Last week we were all hearts and gratitude and talking about service. Which is where our passion is. It was Thanksgiving after all, which is about thanks and giving, in case that escaped you.
Thanksgiving is over. Now it’s time to get to work.
And to start off a Monday-after-the-holiday with a real reality check (as opposed to a fake one, whatever that might be), let’s get practical.
It will be depressing.
Or maybe motivating.
But it’s real.
The page we’ve linked to is a summary of a sociologist’s work analyzing the hiring decisions and methods made by the elite of the elite: Wall Street banks. Big Three consulting companies. Upper-crust law firms.
What she found may not be a surprise, but it is still sad.
Here’s one key excerpt:
Evaluators relied so intensely on “school” as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms – in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was “too abstract,” “overly theoretical,” or even “useless” compared to the more “practical” and “relevant” training offered at “lesser” institutions…
[I]t was not the content of an elite education that employers valued but rather the perceived rigor of these institutions’ admissions processes. According to this logic, the more prestigious a school, the higher its “bar” for admission, and thus the “smarter” its student body.
So basically, the hiring managers felt that the top universities actually did a worse job of educating students for the practicalities of their field, yet they preferred those universities over lower-ranked state schools because of the more rigorous admissions process.
In other words, it’s less important that you graduated from Harvard or Stanford or Wharton, but that you got accepted there in the first place.
Disgusting and discouraging and frankly pathetic.
It’s an old boys’ network still. Not sure what forces may ever change this.
Be sure to read through the comments on that study synopsis as well. Useful? Dunno. Important to know? Definitely.
Tell us what you think.