This is simply not true. I went to what I would call a tier 3 school for undergrad and then ended up at MIT for graduate work. The difference between the two institutions was really night and day. Not only are the classes more rigorous and the instructors objectively better at MIT, but the students just think differently: they have much more ambition and are far less constrained by the status quo / what their parents did. Being around that totally changed my outlook of what is possible and what I should expect from myself, and really pushed me to make huge career and self-education strides.
There's also a difference in mindset - there's an appreciation of knowledge for knowledge's sake, and there's a presumption that you can get up to speed with the basics of things quickly even if it is outside of your subject. I distinctly remember discussing calcium channels with the medical students (at an event where there was also a lot of drinking), and discussing economics with the economists.
From my first hand experience as a graduate student at MIT, a lot of the research produced at MIT generates a disproportionate amount of buzz - essentially identical work (in terms of quality) produced by a student in a "tier 3" school will not generate the same kind of recognition. The reasons for this lie in the network effects; people read and cite people who they can attest to with less effort and scrutiny.
The points regarding the instructors and student body are definitely valid and should not be ignored.
Example from my field: silicon photonics project which got a lot of press and all of them mentioned MIT, usually in the headlines. U boulder contributed to the project and got e near zero recognition.
They always were, to some extent. Comparably, they are considerably more egalitarian now than they were even 50 years ago.
"so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network"
Whatever the admissions problems - they are still very good schools. They tend to have better profs and better students and that counts for a lot. Also huge financing basis, and due to 'brand' they get visitors from prominent individuals the world over.
I think the problem is not the schools - it's the way we treat 'brand value' particularly in places like the Silicon Valley.
I wonder if during interviewing, what would happen if interviewers were simply not allowed to know the educational background of the candidate - after all, once they have been admitted for an interview, does that information really matter at all (i.e. in the context of a specific interview?).
It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.
Particularly when it comes to socialization - I find that Ivy League types are confident and polished communicators, so I particularly enjoy the process of trying to 'see past the nice smile' to find what counts ... but fully aware of how important it is to still have 'brand recognition' even at the company early on, as this actually does help to recruit more talent and investment, sadly.
I've been heavily involved in interviewing, from the hiring side. You are actually correct.
From the hiring party's perspective, the cost of interviews is the time of the current employees administering them. The candidate's entire resume is thus taken into account before making the expensive decision to fly them over and have 5-10 people interview them in person.
In other words, there certainly is some weight given to a candidate's educational credentials, but it's almost completely limited to the decision whether to interview them at all.
Once a candidate is in front of an interviewer, their resume only matters as a jumping point into live discussion, typically of topics like past projects and interests. The brand of their school makes zero difference at this point.
> It's hard for younger people to avoid this, and when I did a lot of interviewing in my 20's I think I was too skewed by this, not having the opportunity to know really what all of that meant.
The unpleasant truth is that unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance.
Nobody flies a candidate for a full day of interviews just to reject them based on something that was already known.
Not every candidate from a top school is smart. There's plenty of terrible candidates from top schools, and they bomb interviews just like everybody else, and when they do they get rejected.
Finally, I'd say that nowadays, the benefit of the handful (say top 10) schools is far less obvious. There's plenty of "2nd-tier" engineering schools that will easily get you into most interviewing processes.
"unless you interviewed with some extremely inefficient employers, you were not rejected due to your school brand, but due to your perceived interview performance."
I disagree with this point (and FYI I don't think I've been rejected due to this).
I strongly believe that the word like 'Harvard' biases perceptions right from the start of the interview. As do appearance, culture, possible demarcations of political orientation.
I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise.
Tech is generally a little better than other fields because it's a little easier to intelligently discriminate between good and bad ... but in my view it's problem.
I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out' - but I also believe that if you did not allow interviewers to see the resumes ... that'd you get different results.
I'm only really familiar with engineering interviews, but for those, in the past decade and especially recently, most of these factors are irrelevant.
