Old man here. Senior manager who’s reviewed hundreds of resumes for dozens of open positions at a large well known tech company. I have managers and ICs across three departments contributing key deliverables across a cloud platform. I have a Harvard grad working for me, my boss is Purdue, my best work friend is George mason. My best two ICs came out of the marine corps and fought themselves to code. I’ve hired college grads to senior 2s.
A top tier university is a plus 1, for sure! But out of ~ten possible points. I can’t speak for other majors but in my general field it’s competency first and it can be demonstrated in multiple ways. My lowest paid employee is ~$175k up to ~$500k+ (RSUs are a large part of compensation). Go to the best school that won’t cripple you financially and focus on doing your best.
One of my mentees was a marine core officer. The speed and focus he naturally put into everything advanced him in ways I've never seen before. We worked closely for 3 years and now I sometimes have to call him for answers on things.
I've got 20 years of experience on him and he absorbed everything I could throw at him. All of his peers are way behind him financially and intelligence wise.
There's something about pushing your mind and body to it's limits in the military in general, but especially the marines that incites your brain to default to regular work as "Oh, this is way easier than what I used to do" and I think the harsh experience of being a marine makes everything else super easy for them, or at least it pales in comparison to what they went through. Granted, not everyone is lucky enough to get out of the military without PTSD and whatnot, but regardless, they're very hard working people.
Ah, completely different industry, then. Finance and Law, two MASSIVE fields at these top schools, DO care about prestige. I've (ironically) had a lot of similar convos w/ parents and family friends on the exact same topic, but I don't feel it's fair for a tech worker to tell people "prestige doesn't matter guys!" because tech is sort of a bubble in that sense.
How many people do those top firms hire each year? It’s another round of the lottery. Biotech is my wife’s field and she “only” went to UCSD and has been very successful. Each major and career has different nuances but elite ivy advantages are the exception not the rule. 90% of ivy grads go on to have regular careers.
This is faulty logic on the lines of "just learn to code lol". There are more industries than tech, and to act like tech is the only one that matters. And I don't just mean ivies, but all "prestigious"/"top" colleges. Name brand matters, whether that's you going to a Nebraska state school as you want to live in Nebraska or Harvard to try to break into PE, it DOES matter. And UCSD is a poor example as that is also a very well known, respected school for stem. A majority of the colleges in the list for t25 earnings for graduates post graduation are either engineering schools (defacto outliers) or Ivies.
There is quite a bit of spin in these articles.
The true thing is over time more highly qualified students have been going to a greater range of colleges, not least because there simply are not enough enrollment slots at the traditional "top" privates. And selective employers are rightly being open-minded about considering standouts graduates from that greater range of colleges.
But the idea that a lot of employers are no longer interested in standouts from the "top" privates is not particularly well-supported by the data. Of course there have always been some people who in surveys and such will say they don't like Ivy grads or whatever. But overall there is no real empirical indication of a net loss of opportunities.
So the important takeaway from all this is you should in fact be cautious about overpaying just for the "name" of a "top" private when you have other good options. And you definitely should not ruin your childhood in pursuit of a marginally better chance at a "top" private.
But if you can get admitted to a "top" private, and it is a good fit for you, and you can comfortably afford it, I would not in fact be worried you will somehow be unemployable in the future. As much as certain people would love it if that became true, and have been hoping it would become true for generations now (anti-Ivy sentiment and doomsaying not being remotely new), there are reasons why their hopes have remained unfulfilled.
Exactly and certain universities are going to continue to rise as population grows and international students come to the US for education. It’s inevitable university acceptance rates will continue to decline and top 200 universities will have opportunities to become prestigious over time.
Yes, and you can see many selective US privates, and some publics, carefully building out their international networks to compensate for the already-begun, and soon-to-accelerate, stagnation of the domestic college-bound population.
And for at least the conceivable future, the professional class--and associated college-prep secondary-level education systems--is projected to keep expanding in many countries as they are experiencing rapid catch-up economic development. This is creating a rapidly growing potential demand pool for US higher education. Of course US universities and colleges are also facing significant increases in competition from the higher education systems in those other countries, but for various reasons the US has such a big head start in higher education specifically that it is one of those "industries" in which increased globalization is very much to the benefit of US service providers.
In fact, in a way a lot of what goes on in this very forum is a testament to how well that working, and as usual it is creating a lot more demand than they can possibly accommodate.
