street Lawyer, his study of the New York legal establishment of that era, they were looking for:

"lawyers who are Nordic, have pleasing personalities and ‘clean-cut’ appearances, are graduates of the ‘right schools’, have the ‘right’ social background and experience in the affairs of the world, and are endowed with tremendous stamina. A former law school dean, in discussing the qualities students need to obtain a job, offers a somewhat more realistic picture. ‘To get a job [students] should be long enough on family connections, long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these. Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts. If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs; if he has three, he could go anywhere.’"

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. At least nowadays you don't necessarily have to be white, male, or non-Jewish, and the definition of Ivy League has broadened a bit, but this clubbishness is how it's been for a century and more. What, you thought people battled each other to get into Harvard because Harvard's graduate TAs were such talented and dedicated teachers relative to the competition?

Precisely. I actually have another comment to make, though, which is about the impedance mismatch between Engineering School culture and Ivy League culture.

I graduated Caltech in 2005. Caltech may be the best example of a school with extremely high academic standards but mediocre credibility with the "white shoe" crowd. Many of my fellow Caltech alums are descended from parents who are highly educated and moderately affluent, but also immigrants and/or Asian and/or Jewish and/or from less fashionable parts of the US (say, Idaho). On top of that, many of us display personality types most easily described as "geeky."

Caltech alums end up in many industries, but everywhere they tend to converge on rather specialized, analytical work. I know two who went into politics... to do statistics for campaigns. I heard of one that went to law school... and became a patent attorney. The ones in finance tend to do quantitative modeling or computer systems. Many, of course, ended up in private sector R&D (biotech, computer programming, engineering, what-have-you). And about half of us went to grad school, often to pursue a career in academia.

Now one reason for this pattern may be that white-shoe firms are not interested in hiring eccentric geeks as much as they are in attracting "well rounded" Ivy League folks. But an equally important reason is that the eccentric geeks are often not very interested in "white shoe" jobs, or at least don't look down on more specialized work.

That may be hard for the "white shoe" recruiters to understand. I recall talking to an acquaintance for whom being a McKinsey consultant would be the epitomy of career and life success, surpassable only by joining the Dutch foreign service... and who was almost offended at the idea that I was not in the least interested in such prestigious occupations.

I can easily imagine this attitude rubbing the white shoe folks the wrong way. "What, you are actually considering a career in kernel hacking (or genome hacking, or whatever) as a viable alternative to joining our glitzy band of Masters of the Universe? You must be, like, arrogant or something."

Agreed. And it seems like "professional world" only involves the United States. Last I heard, we have more than 1 country in this world. Pretty sure many other actual world-class firms would take these grads.

And its not even true for all top consulting agencies and investment banks (I can't speak for law firms). I know that Goldman Sachs recruits pretty heavily at MIT.

Yes, but for math wizards or accountants, not lawyers.

What is the point of this article?

There are some 2,000+ four year colleges in the US, and "recruiters" are only interested in grads from 3 or 4 of them? I'm a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, no one I know or work with is even interested in job fairs, recruiters, etc.

That said, any company that won't look at me because I'm from MIT and not Princeton isn't the kind of place I would want to work anyway. I'm sure this sort of discrimination makes for great internal culture.

> What is the point of this article?

Trolling for page views.

Would you count Google in that statement -- with their notoriously discriminating hiring practices with respect to schooling?

The handful of people I know at Google are from a variety of academic institutions, ASU, UW, Stanford, and MIT to name a few. Most importantly, they're all passionate, creative hackers who take pride in their work – not riding the prestige of their education.

The answer directly, if google decided folks from Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, MIT were not good enough while those from Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Harvard were - then yes, I would count Google in my statement.

That's good to hear -- and sounds like an improvement.

I was having dinner with a coordinator of university job fairs about a year ago and she commented that Google and Facebook were among the worst companies she's ever dealt with respect to hiring practices due to a very large school bias. Many of the schools she works with complains that their students don't even get their resumes looked at. She also note that Microsoft used to be one of those as well, but with Google and FB vacuuming up everybody else they've had to cast their net a bit wider.

Perhaps times are changing?

Anecdotally, the most brilliant people I've ever worked with came from either state schools or CMU or Stanford or MIT (specifically). I've had very little success finding top-notch folks from other established Ivies. Not sure why that is.

I think pg's essay on schools really helps bring some data to that though. It really is the individuals that count.

I graduated from a community college, heh. College is a way for me to maintain social approval* while I learn, and I will then use my knowledge to build my own company & fortune. Working for other people is a guaranteed way to stay middle class.

If you're worried about who is going to hire you, you're worrying about the wrong thing. Jobs are a way to obtain money, but not the best way to obtain it, if you're smart.