The trend since at least 2005 has been ever more strongly favoring real, quantifiable, comparable, job-related challenges. Most everything else is a distraction, which interviewers are trained to ignore.
This was a result of scientific studies of the older interview paradigms, which indeed suffered from some of the biases you mentioned and were - for these and other reasons - inefficient at predicting good job performance.
This is doubly true for intellectual work like engineering, where quirky folk (including those who have poor appearance, not much interest in non-geeky culture, etc.) are common and often the best candidates.
Bottom line: performance is measured and quantified on well-defined tasks, the rest is largely fluff, unless the candidate is being a blatant jerk or something of that extreme nature.
> I believe that even at a supposedly imminently professional place as Google ... that the same person interviewing with a 'thick southern accent' who enjoyed 'hunting and fishing' would have more difficulty than otherwise.
Do you have any data or evidence to back this up?
I'm inclined to believe that someone like that would, if anything, stand out if they performed well on the technical part. They'll be the "CS genius hillbilly".
That's another thing you're missing: the main challenges provide such a strong and salient signal of performance, that the rest of the data is largely interpreted in light of that performance.
That goes for school brand too, by the way.
If a candidate from MIT does very badly, the reaction is not "let's forgive him, he's from MIT" but rather "for someone who got accepted and graduated MIT, this guy sure did underperform" and a prompt rejection.
> I totally agree that 'school' is a reason to 'fly them out'
School brand alone will not get you a plane ticket. It might get you a phone screen. There's too many bomb candidates from top schools to just freely shower them all with plane tickets.
By the way, I agree with the claims made in the article. With top schools like Harvard giving legacy candidates 6 times chances of admission, you're going to have a lot of Harvard students who got there because their parents did, and/or their grandparents before them, etc.
That means a lot of bomb candidates from even the very, very best schools. Hiring businesses are aware of this.
The brand power of these top schools therefore falls short of what you seem to believe.
Sure, you can get a phone screen with a Harvard degree. But you can get the very same one with an NYU degree too. And once you do, it doesn't matter that you're "only from NYU".
Recruitment, Resumes, Interviews: How the Hiring Process Favors Elites
For those who didn't go to prestigious schools, don't come from money, and aren't interested in sports and booze—it's near impossible to gain access to the best paying jobs.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/recruit...
A prestigious school brand will help you to get into the hiring process. I did hear that for certain roles in certain companies, such prestigious brand is effectively a requirement to enter the process. This is rare in software engineering, because there's so much demand, that even the top tier employers can't limit themselves to top school graduates, not if they want to fill up all openings.
The other reason is that these top schools churn out a lot of legacy graduates - people who got in and graduated because their parents attended the school and/or donated money. That means there's a lot of top school graduates who aren't that bright, and many of the brightest people who went to less prestigious schools.
I agree with basically everything you said except this part. These schools very actively attempt to boost their brand. OTOH, silicon valley stands out as being one of the few places to place relatively less weight on such pedigrees and has even developed alternatives, e.g. the Thiel fellowship.
My ex's internship at Harvard was as simple as her dad knowing a prof that is friends with a harvard one. No prep, no interview, no nothing. It opened a lot of doors and that's great, but the interesting thing was that when things are so easy to attain, I had to do a lot of convincing to actually get her to attend it.
And when I contrast it to the amount of stones that were thrown in my way, I can't help but be a little bit jealous
Mind you - at least these days law has changed and nobody really cares about how posh your relatives are, just how much money they have....
To clarify: "public school" here means "private school" in American, yes?
At the school I went to, even before I applied I knew that their admissions process funneled legacy applications into an entirely separate pool from normal applications.
More and more, I view these Ivy league colleges (and a few others like MIT, Stanford, etc) as private clubs not too dissimilar from country clubs. Beyond the anti Asian bias, I think something more revealing will be the number of legacy admits.
Education is getting more decentralized and so the only real value of these institutions is brand recognition and network.
If that is indeed a good analogy, then it makes sense Harvards admission criteria is a trade secret.