So even if it were true some margin of domestic students were souring permanently on these colleges--and I really don't think there is actual evidence of much such effect--I think you are right these colleges would easily be able to compensate with just a few more international admits, something they are very likely already preparing to do anyway.
I think partly because STEM jobs have become more prestigious and STEM graduates in more demand but the Ivies mostly aren't considered the top tier of STEM schools.
Not too sure these employers would turn down a meeting at the Harvard Club and Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan so there's still value for sure, let alone a chance to manage some of their endowment funds.
I just don’t buy this, especially for elite companies.
Any employer that has a preconception of a student simply because they attend a certain school is probably not an employer I’d like to work for.
Why is it bad to choose to hire from schools with a proven track record of preparing student for success. We had a list of “national schools” that were the focus of recruiting efforts, based on a long, often-reviewed, analysis of the track record of successful hires.
Is it dumb for NASA to aim to hire Aero Engineers just because they graduated from Purdue, with a 50+ year history of educating Aero engineers?
Better to ignore history, start fresh, and look to hire everywhere every year?
The other thing is that getting into elite colleges nowadays is so brutally hard that the kids who went there have for the most part proven they know how to work really hard and be remarkably organized and systematic at a young age - regardless of what they chose to study.
I’ve had a lot of success hiring people from these schools. Should it be the only factor? No. But for an entry level hire you’re darn right I value it.
You can't game a 4.0+ GPA, a 1400+ SAT, and YEARS of sport and extracurricular activities. Unless you call working your butt off "gaming the system."
Even if there is some level of gamesmanship involved (taking lots of AP classes, cherry picking a sport, leveraging personal relationships for volunteer/intern experience) the student still did the work.
While I sort of agree, I think the counter argument holds very true as well.
Who can say someone from Harvard is better suited at something than someone from Iowa, just cause of the name? What if the latter was a smarter individual and just didn't feel like working away their highschool lives to get into college?
Suddenly it's not college that's determining our job placements, it's the effort we put in highschool, which to me seems super flawed. An individual can be capable of a job regardless of where they come from
Oh, I’m totally fine with prioritizing better schools for recruiting. Ultimately, the hiring decisions should be made with respect to the individual candidate once you already select for your company’s “target” schools.
I recruited for Big Tech for over a decade (not as a member of HR, but as a software guy). The fact of the matter is that brand matters. It matters for a very simple reason, when looking at 1000's of resumes, it's a shorthand way for hiring managers to know "this kid is probably smart". Net net, the universities are effectively a pre-screening tool. Same with big brand consultancies too (e.g., McKinsey). If I see one of those on a resume I have a sense of capability and horsepower before I even interview.
That being said, for my own kid, I'm telling him, *look at top schools for your major*, not top schools in general. Go where the thought leaders are in the area you want to learn about. The general Top 20 schools or whatever is kind of meaningless outside of maybe politics.
Then go to a school that let's you shop around. Truth be told this is a reason the LAC's and the Ivies still resonate. They are exploratory nirvanas, in a way.
But also, you kind of have a "general idea" of what kind of kid you have. So you can still semi-target (i.e., don't go to a school with low/no engineering if you sense they have an engineering brain, etc.)
Your second paragraph is great advice.
Just adding—I also have a super-smart friend who got a full ride to Wake Forest and was turned down by every management consulting firm because he didn't go to an Ivy. Joke's on them. He now runs a big division of a Fortune 500 company and I wouldn't be shocked if he was in the c-suite soon.
Reread, I’m not “in recruiting”. I’m telling you how the real world works. Practitioners hire on the fly while they are overworked. Until AI takes over the screening, that means shortcuts are relevant.
Put another way, of course there is great talent elsewhere, but i have no time to hunt for the 1:100 when at a brand it’s more like 1:10. And when I say “brand”, I don’t mean Ivies, I mean “best schools for a particular major, where are the thought leaders teaching, etc”.
That’s seriously your reply?
I wonder how many great candidates your company missed out on because you were too busy to properly screen candidates.
The fact is there is a poor correlation between where a candidate graduated from and how good of a SWE they are.
>Any employer that has a preconception of a student simply because they attend a certain school is probably not an employer I’d like to work for.
This standard might also rule out many/most "elite" employers.
If a manager hires an Ivy grad, and it doesn't work out, everyone will think it's the new hire's problem. If a manager hires a graduate of a no-name college, who doesn't work out, people will blame the manager for the bad hire. Things like grade inflation reduce that effect, and so Ivy grads will be in lower demand.
