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Who Needs Harvard?
theodp writes "Slate's Daniel Gross explores why big corporations are hiring fewer Ivy Leaguers. Is it because today's bosses aren't as snowed by polished young Ivy grads as they were in the past? Or are today's Ivy League graduates simply so wealthy that they no longer feel the need to find stable, high-paying jobs at big companies?"
Legacy graduates are destroying the integrity of the academic program and make a feudalism out of a supposed meritocracy.
Say what you will about GW Bush; the man is not an intellectual, but is an ivy league grad.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I've worked with both state-school grads and Ivy League grads. Ivy Leaguers, on average, surpass their state school colleagues in the area of self congratulation. Otherwise, there's no advantage in engineering and the hard sciences.
When everybody gets an A at Harvard, how could it be otherwise? State schools have to offer admission to just about everybody, but there ain't no grade inflation there. Nothing like the Ivy League, anyway. The weak are culled from the herd by the sophomore or junior year.
Or maybe it's the fact that there aren't any stable jobs at large companies anymore. Why spend the big bucks on the school when you'll have to change jobs every three years anyway. The article mentions it, but I can assure you that C-level executive positions usually last less than five years. The same is true for most other positions now, too.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
There is no such thing as a "stable" "job" anywhere in the United States today. You either work for someone else, in which case your job is only as stable as the next quarter's results (factoring out your personal performance), or you work for yourself with all the instability/risk that entails.
But the 1950s career ladder is gone.
sPh
For the average Ivy Leaguer, motivation and work ethic are exactly what got them admitted, and it's also motivation and work ethic that's required to do well in such a competitive environment.
However, I can tell you that at my school, as well as most of the others in the Ivy League, there is a discernible difference between those who had to work hard to get in and those who are of "legacy" status. Us public school educated kids aren't necessarily a rarity anymore, but we do come from quite different worlds.
Perhaps corporations are realizing that simply graduating from an Ivy League says little more about the person than graduating from any place else....you still want those who aren't at the bottom of their class, because, truth be told, it's nearly impossible to flunk out of an Ivy League school. Few people realize that when you have a poor semester at most of these schools, you go on "academic leave" for a semester to "get your head straight"...your old grades take a more permanent vacation.
According to the US Census, about 13 mil employed white males from 35 to 64 have a bachelors degree or greater.
There are 8 Ivy League universities, but let's be gracious and include schools like Stanford, MIT and Chicago and up the number of "top" schools to 12. Let's assume an average enrollment of apx 1,500 students per year per school between the years 1960 through 1990 (the years those white males went to school), leading to a total of 12 x 1,500 x 30 = 540,000 graduates and let's assume that 2/3 are male (it's only 1/2 nowadays), leading to apx 360,000 ivy leaguers out there.
This means that ivy leaguers make up apx. 2.8% of the eligible CxO candidate pool.
So, the conclusion is that having an ivy degree increases your odds of becoming a CxO by about 3.5x today instead of the 5x it did back in the day.
Of course, all this is meaningless drivel since they Ivy League is a *football* league, not some sort of academic standards association and, more importantly, as if increasingn a 0.002% chance to 0.007% means anything at all.
Compare this to the competition at other competitive schools whose degree programs are still tough (see above), and A's mean something. These schools - some mentioned in the article as ivy alternatives - are picking up the slack. I know for sure that the high-profile companies the article mentioned (McKensie, Goldman-Sachs, etc) do recruit heavily among top-tier non-ivies these days. They do here at Caltech anyway.
Also, as things move more and more toward technology and fewer employers care about the liberal arts, the smaller ivies don't have the resources to compete - science is very expensive. Even Princeton and Yale didn't crack top 10 in many of the sciences, last I checked, and the other ivies aren't close. In sciences/tech, Harvard is the only Ivy that can even COMPETE with many of the the schools I listed at the top.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
In my opinion, Americans spend way too much effort getting into the 'best' schools. In the end, your personal achievments speak much louder than where you graduate from. Mediocre Harvard graduates are still mediocre; exceptional XX-State graduates are still exceptional.
