Castorp, you are right of course that there is an academic distinction between Fachhochschule and University. What I meant to say was that an FH graduate isn’t generally looked down an as second-rate compared to a University graduate. On the contrary, a University graduate with a degree say in English or (yikes) Philosophy may be looked down on as useless, compared to a solid engineer.

Now if you look at the Federal cabinet (74), 2 out of 16 ministers went to Fachhochschule and one went to a technical college, versus 13 that went to University. Engineers are underrepresented and lawyers are way overrepresented in politics. To some extent that is self-selection but elite in-group dynamics obviously play a role.

y81 at #114: The useful people are, first, the partners or managing directors at your own job, and, second, the firm’s clients or customers, all of whom are much older than you.

It’s true that when you are starting out, your classmates – in themselves – are not a whole lot of use to you. (“… your recent classmates are of no use whatsoever.” Agreed.)

But it’s the fathers (…and, rarely, the mothers…) of your classmates who are “…the partners or managing directors at your own job, and, second, the firm’s clients or customers…”.

Your frat brother’s father might be the guy who knows just who to call to get you a foot in the door. Your roommate’s family comes to visit and take you out to dinner, too. You start dating your roommate’s kid sister, and start going home with your roommate at Thanksgiving. Suddenly The Old Man mentions your need for a job at his next board meeting.

Lo-and-behold, this sort of networking is much more valuable at the Ivies than it is at State U.

The impression I get is that people who do management consultancy as a career post-business school are at least a tier/rung down from people who do it as a sort of post-undergraduate training internship before heading to business school and then heading into banking, management, whatever. The reason McKinsey is so prestigious for undergrads is because it is the best feeder for Harvard MBA there is, and once you get to Harvard MBA you can go for Wall Street. To do McKinsey post-MBA is basically catching the second wave, and your earning potential is already lower by that point.

I hope you aren’t planning on interviewing with McK/Bain/BCG – you’ll shine right through …

“(I laughed no end when I found out that the general business curriculum at one fairly decent university still, in 2010, contained a unit on manufacturing processes, productivity, efficiencies, and assembly-line setups. Dead-end careers, anyone?)”

I laughed to no end when I read this. What percent of Apple’s (to use your example above) management is concerned on the impact of mmanufcaturing process, productivity, efficiencies and assembly-line set-up? Quite a large percentage. Just because you outsource manufacturing, doesn’t mean that you design from the beginning for manufacturing. If apple’s wizards design something that is too hard or expensive to produce, it will suck as a product in the consumer space.

In any event, real management consultants come from business school. 98% of undergrad consultants get rotated out to graduate school within 3-5 years of starting. As was mentioned earlier, Harvard, Wharton, and Stanford business schools’ students are only somewhat skewed towards “elite” colleges.

This is all really wrong. You have no absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Almost nobody got a 70-80k stipend. There were maybe 3 firms giving out that much. The usual firm paid for bar expenses + something like 15k. They were trying to balance out not having too much bad publicity and giving deferred associates incentives to find different jobs as they massively over hired. And even then a lot of offers were rescinded. Additionally a lot of junior first and second year associates were fired, and laying off first and second year associates used to be considered something you weren’t supposed to do…and yet you had hundreds upon hundreds of young lawyers let go.

If you think the fear of bad publicity is related to impressing career services offices at law schools, you clearly don’t know anything about how any of this works. What do you think; law students are going to refuse a 160k job because a firm isn’t genteel enough? Why don’t you look at how well Latham recruited this year after completely massacring a whole generation of lawyers…? Rescinding offers/no offering summer associates is a sign of a firm’s economic health; firms care because a struggling firm will be a target for predatory firms that try to pick off partners with robust books of business, and a struggling firm will have a difficult time poaching these kinds of partners from other firms. Firms grow by poaching partners and buying out smaller firms. If you think they are acting to protect some kind of genteel image, you are hopelessly out of touch.

And you have no idea what makes a “really elite” lawyer. Professionally, what makes a “really elite lawyer” is that lawyers book of business, which is made in part by winning cases/dominating negotiations, and in part by sucking up to the kind of “grubby” business types you despise. The preference for t14 law schools or t5 law schools has very little to do with a quality of student. If you want to talk about differentiation then Yale has by far the “smartest” law students, and yet they have a reputation for being mediocre lawyers in regards to biglaw practice (they dominate the judiciary and especially academia). The difference between a Harvard Law student and a University of Minnesota Law student is like 6 questions on the LSAT. The real value of getting a t14 kid is that it’s just easier to bill them out at the insane rates firms charge. Easier to justify to the “grubby” businessmen who pay the bills because they hold the same simple minded social climbing views on “prestige” as you do…that’s actually the most amusing thing about you; your strident awareness and the importance you place on these things marks you as an outsider to the very class of people you want to join. You are just like a businessman who looks at the young lawyers Cornell law degree with a mixture of satisfaction and reassurance as the senior partner in charge of the case snickers to himself at the idiot buying this b.s.

College Rankings only matter in long-normally distributed career fields. For all the talk of I-banking being analytical, most of the jobs are really sales jobs. After having done business with McKenzie and Booz-Allen, I will tell you that most of their low-level employees were worthless but did have Ivy league degrees.