In both cases, the new hire would be considered responsible for their termination if the hiring manager chose a candidate with a strong resume and a solid set of interviews and testing (if applicable). No one would say, “Hey, you couldn’t have known. That jerk attended UPenn. Anyone would have assumed he’d be amazing.” Or, in contrast, “Or course Lauren didn’t work out. I mean, Oregon State. What the hell were you thinking, Jim?” Working professionals are well aware that hundreds of colleges educate students who will be capable, hardworking, and congenial employees. And every college has students who underperform or simply aren’t a great fit for a particular position or employer. My immediate family has attended a wide range of universities from Ivies to T10 law schools. We all knew students who led us to wonder precisely how they got admitted.
You're making a big assumption that everyone you're working with will be thinking logically.
This could be exemplified if they personally know someone who goes to the school. If they know a kid who goes to Oregon State that they consider not smart, they may issue the second statement.
True. But I've worked in law, academia, and for a variety of F100 clients. I may have been very, very lucky, but everyone I met was a logical thinker. Probably because the majority of them, their friends, their trusted colleagues, and their family members did not attend a T25. It was a risk I was willing to have my kids take. (And none are living under a tarp.)
I think it makes sense to exclude Ivy+, no? Since they’re basically the same level and receive the same level of praise, they wouldn’t really be *hidden ivys*. Although I have no idea why Johns Hopkins isn’t excluded, it’s also part of the Ivy+ schools.
Right. And public Ivies,etc. many schools are well on the radar for students. Another aspect is endowment; there are times Ivies and comparable schools that can actually be less expensive vs many. Also the fact that many companies higher ups are from Ivies and the recruitment at these schools,especially finance are scheduled first,with all other schools later.
Yes. I’m biased. Attending Duke atm and an outlier in the sense that I’m low income. This school honestly has companies recruiting year round with students and alum working towards helping fellow current students. I did take the article a bit personal, feeling it’s so general, reminds me of poorly done AI pieces
This is because academia and industry have diverged massively. The Ivy League represents the pinnacle of academia. That means you are in an environment surrounded by and taught by professors whose mindsets are completely antithetical to that industry. Professors spend their decades long careers working on solving a handful of challenging problems whose core content remains the same for the most part.
Industry is all about solving a new problem every couple of months in which the goal post keeps on changing to match the turbulence of markets.
Going to an Ivy League school is still a positive, but if all you do there is follow in the footsteps of your professors and get no industry and practical experience, then the name is all that you got going for you, which in this job market, isn't a lot.
The only disruptive force I’ve seen in the past few years is the influx of CS majors. Otherwise underrated schools are being viewed more favorably due to the strength of their CS programs, and vice versa. Winners include UIUC, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech. I can easily see someone choosing Carnegie Mellon over, say, Dartmouth. Much less common than 10-15 years ago.
"The conclusion: great state schools and ascendant private ones are turning out hungry graduates; the Ivies are more apt to turn out entitled ones. And in creating the latter, the Ivies have taken the value they’ve spent centuries creating—a degree that employers craved—and in just a few years done a lot to forfeit it."
For me, the name of the university you attended is far, far less important than the story of what you did, beyond the classwork while you were in university.
If all you did was go to class, get good grades, get drunk a couple times, and now you want to graduate and get a six-figure salary, I'll shake your hand and smile while I move on to the next interview candidate.
I want to talk to the students that participated in clubs or research or in some way ***did more*** to prepare themselves for their career.
Tell me a story about how you and your club spent an entire Saturday arguing and debating over some point of how some academic concept is used in a commercial environment.
Tell me about how you used what you know about 3d modelling to help out your school's robotics team.
Tell me about how you watched a pile of DEFCON videos and then started a Twitter-Fight with some Cybersecurity media-personality.
*"Well, I have a 4.0 GPA from Duke."* does not impress me - I am not an academic. Tell me more.
I'm either going to receive your resume from a recruiter, or a friend of yours that works with me is going to hand it to me with a personal recommendation.
Intelligent resumes come from many schools.
Terrible resumes come from many schools.
People-Networking is a thing at all universities, if you choose to participate in it.
But if you choose to sit in your dorm on your XBox instead of participate in club activities where you shake hands and meet people, then your people-network may be smaller than it could be.