By all means go to the school that will best enhance your personal talents. But don't stand on your head to be admitted to 'the' school, especially if this effort is contrary to developing your individual talents. Admission to university is a beginning, not an end.
People have been spouting this for years, mostly by people who went to technical schools instead of college, or people who took technical jobs out of high school.
Can you honestly tell me that a potential employer who sees two resumes, one with a degree and 5 years programming experience, and one with only a high school diploma and 5 years programming experience, that he'll interview the high school graduate over the college graduate?
Didn't think so.
Inconceivable!
The successful people they're counting are the college graduates of at least 10 to 20 years ago. College attendance began its explosion during this time and that leads to the percentage decrease because the number of Ivy admissions hasn't increased in kind. With so many more people attending other colleges and Ivys not keeping their proportion, it's no wonder that more good people that end up in high positions in corporate America having come from other colleges.
The majority of kids attending Ivys might come from rich families but I would argue this is much different than 50 years ago when the majority came from families that were both rich and had high status. Admission has become tough, even for legacies (well, unless there isn't a building named after your dad) so a lot of the kids being groomed to take over the family empire are more likely to not get into an Ivy and are more likely to not want to go even if they could. Ivys have become a lot dorkier in recent years.
Having attended both an Ivy and non-Ivys I can say that the difference is that the non-Ivys tend to be more practical, teaching things employers actually want to know. Ivys are about theory and thinking...which is what learning should be about, even if not as useful right out of college.
I find it interesting that the article asserts that more children of the rich are getting into the ivy league nowadays. In fact, one could argue the exact opposite. In the past, the ivy league was only for the wealth. However, more and more, the ivies are striving for diversity and they are not taking as many "old money" private school kids.
Visit an Ivy League school sometime. Yes, we have more than our share of legacies, and rich kids, but a vast majority are just very smart people with financial aid (over 70% at Harvard). Believe it or not, we're not all rich kids coasting by on someone else's money or reputation.
You want to see spoiled rich kids, take a look at BU. Brandeis. Bennington. Fairfield. Holy Cross. Schools where the kids of rich people go when they're not smart enough to get into the Ivy's, and not lucky enough to be a legacy.
Gawd, this attitude really ticks me off. I got into Harvard, graduated with honors, and got a good job (in IT, no less). I'm far more typical than the spolied rich kids.
First of all, it's unamerican to not make fun of the President. That's what sets us apart from other nations.
Second, people who whinges about making fun of GW were probably saying nasty things about Clinton, Gore and Kerry, so
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
The corporations USED TO offer "stable, high-paying jobs", but now offer neither.
Pretty much everyone knows that there is no corporate loyalty to their employees anymore, and that you cannot expect to have a position next year EVEN if you do a great job (strategy changes, mergers, sales of divisions, etc.).
Corporate pay is no longer what it used to be either. Except for getting to the absolue top, you may live comfortably, but you will not get wealty on 4 decades of corporate pay. And they are getting better at extracting more work for less (real) pay -- its called increased productivity.
In contrast, there are now many examples of excellent success in entrepreneurship, and the better control over your lifestyle. So, if you were smart and had a top education and a choice, would you go be a wage slave for some corp? Maybe for a few years just to get a bit more background and maybe connections, but not for long. Pretty soon, you won't put up with the corp BS, and you'll choose a better lifestyle running your own show. Ergo, there are fewer Ivy-types available to rise into those positions
I refer to people who don't enjoy learning, who prefer not to think, who generally don't retain what little they do learn, and who often don't pick up the infrastructural skill of critical, organized thinking.
These people are suffered to finish because the schools and departments themselves have incentives to process as many people as possible.
IMHO, that has devalued higher degrees and academic grades so far that they aren't helpful predictors of future performance. We're seeing that reflected in the Fortune 100 statistics.
I agree that the Ivy aura is fading fast. At least in technology.
14 years ago I was interviewing for my first software job and I hadn't even finished my degree at a public university. The interviewer told me, "You know, earlier today I interviewed a guy with a degree from Harvard. Tell me why I should hire you instead?" It was my first real interview and thinking about it now I think I did a poor job, but I gave him a copy of a small Quicken-like finance program I had written for my own use and told him that I thought I had real experience while the guy from Harvard probably just had theoretical experience.
