"Brown and Cornell Are Second Tier" | Hacker News Reader

"Brown and Cornell Are Second Tier"

chronicle.com

41 pointsacchow48 comments

There are several untrue points in this article:

MIT is most certainly not a second tier school for finance/consulting recruiting. It is easily a top tier school that is considered along with Harvard/Princeton/Yale (notwithstanding the inanity of having such a thing as top tier schools in the first place). The raw proportions of grads that end up in those destinations is probably less than other top schools because entrepreneurship is glamorous now and engineers usually end up in tech.

Brown might not be up there with Harvard in terms of recruitment, but it is still a "target" school for top finance/consulting firms. Goldman Sachs is one of the 3 largest employers of recent Brown grads (though no doubt some of the reported positions were for so-called "back office" positions). The other two are Teach for America and Google.

The fact that interviewers like to hire people with similar interests (incl. sports and fraternities) is sadly true from what people have told me.

One important point to keep in mind is that at the large finance/consulting firms, each school's applicants are screened and interviewed by the alumni from that school. So an engineer applying from MIT may very well get screened by someone from MIT with an engineering background.

This is overstated. It's true that top banks/consulting firms couldn't care less about a Rutgers grad, and that some elite hedge funds make distinctions between Harvard/Wharton and Yale, but it's overstating it to say that they aren't interested in MIT grads. Tons of MIT grads go into consulting/finance (I think they make up the top two target professions). Also, the consulting firms are very interested in people who went to non-target undergraduate schools, but went to a top graduate school (PhD, MBA, MD). Also, McKinsey/BCG/Bain are entirely willing to look at Dartmouth/Duke/etc grads.

And note we're talking about the top firms here, in the same sense that Harvard/Yale/Princeton are the top schools. Outside of Goldman Sachs/Morgan Stanley/JP Morgan, hedge funds and private equity funds, and McKinsey, BCG, and Bain in consulting, the name snobbery drops of precipitiously. Lots of people from top state schools end up working at Deloitte, Accenture, etc.

Also, the stuff about grades versus traipsing around in Costa Rica is outmoded. My brother is an analyst at one of GS/MS/JPM, and his summer class is, to be glib, has a huge representation of 3.9+ asian math/science nerds from Harvard/Yale/Princeton. It's not 2007 anymore, hiring at investment banks is way down, and the days of 3.7+ with a great personality skating past the 3.9+ math nerd are over. To be sure personality is still a requirement, but quantitative skills are increasingly valued.

Also, people arguing that this is an inefficient way to hire are ignoring a basic fact of the business model: these hires aren't keepers. These firms are built on up-or-out models and forced attrition. Most analysts are hired for a two year contract and not asked to stay on board. In essence, the initial hiring decision is just the first round--the two years on the job as an analyst is where the top people are screened out. Indeed, this process never stops. Even at the partner level, which a very select few ever make it to, there is substantial forced attrition. GS adds 100+ partners every other year, but maintains the partnership at a pretty constant 500-ish people. You do the math on that.

By hiring only from Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc, they are just making the bet that statistically good people are more likely to be found in that pool than broader pools.

Is the analyst/consultant career path a solid way to get an upper-middle class life? I don't know anything about that sector but I imagine the average GS/MS/JPM finance-type peson makes 300-700k? Or am I way off?

Would you be limited to living and working the East Coast or getting huge pay cut elsewhere?

Yes, though how much you make depends heavily on the level at which you flame out. Investment banking generally is much more lucrative than consulting (and within investment banking you have to distinguish banking from trading, with the latter having higher headroom). Starting salary is similar, but progression is much steeper. Analysts make about $110k with bonus the first year. After 10-12 years total (remember, there is huge attrition at every step) you make MD (managing director). MD compensation at a top bank can vary wildly, especially in trading where it's based on performance. For a front-office position (people in HR/IT/etc often hold the title but don't make the money) I think $500k-$5m is a reasonable range, though very often the highest paid person is not a partner or the CEO, but some MD trader who brought in $1 billion or something.

