
"Brown and Cornell Are Second Tier" - acchow
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565
======
brianchu
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.

------
rayiner
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.

~~~
dr_doom
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?

~~~
rayiner
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.

------
kyllo
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.

------
strlen
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.

~~~
brianchu
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.

~~~
MrFoof
>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.

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

~~~
breckenedge
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%).

------
habosa
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.

~~~
homosaur
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.

------
bdesimone
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...](http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera_lauren.aspx#vita)

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

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

------
Tycho
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.

~~~
BrianEatWorld
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.

~~~
Tycho
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.

------
jasonzemos
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?

------
chimeracoder
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).

------
YuriNiyazov
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.

------
TimGebhardt
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.

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

------
fuzzythinker
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.

------
seanmcdirmid
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!

~~~
RandallBrown
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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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.

------
kwang88
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.

~~~
bigdubs
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.)

~~~
Bill_Dimm
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.

------
IVentures
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.

~~~
snogglethorpe
> _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.

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

------
mynameishere
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.

~~~
habosa
What is S&B?

~~~
lanstein
Skull and Bones. (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones>)

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

------
Bill_Dimm
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.

------
antidoh
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.

------
justhw
From the article

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

~~~
Jtsummers
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.

------
ruggeri
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.