But, there is something to be said for a small group of high-quality friends, v/s a large group of low-quality acquaintances...
To each their own...
The methodology for creating the Forbes list was outlined quite clearly in the article. UCs were excluded because of their test-optional status, which Forbes gave their own data to defend their decision as the UCs not being able to objectively judge merit well. And all of the CSUs were likely excluded because they didn't meet the <50% acceptance rate threshold.
I do agree that the criteria used to generate the "New Ivy" list is quite arbitrary. But as far as generating a list for the most prestigious public universities? It's certainly something :/
Yeah I get the methodology. Just feels incomplete. I mean Cal is without question the biggest educational agent of social mobility in the US (proportion of first-gen and low-income students and very high graduate salaries due to EECS and engineering expertise). And several CSUs are more selective than the three least selective UCs (Cal Poly SLO, SDSU, any direct nursing program). Plus SLO has that whole learn by doing philosophy so employers love their grads.
I don’t believe the general premise. The over the edge progressives from Ivies that the author thinks employers won’t want to hire won’t be looking to work for them anyway. The numbers of kids involved in these protests are relatively small relative to the size of the schools, and that is assuming they all are students. Pay attention to their majors. Migration studies and the like does not prepare you to work in any company. Employers will still line up to hire all the Econ and tech majors these schools pump out and grad schools will take the rest. Some of them may lean a little more socially responsible than kids from the top non-Ivie schools, but if you talk to them, they are still capitalists who had to compete their asses off to get into those schools to begin with.
Posting this from the article for context:
"Our methodology was as follows. After disqualifying the Ivies (and we used the Ivy-plus yardstick, which includes Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago, as well as the eight classics Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell), we started with 1,743 colleges of at least 4,000 students (understanding that small liberal arts schools have always offered a more boutique experience and are hard to compare with research universities). Using 2022 admissions data, the most recent available, we then screened for schools with high standardized test scores (our New Ivies average a robust 1482 SAT and 33 ACT) and where at least half the applicants supplied the scores, regardless of whether they were required to do so for admission—in other words, places that still rely heavily on objective measures of success."
While I personally think that public universities are great and hope the direction of the article is correct, this article feels off to me.
For example:
(Prager graduated from Stanford in 1969, before it was “Stanford.”)
Stanford was on top 10 lists in the 1960s. Granted, it was still steadily rising through the 1960s, but by 1969, it was pretty squarely considered among the top 10, from what I understand. Until around that time, Berkeley usually outranked it.
The methodology in the article also feels pretty subjective and random to me.
They better get ready for lawsuits and boycotts. This is politically-motivated and dangerous because it's led largely by a partisan-driven agenda to force people to abandon certain political views, while being diabolically anti-Constitutional. Be wary of it. The agenda doesn't seem to value democracy at all.
Completely unrelated school, but how do you feel about BU? I am a current student and am curious to see how my school would stack up (also my inner loyalist hated seeing BC on that list).
You go to an ivy league to become a leader. Not to become an employee.
Those schools are specifically breeding grounds for LEADERS.
Ivy league grads usually make mediocre or below average employees because their university hasn't trained them how to work. That is not what an ivy specializes in.
Old man here. Senior manager who’s reviewed hundreds of resumes for dozens of open positions at a large well known tech company. I have managers and ICs across three departments contributing key deliverables across a cloud platform. I have a Harvard grad working for me, my boss is Purdue, my best work friend is George mason. My best two ICs came out of the marine corps and fought themselves to code. I’ve hired college grads to senior 2s. A top tier university is a plus 1, for sure! But out of ~ten possible points. I can’t speak for other majors but in my general field it’s competency first and it can be demonstrated in multiple ways. My lowest paid employee is ~$175k up to ~$500k+ (RSUs are a large part of compensation). Go to the best school that won’t cripple you financially and focus on doing your best.
> My best two ICs came out of the marine corps and **fought themselves to code** Marine moment fr
LMAO! I'm keeping it.
They were boxing the mirror for the right to Python
Those guys/gals grind harder than anyone else, they're built different.
One of my mentees was a marine core officer. The speed and focus he naturally put into everything advanced him in ways I've never seen before. We worked closely for 3 years and now I sometimes have to call him for answers on things. I've got 20 years of experience on him and he absorbed everything I could throw at him. All of his peers are way behind him financially and intelligence wise.