I got the job.
So 14 years ago a high school graduate working on a degree from a public university beat out a Harvard graduate. And that was 14 years ago. When I later moved to a new country I responded to one job offer in the local paper by sending them my resume and a disk with some software I had written. I got the job even though I wasn't yet fluent in the local language.
It's not about where you spent 4 years of your life. It's about what you can do and whether you can provide the employer with any reason to believe that you can do the things you say you can do. If you can, you'll get the job and the Harvard grad will still be looking.
I think the key is to seperate "education" from a "license to get a real job". There are two camps here, really two sides. Pursuing philosophy because you LOVE it, and it enraptures you and consumes you and becomes your life's passion... or computer science, or theoretical physics, or economics, or any other subject like that. Versus working hard to get a BS so that someone will hire you. Versus "you forget most of what you study anyway, it just proves to your employer that you are willing to work hard".
When you focus objectively on the subject, when you do what is called "deep learning", when you really get into what you are studying, and actually get your brain working, thinking new ideas, coming up with new questions, trying to find new answers, you begin to experience the true value of education, which is, if you asked me, about learning the material, understanding the significance of astronomy or physics or ethics or philosophy or literature or art or film, or politics, economics, etc...
I am from the camp that respects education because education is good in and of itself, intrinsically. I find education to be an end in and of itself, a way to improve yourself, question your place in society, learn more about the world you live in. I am not from the camp that feels that education is a "license" to get a job.
What we are probably seeing here is a reflection of these values - perhaps ivy leaguers are more likely to be passionate about education; perhaps they attach a significance to education that goes beyond the ability to get a job or proving that one is a hard worker.
If you think about it, at least at the undergraduate level, the stuff you learn and study has been studied and taught for hundreds, even thousands of years... there must be some compelling reason for this; and I can speak from personal experience that if you open your mind and really focus on "deep learning", really get into what you are studying, that it becomes quite obvious why we are still studying these subjects thousands of years later.
Education can be a very, very powerful tool; but you have to recognize that it has value in and of itself, and that it's not just a way to get a better job. Looking at it from this point of view, perhaps the figures make a little more sense. The types of environments that you will find in these big businesses probably make those positions less attractive to people who have a genuine, deep respect for education. Larger businesses will probably place more emphasis on a degree as a qualification or requirement, potential hires may be required to possess a BS as matter of policy.
Perhaps the path to getting the most out of education doesn't lead to C* positions at large organizations; and if getting the most out of life has anything to do with getting the most out of education, and if getting the most out of education has anything to do with respecting education as being important in and of itself, not simply a means to get a job, then you may very well see the positions in large corporations being filled with individuals who are open to accepting the viewpoint of education as a requirement, as a prerequisite to employment, with less emphasis on the intellectual and creative side of education, which usually requires money and time to pursue.
Who needs Harvard? A lot of talented people looking for a really good education that they can use as a springboord for a better life. Get real people, life is not measured soley by whether or not you find a CEO job for chrissakes. It's about doig something that you enjoy and making the lives of people around you better in the process.
Slashdot should know better than to publish an article like this. Life is more than getting a fancy title in corporate america. Criminy.
Any idiot can graduate from an Ivy League. There's several reasons for this. One is customer satisfaction. Am I seriously going to pay all that money for Harvard for bad grades? Another is the image of the university. Ivies thrive on the illusion that they are places of unparalleled genius where exceptional academic performance is just the rule. If they start failing people out, they have to admit that some of their students are substandard nongeniuses. Seriously, I've known *plenty* of idiots that went to an Ivy League school, so the fact that Bush went to an Ivy League is anything but impressive. Yet another is that the University is willing to tolerate idiots if they bring something else to the table, such as connections, a name, or shitloads of money. The Ivies have a whorish interest in money and power. Really, can anyone seriously argue that Bush would have got in to Yale, a place he probably can't even spell half the time, on merit?