Most people never make MD. Some people leave voluntarily to go to hedge funds or private equity funds. Compensation at these funds vary by size, but is broadly similar to banking at larger firms, less at middle market firms, and possibly more at mega firms. Most people don't end up in HF/PE. They go to a top business school (almost guaranteed admissions) then enter upper corporate management. These folks don't make banking money, but 100k starting out after MBA is probably the minimum outside of non-profits, and you'd be surprised how many "assistant controller" types make $300k+. CFO's can make a few million a year at a large company

Consulting pays a lot less, though I know less about it. Average partner compensation at McKinsey is rumored to be $500k to a couple of million. Most, of course, don't make partner. They end up in MBA programs, and either take a second bite at the apple, try to lateral to finance, or compete for the aforementioned management positions. All else being equal, financial experience is really valuable, though (the M&A department at a place like Google is very well compensated).

Wow that got long, haha. This was my pitch to my brother when I told him to go into banking.

Re: east versus west. Consultants can work anywhere, and indeed spend their lives traveling. For banking, you want to start in NY, but good funds exist in every major city for after. Corporate jobs are everywhere. Again, you'd be surprised how many assistant controller types make in Dallas or Atlanta.

This is what happens in situations where you can't measure an employee's marginal productivity with any reasonable degree of accuracy. You hire based on pedigree and promote based on popularity. Excessive focus on these things implies that no particular measurable skill is actually required to do the job. It's not really "we want to hire people who can use their skills to create the most value for us." It's more of "we control a large source of income, and we're going to share access to it with the people we deem worthy." It's the old way.

This hilariously demonstrates what I've long thought about consulting companies: they don't provide "smarts as a service" as they claim (otherwise they would just take the MIT engineering grad, or simply compare based on GRE scores, etc...), instead they provide "corporate ladder infiltration as a service". They want the kind of people with an impressive diploma, with the right hand shake, who exude athletic acumen and look smart and accomplished. Their job would be to impress middle management which would then permit the consultants to do what is likely a trivial job.

It's sad to see so many people with STEM degrees going down the consulting route. I can't obviously understand why anyone would want to go down that route. If someone is truly intelligent and are purely after the money itself, quantitative finance, or working at Google and sticking around for promotions and stock grants (I'm not even talking about, e.g., Founder's Awards -- which I'd argue aren't out of reach for someone truly "best of the best") would pay much better. If (like most people) they want to actually derive some kind of satisfaction from their work, it becomes even more puzzling.

Carl Sagan mentioned in one of his books that he felt the way science is taught in high schools is largely mechanical and robotic and that might draw the wrong kinds of people into science. Without extra-curricular help (youth science/math camps for some, or in my case dad being an maths professor and mom being a software engineer), many creative minds tend to shy away from those fields for that reason. They presume that these fields are remain like that at university level: I've often tried my best to help-out younger hackers who decided not to pursue a CS education thinking they were "bad at math" (based on their experience with high school maths).

As a result by the time of high school seniors apply to college, STEM majors end up attracting many individuals that like mechanical and robotic work ("plug and chug") in pursuit of external awards and social status. Once they graduate, however, they know they can't contribute meaningfully to their field with that attitude; management consulting seems like a good "refuge" for those types. The lesson isn't "these firms are being silly in their recruitment practice", the lesson is "buyer beware" when it comes to being these firms' customers.

The best thing about the 2007-2009 financial collapse was freeing up a lot more STEM graduates for "real" work in the economy, like tech startups, engineering roles at companies, etc., vs. going into consulting and finance.

Well, not all people coming from those backgrounds can work in those fields, so one has to be careful.

Many can and are glad to come to to tech/startup worl, though. Indeed some (many?) financial companies/hedge funds are really just software companies in disguise and have great folks working for them.

I think some of your points are a little off the mark. A bit about my perspective: I used to be (and still am) interested in business (vaguely defined), and did lots of research and talking to people and I used to see consulting as the best option for my career after college. But now I'm an engineer at a startup.

1) They do take MIT engineering grads (see my own comment)

2) Consulting pay is actually not very good. We're talking $80k and not much bonus. Google pays more (STEM roles). Finance pays even more. STEM people don't go into consulting over finance for the money. The exception might be liberal arts majors for whom consulting does pay the most out of all their options. The reasons they go into consulting...

