Guess who private sector loves to promote to executive positions like VP and SVP? Harvard and ivy grads. Even in engineering, where it's supposed to be more of a meritocracy, you can see this at every bigco.
Human idiosyncrasies lead to branding pedigree consistently being selected over pure skill and / or superior experience in favor of an abstract perception.
The C-suite is a different story: The Ivy Grads are either joining their parents' companies, going into VC, or starting their own companies (YC), not working as lowly "senior" ICs at say Amazon. Chances are the company you work for was founded by a Harvard or Stanford grad who spent their school years partying and networking in social clubs instead of studying...
You might further split Ivy into HYPS and others (Stanford is much more like the other Ivies than Cornell). The others like Brown and Dartmouth are more like a Northwestern / U-Chicago, for people who didn't quite make the cut or for good test takers from upper middle class rather than upper class backgrounds.
UPenn and Columbia lean in the middle. Sure, Elon Musk and Donald Trump went to UPenn, but the school itself still mainly graduates "just" worker bees in finance / investment banking. Your coworkers at Google didn't go there, though.
There are always outliers at all of these schools, but by definition, they are the exception rather than the rule...
Thankfully not at the moment, but I get your point.
My original point stands- looking at the social network connections, nothing these days is a surprise with regard to general composition.
Is it the best? No, I think it is elitist and pointlessly or harmfully exclusionary. These are fundamental divisions in society, a glass ceiling that is hard to break through.
I went there, and I didn't see anything but ordinary people. Something like Classics will naturally skew towards secondary schools that have a Latin class, but apart from that admissions are close to a dice roll among qualified kids. Certainly the impression I got was that dons were jealously guarding their right to decide, on their own, who would get in.
The place was non-elite enough that I never even realized the Bullingdon Club was a thing until after I left.
As you might expect though, a fairly large proportion of kids came from wealthy backgrounds. Private schools that cost way more than university tuition, that kind of thing.
If you look at how admissions work, it seems reasonably fair: most courses have some sort of entrance test, and then a grilling by the don. There's not a lot of soft questions in those interviews: what's e, let's take the log of a negative number, what's magnetism. Not a lot of cultural fit or motivation questions.
There's also the fact that the dons seem to just have their own set of applicants to look at. My understanding of the US system is you have a whole pile of applicants from which to shape the class as a whole. At Oxford it seemed like your don has 10 applicants and chooses 2 or 3, and that's his class. The rest of the uni does the same and the incoming few thousand kids are just whatever the sum of those little decisions is.
Totally different than the US and much more meritocratic. Steps are:
1. Be qualified to apply. In UK this means at least AAA if not more. Varies by course. US equivalent is have at least three 5s on AP and above 1450 on SAT. This is roughly equivalent to top 10% of uk graduates.
2. Take the entrance exam. Huge weed out. This really separates the grinders vs the smart kids as the tests are based on what you intend to study, but most are more intelligence based and cannot necessarily be prepped for.
3. Assuming you make it past that, you get two sets of interviews. They are testing for the ability to go toe to toe in an intellectual conversation on your subject. This is obviously biased toward a certain "type", but given the small group tutorial teaching, it is really a responsibility of the student to engage this way to provide a good experience for all. No sitting in the back of the room taking notes!
4. There are some additional crazy things like applying to specific colleges, and wildly different admit rates based on the course you choose. But the overall impression I got was that for a well prepared and smart kid, it is much more straightforward than the so called elite US schools.
Yes, plus you can skip applying to all the US schools if you get accepted, because you get the acceptance letter in December.
I went to a high school that sent kids to both US and UK universities, and the US ones are incredibly onerous, not to mention expensive to even apply for. Multiple teacher references, essays that are supposed to be some sort of work of art, requirements to do extracurricular stuff. I did the SATs, got the Oxford acceptance, and just dropped all the US stuff entirely.
Can you expand on that? I would be amazed to find tests that truly measure intelligence and where your score doesn't improve with practice.
I think in general people who know the answer to something misjudge how hard it is to figure out from first principles.
Just look on oxfords website for the admissions test. The TSA test for example is required on top of the math test.
Of course you can train yourself to do these better, but because they are so specific to each major, there is not a test prep industry behind them. So it is a more natural test.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
Isn't this what was depicted in The History Boys? The extra class for kids who wanted to get into Oxford? Can't quite remember.