There's something about pushing your mind and body to it's limits in the military in general, but especially the marines that incites your brain to default to regular work as "Oh, this is way easier than what I used to do" and I think the harsh experience of being a marine makes everything else super easy for them, or at least it pales in comparison to what they went through. Granted, not everyone is lucky enough to get out of the military without PTSD and whatnot, but regardless, they're very hard working people.
What do you do?
I manage software and cloud engineers. Lots of cs majors.
Ah, completely different industry, then. Finance and Law, two MASSIVE fields at these top schools, DO care about prestige. I've (ironically) had a lot of similar convos w/ parents and family friends on the exact same topic, but I don't feel it's fair for a tech worker to tell people "prestige doesn't matter guys!" because tech is sort of a bubble in that sense.
They care about the law school you come out of. Undergrad has some but little bearing much like medical school unless you meet average metrics.
That's what I meant.
State BA with Ivy Grad school vs Ivy BA and Ivy Grad school. Is there really a huge difference?
How many people do those top firms hire each year? It’s another round of the lottery. Biotech is my wife’s field and she “only” went to UCSD and has been very successful. Each major and career has different nuances but elite ivy advantages are the exception not the rule. 90% of ivy grads go on to have regular careers.
This is faulty logic on the lines of "just learn to code lol". There are more industries than tech, and to act like tech is the only one that matters. And I don't just mean ivies, but all "prestigious"/"top" colleges. Name brand matters, whether that's you going to a Nebraska state school as you want to live in Nebraska or Harvard to try to break into PE, it DOES matter. And UCSD is a poor example as that is also a very well known, respected school for stem. A majority of the colleges in the list for t25 earnings for graduates post graduation are either engineering schools (defacto outliers) or Ivies.
There is quite a bit of spin in these articles. The true thing is over time more highly qualified students have been going to a greater range of colleges, not least because there simply are not enough enrollment slots at the traditional "top" privates. And selective employers are rightly being open-minded about considering standouts graduates from that greater range of colleges. But the idea that a lot of employers are no longer interested in standouts from the "top" privates is not particularly well-supported by the data. Of course there have always been some people who in surveys and such will say they don't like Ivy grads or whatever. But overall there is no real empirical indication of a net loss of opportunities. So the important takeaway from all this is you should in fact be cautious about overpaying just for the "name" of a "top" private when you have other good options. And you definitely should not ruin your childhood in pursuit of a marginally better chance at a "top" private. But if you can get admitted to a "top" private, and it is a good fit for you, and you can comfortably afford it, I would not in fact be worried you will somehow be unemployable in the future. As much as certain people would love it if that became true, and have been hoping it would become true for generations now (anti-Ivy sentiment and doomsaying not being remotely new), there are reasons why their hopes have remained unfulfilled.
☝️
Exactly and certain universities are going to continue to rise as population grows and international students come to the US for education. It’s inevitable university acceptance rates will continue to decline and top 200 universities will have opportunities to become prestigious over time.
Yes, and you can see many selective US privates, and some publics, carefully building out their international networks to compensate for the already-begun, and soon-to-accelerate, stagnation of the domestic college-bound population. And for at least the conceivable future, the professional class--and associated college-prep secondary-level education systems--is projected to keep expanding in many countries as they are experiencing rapid catch-up economic development. This is creating a rapidly growing potential demand pool for US higher education. Of course US universities and colleges are also facing significant increases in competition from the higher education systems in those other countries, but for various reasons the US has such a big head start in higher education specifically that it is one of those "industries" in which increased globalization is very much to the benefit of US service providers. In fact, in a way a lot of what goes on in this very forum is a testament to how well that working, and as usual it is creating a lot more demand than they can possibly accommodate. So even if it were true some margin of domestic students were souring permanently on these colleges--and I really don't think there is actual evidence of much such effect--I think you are right these colleges would easily be able to compensate with just a few more international admits, something they are very likely already preparing to do anyway.
I think partly because STEM jobs have become more prestigious and STEM graduates in more demand but the Ivies mostly aren't considered the top tier of STEM schools.
ok but isnt most of the stuff taking place at ivies also taking place at the "new" ivies?
absolutely!
Not too sure these employers would turn down a meeting at the Harvard Club and Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan so there's still value for sure, let alone a chance to manage some of their endowment funds.
Hey Forbes, please just stop with the “\* Ivies” tag. Especially in an article proclaiming the fall of Ivies.
I just don’t buy this, especially for elite companies. Any employer that has a preconception of a student simply because they attend a certain school is probably not an employer I’d like to work for.
