I'm clearly naive and haven't worked closely enough to filtering stage of of the hiring process, but nevertheless.. I'm shocked to hear that there was a deliberate and explicit filtering by a list of "top schools. An implicit look at the school and some dose of bias, okay sure, I could see it, but an explicit filter? Wow.
There is a reason why in America there is an incredible focus on getting into certain schools, and follow-up obsession about what school you went to afterwards. There's a lot of 'brand name' focus and historically these schools have offered networking opportunities that far outweigh the actual academic quality (at the undergrad level). I always found it bizarre coming from a country where there isn't some idea of an ivy league-set of schools.
In some industries that's the norm. I did my MBA at Oxford (which, at least at the time, was not well-known for its MBA program). A recruiter at an investment bank told me that, since Oxford wasn't on their list of target schools for post-MBA hiring, they wouldn't even look at my CV until and unless they were unable to fill their associate-level positions with people from those target schools.
I've seen this in the startup ecosystem; it's a prestige game. When I was applying to jobs last year I would see startups brag on their websites about how many MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, etc grads they had. The most egregious was a startup that had a "select your school" dropdown that was basically the US News top 20 CS schools followed by "other"
It's a challenge. I get over 1000 applicants for every position, I can't read every resume and use a few filters to get a subset to read, but it's a disjunction (top 50 school OR company advanced in our field OR specific technology names).
This is standard across the world, in professional and engineering jobs. Hiring can be filtered by where you work, what your major is, what school you went to. Not all jobs or education are made equal. Its not what I'd do, but saying, we'll only consider candidates with CS degrees from these top 25 schools seem like a valid strategy to recruiting. Esp. if you consider their professors can be renowned in certain research topics.
That's not true. I worked for a big tech company with a large European presence and they 100% heavily factored in the prestige of what university you went into for hiring. Also, they do this with career fairs/college hiring - they aren't sending college recruiters to a community college, they're sending them to MIT, Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Harvey Mudd, etc.
If you work for an American company, you usually get the American experience. Local companies tend to be more in sync with the local culture.
One thing I remember from Finland is people who went to a prestigious foreign university and then returned home without work experience complaining how difficult it is to find a job. In some fields, a fresh graduate without real professional experience beyond internships is already a bit suspicious, because the Finnish system encourages starting your career before graduating. Finding job opportunities is difficult, because you don't have any professional contacts. And while recruiters recognize that you went to a reputable university, they don't know what to expect from you.
And if you went to a school like Harvey Mudd, which isn't really known outside the US, your situation is even worse. Because they don't know the school, recruiters may assume that you got your degree from a for-profit diploma mill and ignore your application.
I agree that things will be more localized depending on the company. But good recruiters should know what schools are good, but they should also be able to assess a resume that doesn't have an elite school attached to it. Obviously this doesn't always happen, but it should in practice.
It's really hard to meaningfully evaluate college new grad resumes en masse. They all have the same useless class projects and an impossible-to-judge GPA.
Unless you spend an hour doing a tech screen for each person, they just all look identical. I don't endorse a strict filter, but I understand why people do it. Top colleges filter for something meaningful for entrance criteria, and it's easy to take advantage of their filtering.
This is the norm in law firm hiring. Top firms don't look outside of a handful of schools. Good firms consider graduates from 1-2 dozen schools. And legal academia is at least as elitist — something like half of all law professors graduated from one of four schools. It's great for groupthink!
I am not aware of any hard data on it, but observationally, the degree to which people care seems to vary greatly by location in the US. The interest in "top schools" seems highest on the East coast.
