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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?"
It's because they all get hired by Google these days. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Could it be that other schools are becoming better as access to information increases?
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Maybe it's because they've realized George Bush not only attended, but actually graduated from an Ivy League School.
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
Education has been found to be less desirable than motivation and work ethic.
Education has now become accepted as being acquired through experience and higher learning - not just the next step/next grade level of yesteryear.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
God! The word "job" is forbidden! Don't say it near me!
-Anonymous Third Year College Student
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?
Being alumni of the ivy I can say I have had no real advantage in the direct job market because of my school but the network that I was able to develop while at school is second to none.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history.
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
Isn't it, Haaarrvard?
Nothing worse than hiring an ivy-league graduate who cannot do the job very well and then proceeds to display an arrogant attitude towards his or her non-ivy-league coworkers who can.
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As a student at Penn State, I can attest to the power of alumni support. The education here is pretty good, and that is my main advantage when looking for a job. However, one big advantage(probably 3rd behind education and experience) is the freaking HUGE network of alumni that "bleed blue and white" and prefer to hire Penn State grads. As more and more people go into higher education, the percentage of Ivy League grads is dropping, and to a certain extent, I think there is some resentment towards them.
Also, to me it seems people at the top schools have tough times finding jobs. I'm not sure why, maybe it is an over-reliance on technology(they don't network, they just resume bomb on monster) and a lot of them end up hiding out in grad school for a while, maybe never going to work at a big company.
Monstar L
Plastics.
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
This sig is false.
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.
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!
I can speak from the perspective of UVa out here in Virginia -- which was ranked as the #1 public school last year, and is tied for #2 this year with University of Michigan. #1 this year is UC Berkley, who trades spots with UVa every few years. (All these facts are courtesy of the worst ranking agent ever, US News and World Reports)
Anyway, basically what I'm trying to say is that public schools are making huge headway into almost every important field. Berkley has the amazing engineering program that the best schools compete neck and neck with. Michigan has extremly competitive law, business, and medical schools. Virginia has #4 law program, the #12 business program, the #24 medical school, a top 5 commerce school (that puts out some of the best investment bankers in the world) -- etc, etc.
Between the three top public institutions, every facet of higher education is relatively well covered from medicine to liberal arts to commerce to engineering. Today, wasting 50 grand a year on a Harvard education may still be worth it if you're not lucky enough to be living in Virginia, California or Michigan, but honestly -- the concept of building a network of connections and alumni support is well expressed in our public instituions today.
Perhaps the biggest difference between a public school and a private schools is a fact that wikipedia expresses -- the endowments are huge for schools like Harvard and Yale. UVA had an endowment of 1.4 billion dollars, harvard had 22.6 billion, and yale was at 11 billion. Harvard is the second largest nonprofit after the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.
Those are the facts that set apart a university like Harvard from a UVA or a Berkley. I think in the coming years these kinds of huge differences between top public schools and top private schools will increase. While the economy was bad in the earlier part of this century (hehe), schools like Berkley and Virginia took hits in funding. In virginia for example, the tuition was raised somewhere around 30%, and funding dropped pretty substantially. Certain public institions in the state that weren't doing as well dropped substantitally in rank according to US News and World Reports, and without public support, pulic (!!) institions can't do well.
For now at least, UVa looks to be going more and more the private route, especially with the new legislation on the table specifically asking for more leeway in the strings the government has attached to the institution. Hopefully as a more expensive, but still cheaper top instition that's quasi private/public will make for a better University overall. As per now, I can honestly say that going to a instition other than a top public one if you live in the states of Virginia, Michigan, or California (if accepted of course) would be a mistake. Perhaps getting lots of money to go to an expensive Ivy is not a bad plan, but the majority of them don't even offer merit based scholarships.
Anyway, there were quite a few cents more than my 0.02 there, but take from this what you will. =)
Those stats didn't sound quite right to me, and they seem to contradict the numbers in Harvard's own information book:
http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/budget/factbook/current _facts/enroll_ethnicity_7.html
It shows (American) whites as comprising 44 percent of the student body. And since a third of the international students are from Europe, that probably tips the total over half. No info on how many are 'gentiles' though.