3) The reason people (like me in the past) want to do consulting is because it's a "career supercharger". If you get into McKinsey/Bain/Boston you have not only that pedigree on your resume and near guaranteed entrance into a top 10 business school, but you also get a very broad set of experience working with (and connecting with) CEOs/executives and working in multiple markets and with multiple business models and analytical models. You get to work in many projects and with many different teams. Consulting has a multiplicative effect on your career. 2 years in consulting has the equivalent effect on your career as, say, 4 years in a biz dev role at a Fortune 500. A lot of people who know they are interested in "business" but don't know what they specifically want to do in business also go to consulting to figure that out. Finally, for any business position you apply to, nobody ever questions whether your consulting background is relevant experience. Consulting basically keeps all business doors open. The same does not apply for, say, finance.

4)Whether consulting is value-adding is a mixed bag. Sometimes it can really help a company. Oftentimes consulting is just used politically to cover an executive's ass and is used to tell the other executives what that executive already knows.

>If you get into McKinsey/Bain/Boston...

Fun fact: If you are a college dropout and apply to these places, they will at best politely rebuff you. However, if they need you, and you run your own consultancy, they have no problems being your customer in in order to get a job done. How you handle the awkward inevitable conversation at lunch about your lack of degree is up to you, though personally I always try to have fun with it.

How do you get them to contract out to your consultancy?

Same as always: have something they need. I've worked for a top-three consulting firm (only because they bought the consulting firm I worked for at the time).

Surprise: their expertise is Excel and PowerPoint (mostly PowerPoint). These are not the ideal tools for all projects. Much better to just buy what you need when you need it (and mark it up 400%).

It just seems seems bizzarre that someone who has invested many years of their life into a hard science degree (much less a graduate degree in hard sciences) and has the intellect and work ethic required to excel in a scientific field would genuinely be more interested in "business" than in advancing their field. I mean that in the pure sense of puzzlement rather than judgement: I understand the value of business people (more-so having been in a few startups), but it seems like a role much better suited for economics, political science, or some of the liberal arts majors; I just don't understand that why it would appeal to someone who took pains to study a scientific discipline.

To quote Democritus, "I would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia." I can understand a scientist or an engineer doing "business" work in the context of a startup -- usually their own (as there's simply no one else to do it, or no one else who understands the product and is capable of doing it, etc...) -- but choosing to do "business" when given the choice between an engineering role and a generic "business" role is what I just don't get.

As a side note, I also find pursuit of power and status (not saying that is what all those who enter management consulting have -- but I am sure at least some see it as motivation) to be far scarier than pursuit of money: if an unscrupulous character is hungry for money they'll be satiated quickly as money has diminishing marginal returns. Desire to have power over others knows no bounds.

I'm thankful this isn't true in Engineering (for the most part). I go to UPenn so I see snobbery like this all the time, but from my experience my friends from 'lesser' (not my assessment) schools are all given a fair shot at engineering companies of any size. I definitely see a ton of bullshit like that described in this article from large financial companies like Goldman Sachs, etc. I have friends who go to Penn and will get an interview, but then when the interviewer finds out they're not in Wharton in particular they lose all interest without even giving the kid a chance. It's crazy, so much emphasis is put on the words on your degree rather than your abilities. It's one thing to use it to filter resumes, but it's crazy when my friends go into an interview for which the interviewer has already allotted time and are not given a fair shot.

Engineering has always been a put up or shut up kind of field. I've seen people with very little education who are some of the most respected programmers in their field and I've seen people who barely graduated from State U making 175K leading huge departments. It's kind of hard to do that with say, investment banking. How is an undergrad supposed to prove they are an amazing investment banker? What kind of portfolio do you assemble for that?

Part of the issue here is not just the name on the degree, but that they want people that are homogenous and from that Harvard/Yale milieu so they can chat up other bankers who also graduated from Ivy League schools.

All college admissions and personal branding are determined by age 16 at the latest. Records considered prior to the seminal test given at that age include: early high school grades (ages 14 through 16), extracurriculars and sports (ages 3 through 16), and middle school placement tracking (ages 10 through 13). These are all factors either directly or one step removed in the process.

So the question has to be asked: Are these brands as childish as what formed them?