In the UK system, even if you do have privilege, you still have to do the same exercises and the same work, and impress the same person to get in.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-ox...
they're just normal people who happens to be extremely smart and also from wealthy backgrounds. maybe some day they'll be C-suite but they're only mid 30s right now. I would say only a handful have the personality traits for C-suite or founding a company anyway. they're mostly just nerds who went to a top private HS and got perfect SAT scores.
Plus I wouldn't let that dissuade me from attempting to figure out how to break in if it lead to x2 FANG compensation rates consistently at the same work load.
That's an interesting matter on its own. Americans are jumping through 12 stage interviews at a chance for a job and getting ghosted while somehow people from other countries are quickly filling up corporations.
It's also weird that so many people with no local connections and no reason to stay in the country get important roles in tech companies, return home, and data is consistently being leaked or "hacked" through various vulnerabilities obvious to employees.
Keep in mind it is more expensive for company to hire foreigners as there are 12 hoops to bring foreigner in board, they just desperate for any talent that can do the job (at high bar though)
The "Americans just aren't good enough!" excuse hasn't been bought by anybody for years now. It's boring and desperate sounding.
There's nothing wrong with hiring workers from other countries. The H1B system just promotes abuse.
[1] https://content.techgig.com/us-govt-to-end-h1b-visa-abuse-he...
Oh yes they do. It definitely opens doors. After that, depending on the role, it can have subtle effects. For mid-level management, right in the grinder, probably no as you say. For externally facing things, yes. They also might have more opportunities for lateral moves, into BD/Sales etc..
I'm aware of at least one company a friend works at in the marketing department, and works directly with salespeople, and at that company a single salesperson brings in 40% of the entire company's revenue, makes 7-figures, and non-execs in the company complain they can't get him to do anything else in the job, like provide data for presentations and the like (personally I'm of the opinion that if they're generating that much revenue for the company, the salesperson has already done their job, and C-suite seems to think so too, but I digress).
Other salespeople at that company pull in a lot less but are still difficult to get them to do other work (except attend meetings here and there), just slightly less so. They're still making good money. And that seems to be the norm at all the companies my friend has worked at.
I imagine sales is more of a grind when you're starting from the bottom, and/or for companies where the margins are much smaller, but Corp2corp salepeople in particular seem to have a pretty sweet gig.
I have witnessed numerous times hiring managers that would request that HR only sends them resumes from 1-2 target schools, specified by name.
But I guess it's the more "polished" post-MBA candidates from said schools that go on to become product managers, and eventually become executives.
What school you went to, what your 2-4 first years of work experience was like, and what business school you went to, seems to work pretty well when signaling potential and success - especially when trying to either come up with funding, or convincing some big corporation that you're the man to lead their product XYZ.
That's weird, because all those schools you mentioned are ivy leagues in the comparative sense.
No. This has not been my experience working at bigcos -- the opposite is true. This isn't even hard to disprove -- just take a look at any large company (outside of those with Ivy funnels like management consulting). Just go to their websites. Many executives often did not attend Ivy league colleges.
You'll find that most US executives actually didn't go to prestigious schools. This fact surprised me when I first observed it, but it makes sense. Assuming US management is a meritocracy, those who make it to the top are those who are in some way good with people. Ivies optimize for intellect, but this often has a negative correlation with social skills.
Alphabet - Sundar Pichai (IIT, Stanford, Wharton)
Amazon - Jeff Bezos (Princeton)
Apple - Tim Cook (Auburn, Duke)
Microsoft - Satya Nadella (MIT Manipal, UW–Milwaukee, UChicago)
Meta - Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard - dropped out)
Tesla - Eleon Musk (UPenn / Wharton, Stanford - dropped out)
Nvidia - Jensen Huang (Oregon State, Stanford)
Broadcom - Hock E. Tan (MIT, Harvard)
Oracle - Safra A. Catz (UPenn)
Adobe - Shantanu Narayen (Osmania University, Bowling Green State University, University of California, Berkeley)
Cisco - Chuck Robbins (UNC)
The Peter Principle is widely known and modern orgs are designed to account for it (American management is constantly evolving) -- for instance, promotions today are based on personnel already performing at the next level rather than them just showing good results at their current level.
The undergrad curriculum in Physics at MIT and a good state school are hardly dissimilar.