That's less than the 70 some percent whites make up of the population, but lets see who is even more under-represented: Wow, even though blacks make up about 12% of the population, they're just 6.3 percent at Harvard! And Hispanics, who I believe recently passed blacks as Largest minority in the US, have just 5.5%!
Of course we all know who the real culprits are: those crafty Asians and Pacific Islander's. Of course their status as the lone over-represented race is due to white guilt, not a culture that values academic achievement. (/end sarcasm)
To disclose my slight personal connection to the issue: My uncle was the first Irish Catholic to get tenure at the history department at Harvard.
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.
And from the actual paper: "Between 1980 and 2001, the percentage of Fortune 100 top executives with Ivy League undergraduate degrees fell by four points (to nearly 30%) while the proportion from public schools increased by 16 points (to 50%)." The paper then goes on to say that this effect may be because there are more people graduating from state schools than ivy league schools (Harvard continues to graduate approximately 1600 kids ech year).
As someone who graduated Harvard recently, I can tell you my hypothesis as to what the difference is. When most of my peers graduated they either went on to become consultants (a nice pay-check + world travel), graduate school (both professional and academic), or investment bankers (really nice pay-check). A few became newspaper reporters, governmental employees, or started working at a large publicly traded corporation, but these things were not the norm.
Also, though there are some rich (and very rich) kids at Harvard, there are also poor and middle class kids from public schools. Harvard's financial aid is good that you can afford to go if you are admitted. They even give you money to buy winter clothes if you can't afford them. But it's so much fun to stereotype, isn't it?
You mean "alumnus". "Alumni" is plural, but "alumnus" is singular.
You're missing some commas there.
There is a idiom of ivy arrogance that the only difference between the education you get at Harvard vs other schools is that at other schools you learn about history at Harvard you are taught by the people that made history and sitting in a room with others that will make history.
Gosh, where to start: "a idiom", missing commas, missing "while" before "at Harvard", no capitalization of "Ivy".
They would have thrown me out of CMU for writing like that. Is that another key difference between Harvard and non-Harvard education?
You see, that pesky little organization that actually thinks about issues like global terrorism and the impacts of US policy on such activities, the CIA, has this to say about dumbasses little escapade into Iraq. Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of "professionalized" terrorists...
Not exactly what dumbass had in mind, but I guess when your brain works with binary logic (black:white) you can't see that the world is morass of nasty fucking gray that takes more than 1 step of logic to contemplate.
I hope that the Idiot in Chief at least can figure out that since he's a 2nd-termer, he should pull our troops the fuck outta that shit hole once the civil war begins in earnest...and that should begin in about 15 or so days after the killing event also know as the January 30th "election".
Your points about public universities are right on.
... or has Harvard just lowered the quality of its graduates by inflating everyone's grades?
The stories about it may be completely bogus but if they are giving out that many A's then something is definately wrong.
This is all part of the continuing devaluation of American workers. People older then say 30, aren't really feeling it. But every college graduate I know who is working in the county records office, "self employed" making 10g/year, selling motorcycles, doing plumbing, woring at walmart, and delivering pizzas *WITH A COLLEGE DEGREE* knows what these people are finding out -- that "business" has sold us out.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Can't comment on your first statement, I just happen to not trust statistics cited in racist diatribes. I'm not going to spend any more time digging around. And you know, the real reason the statistics aren't right there isn't because of some massive conspiracy, it's because no one cares about this stuff anymore except racists like you.
But on the second point, I'm correct. See, if you add all the categories, including the various races and 'international, you get 100%. And the 3400 figure is the same as the total on the page that shows the ethnic breakdown of international students. So no one's being counted twice on the first list-if you're international it doesn't lump you in with whites, latinos or whatever.
The article doesn't say that companies are hiring fewer Ivy Leaguers. It says that fewer "C-level" (CEO, CFO, CIO, etc) execs went to an Ivy League school as an undergrad. Also, it is not like NONE of them are Ivy grads. The percentage dropped from 14% to 10%. This is still a LARGE number when you compare the enrollment size of the Ivy's with the size of the population at large. Based on this number, Ivy schools have a disproportionate representation in the board room, relative to their size.