This "elite school" concept could probably be considered a "simulacrum" in the Baudrillard sense. Let us stipulate: working for Goldman isn't the only way to make money; it is for the people who are branded by these schools. Would your parents or friends be happy to hear you're starting a startup that anybody without that branding could start? I think not. Your destiny then rests on increasing your liquidity by working the same 100 hours a week (doing nothing, mind you, because Wall Street produces nothing) for people who are also members of your brand. Then you get to live your ideal life in your Manhattan flat: meet your trophy wife: with a weekend house in East Hampton: re-live all the mistakes your parents made: propagate and create dysfunctional children...

The corollary then asks: Does the brand define one's life as their Geworfenheit? With such fixed determinism from such a young age, were you ever truly free? Is your quest for freedom what these employers are truly capitalizing on?

Linkbait article aside, in the actual paper[0] Lauren does not name the firms, and draws these conclusions based on 120 verbal interviews. Not exactly scientific, even for sociology. To be fair, her abstract isn't as hyperbolic as the above article (albeit obvious).

>> Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about absolute productivity.

No way! An interviewee from MIT (...heavily math/science/engineering bias) has a harder time getting an elite professional services gig? Next I'll find out NASA prefers MIT grads to Harvard. People hire/like people like themselves.

Deciding on Harvard over MIT (or vice versa) is both an education and cultural choice. That cultural matters is no surprise. And neither is that people hire with similar backgrounds to themselves.

And, not for nothing, guess where Lauren went? [1]

[0] : http://www.asanet.org/journals/ASR/Dec12ASRFeature.pdf

[1] : http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera...

> And, not for nothing, guess where Lauren went?

Oh, let's not resort to ad hominem arguments. The paper stands on its own.

The fact that top firms have blunt, inefficient hiring algorithms is in theory a good thing for equality/competition/dynamism in the long run. Imagine they accurately assessed every graduate in the job market and always harvested the best ones.

Would it be better if it were more difficult to measure the performance of all types of workers? If not, what's different here?

I see what you're saying, but hasn't this been going on for decades? Wouldn't that indicate that it is actually efficient for the scale of their business?

I think one of the key points in the article is when the recruiter suggests that basically they are free-riding off of the admissions committees of the top schools. That makes a lot more sense than blanket elitism, which would be costly and inefficient in the long term.

And for decades established firms have been tumbling from their perches and replaced by new ones. I don't have stats to back that up though so I could be wrong.

But even just the idea of free-riding college admission committees - if that's their idea of capturing the best candidates, then they're turning a blind eye to students who underachieve until they actually reach higher education (or who can't afford to enter institutions like Harvard anyway). Clearly they leave a gap which allows the possibility of weaker firms grabbing the best talent.

I don't think blunt and inefficient are necessarily the same in this instance. The hiring managers are basically outsourcing the prescreening to the college admission boards. That method certainly allows a huge number of great candidates to slip through the cracks. However,it also is an incredibly quick and efficient way to narrow down applications to a group that is on average "better" than the general population.

Another firm can try to capitalize on the market inefficiencies and hire tons of Brown grads. Although they will likely need to spend more time and money on the hiring process since the candidates aren't as thoroughly prescreened. None of us know if that will really pay off in the end.

The title is linkbait, but I'm not sure what about this is really news. Yes, degrees so-called "elite" schools like Harvard are essentially an expensive form of signalling.

Whether or not that signalling is accurate is a topic that can be (and has been!) debated ad nauseum, but the observation that people in the financial, etc. industries[1] do treat those degrees as a signal is nothing new or surprising.

[1] Really, anything except tech, where this trend is absent (or arguably reversed - ie, respect for dropouts).

No one care about Dartmouth? Puh-lease. Hank Paulson, long-time CEO of GS and Treasury Secretary, was a Dartmouth grad, and I met several Dartmouth grads during my short time there.

Then down the line the smart people from those firms can disrupt the existing players at their own game or a new game when the current-elite get lazy or can't innovate. That's how the market's supposed to work.

You're mistaken about the game that is being played.

Sounds like Moneyball to me. If true, these firms are just taking the "No no every gets fired for using IBM" route and overspending, which isn't actually bad for the companies if they've got the money for it, as graduates from these schools with "really awesome" extracurriculars should be pretty decent filters.

In computer science, this doesn't really apply. I mean, hiring decent people is hard enough without restricting ourselves to certain top tier schools. Sure, a company like Google might have a bias for MIT or CMU, but they'll take you if you are from UW, Cornell, or Brown, as long as you can pass the interview!

