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

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

#31

Post by Alex3917 »

ajscherer wrote: post #29
tomjen3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In addition to the other reasons mentioned, I imagine it is also a decent proxy for a number of other characteristics (white, from a wealthy family) that you might not want to make explicit in your recruiting strategy. I guess Harvard just isn't doing a good enough job screening on those things these days.

"There's no surefire way to get into Harvard, but it certainly helps to have every advantage you can get." --A Harvard faculty member on why 2/3rds of the white students are Jewish.

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

#32

Post by acconrad »

What a troll...I can't believe Northwestern gave her grant money to write about schools better than hers and how they do not get into the top consulting and law firms by looking at...ENGINEERING STUDENTS. News flash - software engineers aren't trying to get into consulting and law firms.

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

#33

Post by sruffell »

m0th87 wrote: post #26
PostOnce wrote: post #7

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. *…

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

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

#34

Post by jedc »

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

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

#35

Post by weel »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #22
weel wrote: post #10

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 emp…

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 suit…

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."

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

#36

Post by tzs »

tkahn6 wrote: post #25

Here is a list of schools ranked by recruiters with an emphasis on engineering: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870455410457543... MIT is on there, but the only Ivy on there is Cornell.

When a list of engineering schools ranked by recruiters does not have Caltech in the top 25 (or even on the "next 20"), but does have Cal Poly, something is seriously screwed up.

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

#37

Post by theprodigy »

tomjen3 wrote: post #17
Alex3917 wrote: post #5

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?

Yeah I don't get why rowing is seen as significant. What this article is trying to point out is the top firms are looking for people like the winklevoss twins(harvard, olympic rowers, connected family, etc).

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

#38

Post by PostOnce »

sruffell wrote: post #33
m0th87 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#39

Post by ZeroComplete »

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.

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

#40

Post by sruffell »

PostOnce wrote: post #38
sruffell wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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