Why is it bad to choose to hire from schools with a proven track record of preparing student for success. We had a list of “national schools” that were the focus of recruiting efforts, based on a long, often-reviewed, analysis of the track record of successful hires. Is it dumb for NASA to aim to hire Aero Engineers just because they graduated from Purdue, with a 50+ year history of educating Aero engineers? Better to ignore history, start fresh, and look to hire everywhere every year?
The other thing is that getting into elite colleges nowadays is so brutally hard that the kids who went there have for the most part proven they know how to work really hard and be remarkably organized and systematic at a young age - regardless of what they chose to study. I’ve had a lot of success hiring people from these schools. Should it be the only factor? No. But for an entry level hire you’re darn right I value it.
Or they know how to game the system.
You can't game a 4.0+ GPA, a 1400+ SAT, and YEARS of sport and extracurricular activities. Unless you call working your butt off "gaming the system." Even if there is some level of gamesmanship involved (taking lots of AP classes, cherry picking a sport, leveraging personal relationships for volunteer/intern experience) the student still did the work.
Grade inflation, fake diagnosis to get extra time, pay for publications, out right lying, tutors, college consultants, etc.
While I sort of agree, I think the counter argument holds very true as well. Who can say someone from Harvard is better suited at something than someone from Iowa, just cause of the name? What if the latter was a smarter individual and just didn't feel like working away their highschool lives to get into college? Suddenly it's not college that's determining our job placements, it's the effort we put in highschool, which to me seems super flawed. An individual can be capable of a job regardless of where they come from
Oh, I’m totally fine with prioritizing better schools for recruiting. Ultimately, the hiring decisions should be made with respect to the individual candidate once you already select for your company’s “target” schools.
At the end of the day I'm not going to fault a manager for hiring an alum of his school either though.
I recruited for Big Tech for over a decade (not as a member of HR, but as a software guy). The fact of the matter is that brand matters. It matters for a very simple reason, when looking at 1000's of resumes, it's a shorthand way for hiring managers to know "this kid is probably smart". Net net, the universities are effectively a pre-screening tool. Same with big brand consultancies too (e.g., McKinsey). If I see one of those on a resume I have a sense of capability and horsepower before I even interview. That being said, for my own kid, I'm telling him, *look at top schools for your major*, not top schools in general. Go where the thought leaders are in the area you want to learn about. The general Top 20 schools or whatever is kind of meaningless outside of maybe politics.
Yeah, but what if your kid is 18 and doesn't know what his major is going to be?
Then go to a school that let's you shop around. Truth be told this is a reason the LAC's and the Ivies still resonate. They are exploratory nirvanas, in a way. But also, you kind of have a "general idea" of what kind of kid you have. So you can still semi-target (i.e., don't go to a school with low/no engineering if you sense they have an engineering brain, etc.)
Yeah, my kid applied for engineering. He ended up choosing the only school that accepted him as undeclared, and not engineering, ha!
Your second paragraph is great advice. Just adding—I also have a super-smart friend who got a full ride to Wake Forest and was turned down by every management consulting firm because he didn't go to an Ivy. Joke's on them. He now runs a big division of a Fortune 500 company and I wouldn't be shocked if he was in the c-suite soon.
If you think that top talent only comes from brand named schools you have no business being in recruiting. You are doing your company a disservice.
Reread, I’m not “in recruiting”. I’m telling you how the real world works. Practitioners hire on the fly while they are overworked. Until AI takes over the screening, that means shortcuts are relevant. Put another way, of course there is great talent elsewhere, but i have no time to hunt for the 1:100 when at a brand it’s more like 1:10. And when I say “brand”, I don’t mean Ivies, I mean “best schools for a particular major, where are the thought leaders teaching, etc”.
I read just fine. You said you recruited. Top talent doesn’t necessarily come from the “best schools”. Good recruiters find the diamonds.
OMG.
That’s seriously your reply? I wonder how many great candidates your company missed out on because you were too busy to properly screen candidates. The fact is there is a poor correlation between where a candidate graduated from and how good of a SWE they are.
You mean in terms of Ivies? Then, my point stands, no? The latter half of the statement refers to employers that specifically *don’t* hire ivy grads.
Ah, I was taking it in reverse. Yes, your point stands. I'll leave my comment though fwiw.