*You can be in college and not doing much and people think it's respectable, but if you're at home not working, hacking all day, people think you're lazy and "spending all day on the computer", despite laying the foundation for future wealth.

There is a subtle sense of superiority in this comment over people who simply want a job. Which is ironic given your identification of the disrespect people have toward the full-time hacker.

Not only that, but he graduated. I fear it may already be too late for him:

http://www.satirewire.com/news/0006/satire-ellison.shtml

If you think I have any level of respect at all for community college, or the education system in the United States in general, you are misinformed.

A poorly trained ape could graduate from any community college in this country. Fact.

I had hoped you would glean from my comment: "If a Cornell grad can't find a job, and I just went to a lowly community college, I must be fucked, right?" NOT SO.

All kidding aside--and I was just kidding with my previous comment--while I think there is vast room for improvement in how people are moved through the education system I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't have any level of respect for it or community colleges in particular.

I graduated from high school two years early and started attending the local community college before moving to a 4-year university. My experiences were that yes, the day classes were like an unfortunate extension of high school, but the night classes were generally filled with people who were working during the day and serious about their time in class at night. Compared to the 4-year university, the feel was more collaborative and less competitive. In fact, one of my instructors during those community college days (Don Heidt, I'm thinking of you) was among the best I had. I still think about things that he said in class on a regular basis, and that was ~19 years ago.

So even though "a poorly trained ape could graduate from any community college in this country", I believe community colleges DO provide opportunities for students to better themselves. The problem is that community colleges, since they aren't selective, don't make great differentiators of applicants if you're not interested in trying to determine for yourself how capable someone is.

The study (which strangely isn't available on SSRN or the author's website) appears to be about recruiting law and b-school grads.

I wouldn't be that surprised if her results are true. Whenever there are lots of applicants and lots of employer uncertainty about applicant quality, screening on things like credentials that correlate (however weakly) with average ability can still be "rational."

To give an example, assume that GMAT score is a) unobservable by employers and b) perfectly predictive of future performance in the firm. If HBS grads have a mean 1 point advantage over Sloan grads, it makes sense to lexically prefer HBS to Sloan grads, even though slightly less than half the time the employer will make the wrong (ex post) hiring choice.

This dynamic also tends to be self-reinforcing. If credentials are all that matter to future employers (and all schools cost the same), then all students will try to attend the most prestigious school they can. If admissions committees are not pure coin flips, then it makes sense for employers to believe that the HBS/Sloan "distinction" means something.

As usual, the HuffPo article is much less informative than the paper itself. From the professor's site here: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera...

The following is the abstract:

Although a robust literature in sociology and economics has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic rewards remains less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the economic and social returns to formal schooling. Yet, little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions.

In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits.

I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.

Key points:

* she looked at top-tier "professional service firms"

* separated out the "super-elite" schools

* found that just going to a super-elite school didn't mean much; you needed to have done something there

The abstract of the paper the article quotes is here: http://tinyurl.com/6bgtwu4 [sciencedirect.com link; too long to put here]

There's no real mention of any university names. This line caught my eye: "However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits."

So it sounds like these 'recruiters' don't just look at what school you come from, but also look at what else you've done outside school during your years. Sounds about fair to me. HuffingtonPost article sounds like it was written in a rather sensational manner.

The recruiters in this article are hiring for "top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks." In those jobs, your number one priority is selling to the wealthy and/or powerful, so this sort of selection makes perfect sense. The recruiters are looking for a set of social skills and connections, not hard skills.

This has been going on forever, and there really isn't any way to "fix the problem." People - including the wealthy - are simply more comfortable with others who share a cultural background. Sales jobs have always sought people with preexisting connections to potential clients.

I signed up for this. Having just completed the recruiting process as a senior engineering student at Cornell trying to go into some of the industries listed I call BS.

I could expound for a while on this but to make it brief:

1) Undergrad recruiting for finance and consulting out of Cornell is not as good as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton but it is very easy to break into these industries coming from Cornell compared to coming from any state level schools.

2) It is not an old boys club, anyone can break into the industry from any background. A number of people I spoke with in industry failed to get a job out of college in the area they wanted. Persistence and networking can land you an analyst level banking job in less than three years after graduation. If you want to be a banker you'll do it.

3) A number of programmers I knew wanted to go into the financial sector, partially because of pay, partially because they got tired of geek.

4) I had a lab partner that played on the football team. His day started at 6am with videos (for the team), then breakfast, then weight lifting, then classes/lab, then practice. He didn't settle down until 9pm at which time he could actually start on his homework. His GPA was crap but I find it pretty ignorant for a bunch of hackers to diminish those who pursue athletics in college based upon their own personal bias. Athletics indicates someone willing to work 15+ hours a day, and mind you standard industry work weeks vary from 80 to 130 hours (looking into Moelis and UBS LA if you doubt the 130 hours).

