According to a recent study, prestige does matter when it comes to job hiring. As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education and ABA Journal, Northwestern University professor Lauren Rivera explored hiring practices at top law firms, management consulting firms, and investment banks.
It seems that these companies essentially rely on schools’ admissions offices for preliminary screening. Accordingly, the firms only really consider applicants from the “super-elite” schools in the field, which for law firms are: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and perhaps Columbia. Most applicants from other schools don’t even stand a chance, unless he/she has some personal affiliation with the company.
As the ABA Journal explains, “For hiring managers, Rivera says, the prestige of your school is an indicator of underlying intelligence. Schools that have a higher bar for admissions have a smarter student body, the thinking goes.” These hiring managers assume students attend the best school they get into, and “a student who chooses a lesser-known school is perceived to lack judgment or foresight.”
Once the super-elites are accounted for, their extracurriculars are evaluated. These top firms are not satisfied with ordinary activities, but instead seek candidates who have won an Olympic medal or traveled with a world-renowned orchestra.
So do only super-humans get hired in top firms these days? As summed up in the Chronicle, “You also can’t read this study without getting the feeling that the game is rigged. That obtaining a name-brand diploma matters more than actually learning something…. The message is this: It’s not what you did in college. It’s where you got in.”
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Read the full article: Hiring Managers Only Want Super-Elites