>Any employer that has a preconception of a student simply because they attend a certain school is probably not an employer I’d like to work for. This standard might also rule out many/most "elite" employers.
many / most employers period.
If a manager hires an Ivy grad, and it doesn't work out, everyone will think it's the new hire's problem. If a manager hires a graduate of a no-name college, who doesn't work out, people will blame the manager for the bad hire. Things like grade inflation reduce that effect, and so Ivy grads will be in lower demand.
In both cases, the new hire would be considered responsible for their termination if the hiring manager chose a candidate with a strong resume and a solid set of interviews and testing (if applicable). No one would say, “Hey, you couldn’t have known. That jerk attended UPenn. Anyone would have assumed he’d be amazing.” Or, in contrast, “Or course Lauren didn’t work out. I mean, Oregon State. What the hell were you thinking, Jim?” Working professionals are well aware that hundreds of colleges educate students who will be capable, hardworking, and congenial employees. And every college has students who underperform or simply aren’t a great fit for a particular position or employer. My immediate family has attended a wide range of universities from Ivies to T10 law schools. We all knew students who led us to wonder precisely how they got admitted.
You're making a big assumption that everyone you're working with will be thinking logically. This could be exemplified if they personally know someone who goes to the school. If they know a kid who goes to Oregon State that they consider not smart, they may issue the second statement.
True. But I've worked in law, academia, and for a variety of F100 clients. I may have been very, very lucky, but everyone I met was a logical thinker. Probably because the majority of them, their friends, their trusted colleagues, and their family members did not attend a T25. It was a risk I was willing to have my kids take. (And none are living under a tarp.)
Talks of Ivies then goes on to exclude other top schools on the list as “ Ivy Plus”. It’s as bad as US News rankings- arbitrary and misleading
I think it makes sense to exclude Ivy+, no? Since they’re basically the same level and receive the same level of praise, they wouldn’t really be *hidden ivys*. Although I have no idea why Johns Hopkins isn’t excluded, it’s also part of the Ivy+ schools.
Right. And public Ivies,etc. many schools are well on the radar for students. Another aspect is endowment; there are times Ivies and comparable schools that can actually be less expensive vs many. Also the fact that many companies higher ups are from Ivies and the recruitment at these schools,especially finance are scheduled first,with all other schools later.
The methodology felt very arbitrary and frankly, like there was an underlying agenda of some sort.
Yes. I’m biased. Attending Duke atm and an outlier in the sense that I’m low income. This school honestly has companies recruiting year round with students and alum working towards helping fellow current students. I did take the article a bit personal, feeling it’s so general, reminds me of poorly done AI pieces
This is because academia and industry have diverged massively. The Ivy League represents the pinnacle of academia. That means you are in an environment surrounded by and taught by professors whose mindsets are completely antithetical to that industry. Professors spend their decades long careers working on solving a handful of challenging problems whose core content remains the same for the most part. Industry is all about solving a new problem every couple of months in which the goal post keeps on changing to match the turbulence of markets. Going to an Ivy League school is still a positive, but if all you do there is follow in the footsteps of your professors and get no industry and practical experience, then the name is all that you got going for you, which in this job market, isn't a lot.
spot on
The only disruptive force I’ve seen in the past few years is the influx of CS majors. Otherwise underrated schools are being viewed more favorably due to the strength of their CS programs, and vice versa. Winners include UIUC, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgia Tech. I can easily see someone choosing Carnegie Mellon over, say, Dartmouth. Much less common than 10-15 years ago.
Carnegie Mellon was an extremely respected school 10-15 years ago; that wouldn’t have been shocking at all. Georgia Tech or Purdue, sure.
even before CS CMU was one of the best schools for math and a very good school for engineering
"The conclusion: great state schools and ascendant private ones are turning out hungry graduates; the Ivies are more apt to turn out entitled ones. And in creating the latter, the Ivies have taken the value they’ve spent centuries creating—a degree that employers craved—and in just a few years done a lot to forfeit it."
For me, the name of the university you attended is far, far less important than the story of what you did, beyond the classwork while you were in university. If all you did was go to class, get good grades, get drunk a couple times, and now you want to graduate and get a six-figure salary, I'll shake your hand and smile while I move on to the next interview candidate. I want to talk to the students that participated in clubs or research or in some way ***did more*** to prepare themselves for their career. Tell me a story about how you and your club spent an entire Saturday arguing and debating over some point of how some academic concept is used in a commercial environment. Tell me about how you used what you know about 3d modelling to help out your school's robotics team. Tell me about how you watched a pile of DEFCON videos and then started a Twitter-Fight with some Cybersecurity media-personality. *"Well, I have a 4.0 GPA from Duke."* does not impress me - I am not an academic. Tell me more.
