2/11/2011
Signs of economic recovery are sending hopes among the nation’s unemployed. However, a recent study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility is apparently set to temper down the high hopes felt by some.
This is because the study revealed that recruiters coming from the top law firms, investment houses or banks, as well as consulting firms consider only at applicants from the “Top 5” schools for possible new hires. These are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and, for business degree holders, Upenn.
All other resumes of applicants who came from different schools are usually are placed at the back burners. In fact, as one investment bank manager put it, even resumes of graduates from MIT or Cornell “pretty much goes into a black hole.”
On top of that, applicants who have done something awesome in college are looked upon by recruiters favorably than those who are just regular graduates. This means that graduates who were involved in sports, not just a lame sport but something that creates an impact, have better chances than non-athletes at landing a job in good firms or companies.
Other acceptable extra-curricular activities that may interest recruiters include traveling with a world-famous orchestra or building houses in Costa Rica.
One of the reasons why there seems to be an exclusive treatment of graduates from “Top 5” schools is that in today’s age of cutbacks and stiff competition for jobs, managers do not bother checking out heaps of resumes without an Ivy lineage. Perhaps this is due to the belief of hiring managers that the nation’s most selective schools only accept the cream of the crop.
One reason for the exclusive treatment could be – in this era of cutbacks and cut-throat competition for jobs, hiring managers don’t bother sorting through stacks of resumes without Ivy pedigrees, figuring that the nation’s most selective schools have already done that work for them.