I went to the University of Michigan for my computer science degree. Google recruits pretty heavily there (Larry Page's alma mater after all). I had lots of friends that went to Michigan State for their degrees. The Google recruiter showed them a list of jobs they could apply for. When one of them asked about other jobs that were on their website, the recruiter said they didn't usually consider people from Michigan State for those jobs.

Now, I'm not saying Google doesn't hire anyone from MSU, I know several engineers at Google from there, but it can be a pretty huge disadvantage to go there.

After college, I worked with a bunch of people that went to Michigan State, and we went to a Michigan career fair to recruit for our company. They were shocked by the number of big software companies recruiting at Michigan vs. MSU. Microsoft and Google might be big enough to recruit anywhere, but places like Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Expedia, and dozens of others never made it to MSU.

There are high tier state schools and there are other lesser tier state schools (usually anything "XXX State", but not always!). But the number of high tier schools is around 30 in the US, so its not a very exclusive club, but once you come from outside that group, life can get very hard to get into a big company. But then, life doesn't completely suck, you can still get a job, especially if its at a local company that already has many employees from that school.

I might be completely crazy or have had biased experiences, but the content and tone of this article are the opposite of what I've observed. Stanford, Dartmouth, MIT, Cornell, and Michigan (to name just a few of the schools cited) all enjoy robust recruiting efforts from top companies as far as I've been able to tell.

Additionally, based on conversations I've had with friends at some of the firms that were (presumably) polled, the desire to cut down on active recruiting at schools is usually due to lack of resources rather than deep prejudice on the part of people doing the hiring. If you only need to hire 3 people, it's simpler to just recruit at a few places where you've been successful in the past and call it a day -- it doesn't matter where you find good people, just that you got some in the end.

It depends what companies are recruiting for. Tech companies recruiting software engineers have a much different crucible than a top flight consulting company (deloitte, mckinsey etc.)

McKinsey was aggressively recruiting PhDs in physics and engineering (to do business consulting) from Cornell when I was there. They claimed to be cutting edge by going after such people instead of MBAs.

It is true that Brown and Cornell are second tier. Cornell isn't even truly private. Part of Cornell is actually a public school (most people don't know this).

I disagree that nobody cares about MIT though. MIT is definitely top tier.

> Part of Cornell is actually a public school (most people don't know this).

It's not so relevant when it comes to technical subjects, though (which I guess is what this article is about), because the "public part" of Cornell is the agriculture/ecology/industrial-relations schools...

For CS/engineering, Cornell is very, very, good (and a big plus on a resume). Probably not as good overall or as useful on one's resume as MIT/Harvard/Yale, but those three are pretty much in their own category for U.S. universities.

Most people in a position of hiring want to hire someone "like me."

It's not just Goldman Sachs. Hollywood and big media in general have elitist hiring. And the presidential race is always a farce.

  1992: Yale/S&B vs Yale
  1996: Yale vs Arizona (!)
  2000: Harvard vs Yale/Harvard/S&B
  2004: Yale/S&B vs Yale/Harvard/S&B
  2008: Harvard vs Annapolis (!)
  2012: Harvard vs Harvard

...and it goes back further with S&B even making more appearances.

What is S&B?

Skull & Bones

Skull and Bones. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones)

I know a couple of twins named Winklevoss that would be perfect for their firm.

This is what happens when the people doing the hiring don't know enough to really evaluate the candidates, so they rely on the "brand" (school) and punt on measuring the person's actual ability.

If true (and there's probably more than a little fire behind that smoke), then don't work at those places. Supply and demand works both ways.

From the article

the gatekeepers at our nation’s most prestigious firms are pathetically shallow, outrageously parochial, and insufferably snobbish.

I'm reminded of the quote "Hiring managers don't always get the people they want, they they always get the people they deserve."

That reminds me of my university search. Looking for an engineering program, visited a campus (top 5 engineering school) and they asked where else I was considering. I mentioned GA Tech (had lived in GA for part of high school, a number of friends intended to go there), and Notre Dame (sister's intended school, had visited and liked it). The response, completely straight, "Well, I guess those are good schools." It's incredibly easy to get people to dismiss an entire institution from consideration when their representatives are so crass.

Love this kind of elitism. Means easy money for those of us who have the patience or imagination to look past the name of a school.

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