5) My understanding and experience implies that "recruiters" are less involved with the process than they let on. Cornell, and most other high ranked schools, have career services offices that coordinate with a staffing member at the hiring firm. That staffing member will take resumes from the school and send them to employees working the position that is being hired for. While this may generate an element of bias based upon existing employees it is not one to be faulted too heavily when taking a pragmatic standpoint (look at the biases displayed in this thread regarding community college and athletes)

7) I have ~18 resume drafts saved on my computer completed over a 3 months period, ~50 cover letter drafts from a 1 month period, I applied to a total of 49 positions, and it took me a total of 4 months from start (beginning of last summer) to finding a job. I beat my target base salary by 30%, I beat my target max potential bonus by 30%, my promotion schedule works out to be twice as fast as I anticipated, and I will have a much more reasonable work week than those listed above. I am an average to below average applicant (from a resume only perspective) in a down job market, recognizing this I put in a great more effort than my peers that are just starting to look.

@PostOnce: I worked two jobs to support myself through community college. We acted as a feeder college for a Top 10 engineering school. It eventually trickled back from transfer students that the courses at my community college were harder than the equivalents at the Top 10 school. EVERY course in math, science, physics, and engineering transferred completely to the top engineering school and I received FULL credit upon arrival at Cornell for my previous coursework. In response to your lack of respect for community college I offer this: to discount an institution, firm, or individual based upon a potentially baseless or anecdotal prejudice is naive at best and moronic at worst. Maybe you simply wouldn't have been able to take advantage of community college and it is truly a lack of respect for yourself?

Anywho, I've ranted enough.

Luckily this is a self-correcting problem. When the grads from all the "second tier" schools, ranging from MIT to the various community colleges, start their own firms and ultimately eat these guys' lunch, it'll become a moot point.

There arent many schools, aside from maybe stanford, that can rival the combination of top notch talent and culture of innovation MIT has nurtured (and I never went there). Any company worth working for would be stupid to ignore this.

I've always had a problem with articles citing the famous "some people" (in this case "some recruiters"). Yea, there are "some (really stupid) people" out there in the world that behave in incoherent, irrational ways and make stupid business decisions. We dont need to write articles about these people and their stupid prejudices.

Why is MIT so underrated against Harvard? I thought the MIT would teach top computer skills that are so valuable today in banking. Is the CS program in Harvard so much better?

Also looking at the alumni, MIT has produced quite a few successful people in banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Massachusetts_Institute... . Of course there are much more Harvard alumni getting at this level also.

These are companies that hire out their employees as powerpoint-generating consultants for x00 dollars an hour and need to be able to say that they all went to Harvard/Yale/Princeton. I'm pretty sure it's the kind of racket MIT students aren't very interested in anyway.

Probably the "bookworm" aspect which from the article apparently "top firms" don't like. But honestly, who cares.

From the article: "According to a forthcoming paper written by Northwestern assistant professor Lauren Rivera, recruiters at top law firms, consulting agencies and investment banks" ...

Of course, it has been like that for years. I'm not sure what the news is, everybody who goes looking for these jobs (and knows what they're talking about) knows it, too.

http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

For what it's worth, crew and student government have always been the two most-valued extracurriculars. If you're a good rower then you can get pretty much any job regardless of which college you attended.

As somebody who has never been in the US, allow me to scream from the top of my lungs: why?

What possible benefit would being a rower bring to working in an investment bank? I can see student government, but rowing?

"What possible benefit would being a rower bring to working in an investment bank?"

Something about the nature of rowing tends to self-actualize people. Not everyone, but a good chunk of those who commit to the program. I think it's some combination of:

- The kind of people who enjoy waking up at 5am to work hard for something that will never make them any money.

- The massive time commitment (30+ hours per week) forces people to get their shit together.

- The ability to undergo extreme pain without showing it or complaining. ("Harvard doesn't care. Princeton doesn't care. Navy doesn't care.")

- Never making excuses. ("There's no asterisks in rowing.")

- The ability to recognize when a team is or isn't working together, and he ability to learn to take pleasure out of firing on all cylinders as a team. There is this feeling called Swing in rowing that's completely ineffable, but basically it's where the boat is moving faster than the sum of everyone's inputs. It's also incredible elusive, and you tend to spend 1,000+ hours per year for a chance to experience it for twenty minutes a year. But when you do experience it, it completely rewrites your model of effective teamwork.

- Develops the Buddhist concepts of right view and right intention, and the hindu concept of non-attachment to outcome. ("The Olympian stands alone.")

- At the same time, you learn to take pleasure in getting to go out and fuck up someone else's day.

Plus there are all sorts of aesthetic benefits as well. And the fact that rowers tend to be much smarter than the rest of the student body as well as athletes in other sports.