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I used to get kinda miffed that super popular restaurants like Border Cafe in Harvard Square do not take reservations, so you basically have to wait an hour or two to get a spot. But from their point of view it makes perfect sense. Why would they go through the trouble if they fill their tables at 100% with a line around the block to boot? That's how I think of the hiring pipelines as well.

p.s. Yes this is out of date somewhat but I promise Border Cafe was a hopping place 20 years ago :-)

Reservations are worse. You have cancellations, and fragmentation if any party leaves early. This can more than make the difference between a restaurant being profitable or not.

Although I’m not sure this can be extended by analogy to only hiring from “top” schools. Beyond, they don’t don’t need to do something so they don’t.

And Casa Mexico 20 years before then :-)

Pu pu hotpot, anyone?

My place!!

You heard it shut down right?

>So why does the gatekeeping all seem to help upper-middle class people? As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes. if they are smarter it is bc of direct filtering by SAT at the admissions stage and indirect genetic confounds, not because elite institutions actually teach useful things better.

> the extra education didn't go into developing useful skills, but into teaching them how to navigate the UMC status signaling games. that is where the entire premium goes

As someone who taught kids like this I can't agree. I taught hundreds of kids real math, writing, and programming skills that I now use in my professional life as a highly paid software engineer. Some of those kids have reconnected with me as adults to tell me I made a difference in their lives and credit my teaching (which their parents paid thousands for) as a very meaningful part of their success.

The problem is that the UMC status signalling game is heavily correlated with success in the real world.

Especially in law, where the status signalling game is a prerequisite in a very serious sense for doing the job, attracting wealthy clients.

If you hire someone from a working class background you basically need to teach them that on the job. Even in engineering it happens.

status signalling games are correlated with success in the real world almost by definition, but that does not mean they are useful to society or that we should tolerate ever greater shares of resources ploughed into them. it is a zero sum game!

What are the KPI's of the people doing the recruiting strategy for these organizations?

They're incentivized to hire people who will fit in, and perform well. After a certain level of competency, from any school, this is no longer a distinguishing feature. So they double down on the culture fit, and the easiest way to eliminate risk is to hire from a pool of people who have already demonstrated that culture.

I has a very illuminating chat once with a hiring consultant developing the onboarding/induction process and activity package for graduate engineers starting at a global oil&gas company (different industry, but the same level of gatekeeping).

When taking the grads through these activities, she was struck by the fact they all looked and sounded nearly identical(even with obligatory racial diversity). She later found out that the two managers in charge of graduate program were hiring exclusively from the two engineering schools they themselves had attended, and that they were running into a terrible time retaining graduates after the program had finished, as they usually stepped off into more boutique consultancies or went to work on passion projects as money was never the motivator.

The recommendation from her consultancy was to broaden their hiring practices, and that drawing exclusively upper crust engineers who just saw the role as a stepping stone was going to hurt them in the long run, whereas they'd get much better loyalty from middle class graduates.

>As a former educator I'm going to say it's because when it comes to the skills companies are looking for on average children of upper-middle class people are better if for no other reason than they've generally had much more money spent on their education and training, to the tune of over a million dollars compared to lower class peers.

This is funny to me, because in most debates about the function and efficacy of public schools, I'm assured by the other side that money isn't the issue.

It's not the state money. It's all the private money the parents dump on top. The tutoring, the extracurricular, the sports, the summer camp, etc, etc, etc, all the shit that teaches them the norms of white collar society so they can fit in enough to do ok in college and beyond.

They're partly right. The US has some aggressively stupid educational policy such as teaching reading via 3 cueing (which I won't go into here), but they've also fallen for a bit of accounting trick.

Most obviously, schools being funded via property tax in most states means rich districts tend to receive more money than schools in poorer districts. Less obvious is that because the US doesn't offer many services generally those that are offered are often routed through the schools and attributed to the education budget e.g. many kinds of therapists and aides are part of school budgets in the US but are part budget under various health department budgets in other countries and thus those countries' total spend on students is undercounted.

Similarly, countries that invest in making sure there are enough social services to ensure a good life for even the bottom 20% of society need to spend a lot less fixing the problems that arise from growing up with a bad home life and get more bang for their buck.

>Consider that for most top law firms, if you're not coming out of the top 3 law schools they're not interested.

Yes, and this is certainly not a new phenomenon. I used to work with a recruiting department at a large upper-end law firm. They only took new associates from the top 10 universities. This was 35 years ago. So there's nothing new under the sun.