This is standard corporate CYA behavior.

I think this quote from Keynes sums it up best:

>"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men."

The Ivy league is a conventional and orthodox disaster. Nobody can blame you for hiring them, their credentials were impeccable!

That previously unemployed guy, on the other hand...