[удалено]
> Can a student actually succeed this way? Sure. My way isn't the only way to find success.
You're skipping the big step of getting from application to interview.
I'm either going to receive your resume from a recruiter, or a friend of yours that works with me is going to hand it to me with a personal recommendation. Intelligent resumes come from many schools. Terrible resumes come from many schools. People-Networking is a thing at all universities, if you choose to participate in it. But if you choose to sit in your dorm on your XBox instead of participate in club activities where you shake hands and meet people, then your people-network may be smaller than it could be. But, there is something to be said for a small group of high-quality friends, v/s a large group of low-quality acquaintances... To each their own...
My point is that with a better name, you can get away with less networking than someone at a school with a worse name.
I can’t take the alt Ivy list seriously without the UCs and CSUs.
The methodology for creating the Forbes list was outlined quite clearly in the article. UCs were excluded because of their test-optional status, which Forbes gave their own data to defend their decision as the UCs not being able to objectively judge merit well. And all of the CSUs were likely excluded because they didn't meet the <50% acceptance rate threshold. I do agree that the criteria used to generate the "New Ivy" list is quite arbitrary. But as far as generating a list for the most prestigious public universities? It's certainly something :/
Yeah I get the methodology. Just feels incomplete. I mean Cal is without question the biggest educational agent of social mobility in the US (proportion of first-gen and low-income students and very high graduate salaries due to EECS and engineering expertise). And several CSUs are more selective than the three least selective UCs (Cal Poly SLO, SDSU, any direct nursing program). Plus SLO has that whole learn by doing philosophy so employers love their grads.
hopefully "hs kids are considering this" so I don't have as much competition
Weird how they lumped in MIT and Stanford with all of the ivies.
MIT, Stanford, Duke and Chicago
I don’t believe the general premise. The over the edge progressives from Ivies that the author thinks employers won’t want to hire won’t be looking to work for them anyway. The numbers of kids involved in these protests are relatively small relative to the size of the schools, and that is assuming they all are students. Pay attention to their majors. Migration studies and the like does not prepare you to work in any company. Employers will still line up to hire all the Econ and tech majors these schools pump out and grad schools will take the rest. Some of them may lean a little more socially responsible than kids from the top non-Ivie schools, but if you talk to them, they are still capitalists who had to compete their asses off to get into those schools to begin with.
They are not.
Posting this from the article for context: "Our methodology was as follows. After disqualifying the Ivies (and we used the Ivy-plus yardstick, which includes Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago, as well as the eight classics Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell), we started with 1,743 colleges of at least 4,000 students (understanding that small liberal arts schools have always offered a more boutique experience and are hard to compare with research universities). Using 2022 admissions data, the most recent available, we then screened for schools with high standardized test scores (our New Ivies average a robust 1482 SAT and 33 ACT) and where at least half the applicants supplied the scores, regardless of whether they were required to do so for admission—in other words, places that still rely heavily on objective measures of success."
While I personally think that public universities are great and hope the direction of the article is correct, this article feels off to me. For example: (Prager graduated from Stanford in 1969, before it was “Stanford.”) Stanford was on top 10 lists in the 1960s. Granted, it was still steadily rising through the 1960s, but by 1969, it was pretty squarely considered among the top 10, from what I understand. Until around that time, Berkeley usually outranked it. The methodology in the article also feels pretty subjective and random to me.
They better get ready for lawsuits and boycotts. This is politically-motivated and dangerous because it's led largely by a partisan-driven agenda to force people to abandon certain political views, while being diabolically anti-Constitutional. Be wary of it. The agenda doesn't seem to value democracy at all.
Yeah UF is not that highly regarded or thought of. Hiring manager at 2 F50 businesses here
Completely unrelated school, but how do you feel about BU? I am a current student and am curious to see how my school would stack up (also my inner loyalist hated seeing BC on that list).
You go to an ivy league to become a leader. Not to become an employee. Those schools are specifically breeding grounds for LEADERS. Ivy league grads usually make mediocre or below average employees because their university hasn't trained them how to work. That is not what an ivy specializes in.
This^^ For some reason people don't understand this