Credentialism and elite employment

Want an elite job at the very pinnacle of 21st century capitalism? Read the rest of this post. Here's what I said in an earlier post How the world works: (see also Creators and Rulers.)

Go to the web sites of venture capital, private equity or hedge funds, or of Goldman Sachs, and you'll find that HYPS alums, plus a few Ivies, plus MIT and Caltech, are grossly overrepresented. (Equivalently, look at the founding teams of venture funded startups.)

Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don't mean "gee US News says Ohio State's Aero E program is top 5!" -- I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT -- the traditional top dogs in academia.)

This is just how the world works. I won't go into detail, but it's actually somewhat rational for elite firms to operate this way ...

The paper below is by a Kellogg (Northwestern) management professor, Lauren Rivera. No offense to Rivera, because she gets things mainly right, but much of (good) social science seems like little more than documenting what is obvious to any moderately perceptive person with the relevant life experience. Bad social science, on the other hand, often means completely missing things that a moderately perceptive person would have noticed! ;-)

Posted by Jim Zellmer at January 27, 2011 6:52 AM
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