:-)
Based upon the erroneous conclusions of the submitter and the author of the original article, I would say that both probably attended a public college.
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
Companies are hiring less Ivy League Graduates for fiscal reasons. Think about this, an Ivy League graduate has a much higher wage expectancy than someone who graduates from a non-Ivy League school. Companies today are in the process of getting rid of employees that eiter don't do enough, or that they feel are overpaid for their job.. So if they have a chouce between the Ivy League guy that wants $50,000 a year, and the State University guy that wants $30,000 a year, most companies will choose the State University guy.
Make America grate again!
The difference now, I think, is that those positions that used to be filled by liberal arts majors are now filled by people with degrees in things like Communications, Marketing, or MBA's.
Leaving aside the worth of such things, I'd think that this would equalize the Ivy Leauge factor somewhat.
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.
While the Ivies do play football (of a sort), the Ivy League is much more than a football league. The eight Ivy League schools, with MIT, do cooperate on issues like admissions, financial aid, etc. In years past the cooperation was extensive--enough so that the Federal Trade Commission sued alleging restraint of trade (since the Ivies would coordinate financial aid offers to prevent "bidding wars" for students).
Plainly, Harvard and others, did not spend enough time teaching ethics. Aristotle is forgotten...
Oh well, what the hell...
There seem to be some shining examples of people who've worked their way up from the bottom... I would assume that it's because they've shown themselves to be motivated and have a fundamental understanding of what the majority of the company actually *does*, and doesn't just look at their products as "goods sold" and people as "labor costs".
Look at the recent McDonald's CEO and the current nominee for Commerce Secretary (or was he confirmed already?) from Kellogg's.
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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.
Not Berkley!
Or call it Berserkeley. But get that E in there!
Infuriate left and right
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.
Not everyone is a DILL if they dont do a degree, sometimes spending those 4 years in a degree can mean the difference between missing the boat on the latest technology booms. Imagine if you went to UNI in 1994 to graduate in 1998. You would have missed the big internet boom, but if you left in '95 started a small company , got into the business and been one of the few people to do a particular thing, then you would have made more experience and technical knowledge while the UNI sticks with stuff 3-5 years OLD because it takes time for lecturers to learn their stuff, then teach it. For fast moving technology, its not suited to slow paced UNIversities, they are more suited to scientific models and slow moving knowledge.
Just because someone doesn't do a degree doesnt mean that cannot be trained, if your a dumb-ass-prick at 19, then you are unlikely to become a smart-ass genius just because you go to Harvard.
I find it often ironic that CEOs and business owners that got them selves rich of others but using their smarts but with NO DEGREE, require that all new hires to be DEGREE people. Once someone has finished their degree and done 5-8years of real work, then they are no longer any more BETTER than someone who has equally worked in similar jobs for 5-8years also. "Look man, I got a degree in 1989 in computing" thats about as usefull as a C-64 for a webserver. Your work experience in 1990-2005 is what sets you apart.
Maybe thats why a lot of super rich business people have no degrees because they could not get good enough job chances without one, so they started their own company and worked from there.
Each person is unique so examine them carefully even if no degree is present, I bet there are many grads which have graduated but not well or probably fluked it or just are sick of the decipline to be outstanding.
95% jobs are nothing more than just factory position process workers being told what to do.
Often job requirements are way above what the job really is, or often they get you to do the work of 2 people that you replaced.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This is a fluff piece from Slate. I work at major biotechnology company in California. I have hired over 30 people in the last 6 years. I have found that most of the people from these schools are extremely arrogant and difficult to manage. Most believe they should be running our company and if they aren't running within a year of coming on-board they are clearly shocked that we don't realize their brilliance. They then do their best to make everyone on the team miserable like them. The real problem is that most universities don't really prepare people for the real world. In fact, I would argue that US universities are probably some of the most "unreal" places around now. Nevertheless shocking how arrogant some of the graduates from these schools are.
Overheard in coffee shop: "Student said, Dad I think I will get my M.A. degree after I graduate. Dad said, after you get your B.A. degree, you will get a J.O.B."