Another way to look at the world is that a nursing graduate from Penn or Johns Hopkins gets the same starting pay as every other nursing graduate. A graduate of Harvard Medical School gets the same reimbursement as any other physicians. However a Harvard Law School graduate will get paid more because they went to Harvard versus other lawyers. Thus, the top schools are all about succeeding in a log-normal field . That is why fewer Harvard or Yale graduates are interested in Medicine, science, or operational management. They are narrowing themselves into finance, politics, media, and consulting where a few get very rich and most people are failures.

Look at engineering (something that Clemson and Auburn are good at. Those are normally distributed careers but can be done anywhere. Yet, being in investment banking limits a person to living in NYC. Working in the Media limits people to working in NYC, DC, or LA.

There’s also the fact the undergraduate business major is quite dangerous for the graduates at top schools themselves. A ready-made business major might translate into an immediate, permanent job track post-graduation, and if and when that job track turns out sour, it hurts the graduates.

Whereas if you only graduate with a generalist degree, you are more likely to be hired by the likes of McKinsey and get rotational training in all departments, and thus have a set of skills that are not vulnerable to economic shifts in the way normal people’s skills are.

For example, someone who was retarded enough to graduate with a focus in Industrial Processes Management or whatever twenty years ago would have been disadvantaged pretty heavily.

(I laughed no end when I found out that the general business curriculum at one fairly decent university still, in 2010, contained a unit on manufacturing processes, productivity, efficiencies, and assembly-line setups. Dead-end careers, anyone?)

They are aware of college rankings – especially things like the NCAA rankings. Knowledge of academic rankings is far less widespread and people will in general be much more familiar with schools that have prominent sports programs – everybody knows what a Villanova or a Clemson or an Auburn is, even though these are not especially notable as academic institutions.

Again, extrapolations from a continental European perspective will end you up in wrong places in the US.

1. In a European context, people getting university educations are often coming out with graduate degrees. In the US business world, you will generally get your first job with only a bachelor’s degree.
2. The top-tier schools do not usually offer undergraduate majors in business. Only two of the Ivy Leagues have undergraduate business programs (Cornell and UPenn). Stanford, Duke, the University of Chicago and Northwestern don’t have them either. Some of the best public universities have undergraduate business degrees, but others don’t (Cal Berkeley has them, but UCLA doesn’t, for instance). So, most of the top schools do not have undergraduate business majors. The small liberal arts colleges do not have them either. You can only obtain top-tier undergrad business majors from a very small list of places – Penn, MIT, Cornell, Cal Berkeley, Michigan, UVa and a few other places. Most undergraduate business programs at top-tier institutions are also intentionally quite small, so the output is limited.
3. Undergraduates in the US will not major in something called financial economics at a top-tier institution. They can get an economics degree, which is usually focused on high-end economic theory and it is only very marginally more applicable to business than anything else is.
4. Undergraduate business programs at mediocre US schools are not (broadly) viewed as particularly good places to learn any sort of high-end analytical skills.

The result is that there’s multiple bifurcated markets. When a corporation wants a junior accountant or junior tax analyst or junior HR person or a number of other functions, they will go to the nearest big mediocre university and hire a business major. They will not hire someone with a liberal arts degree. There is a set of professional services firms that primarily hires undergraduate students with a liberal arts degree, and generally pays only minimal attention to their course of study while doing so (the economics degree really doesn’t make a massive amount of difference and so they don’t privilege it much).

Liberal arts undergrads who do want to work in large corporations will get a job at a professional services firm and only later move to a corporation, generally getting jobs (or preferring jobs) that people with undergraduate business majors from mediocre schools will only rarely be considered for.

No, salient: see, the administrators told you a bunch of stuff about the budget – and they lied to you.

You’re of course one of the people who they will lie to without cease. They have to – the ranks of the administrators have undergone a massive increase, and the administrative salaries have risen rapidly as well. When they do the budgeting, they do this little fun thing of allocating what’s called overhead charges: overhead charges are essentially their salaries. When you do that and present the resulting budget to people who don’t understand how these things are constructed, what you get is: it doesn’t matter how much the administration is wasting because it all gets allocated out to other entities. The more the administrators blow on themselves, the more everybody else in the cost centers (that’s you) gets to suffer.

Here’s a tip: don’t ever take what’s in a budget at face value. If they don’t give you the original spreadsheets, they’re lying their ass off by definition.

Not that the state government didn’t cut back their support, of course. Which is certainly a major problem. However, the more major problem is that, like the top levels of American corporate hierarchies, the top levels of American education hierarchies are kleptocracies. Even if they didn’t get state support cut, they’d be telling you the exact same lies as they do right now.

That really surprises me. I thought college rankings are among the things that almost all Americans are aware of.

Why did it takes us 155 comments to get there?

There are indeed populations who know almost nothing about the finer points of the US higher education system except the domestic or international rankings (I’m thinking especially of East Asian immigrants) and who apply accordingly. I know Chinese parents who have their children apply to the top ten universities listed on the US News & World Report rankings. However, these people are generally well educated and successful in their home country, and can translate that knowledge, albeit imperfectly, into a US context.

I notice that your name seems to indicate that you are Norwegian, and thus possibly unfamiliar with American society. Well, uhm, this sort of thing, relating to places like JP Morgan Chase, are, uhm, more about class than competence. Thus, your actual area of study doesn’t matter, but where you did your studying, and who you hung out with, does. Also, it is a given, a common understanding, in the U.S. that a English major at Princeton is naturally more intelligent than a business/finance major at Third-Tier State, and would be more suited to a high-intelligence-intensive industry like high finance.