Confirming so many suspicions about Wall Street hiring, Lauren Rivera -- a 32-year-old sociologist who teaches management and organizations at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management -- has concluded it's still where you went rather than what you did there that makes the difference. "Plus ?a change, plus c'est la m?me chose," she fittingly wrote in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. "The means of educational credentialism have changed, but the ends remain the same."
She says "elite professional service employers" rely more on academic pedigree than any other factor. For recruiters, it's prestige that counts, rather than "content" like grades, courses, internships, or other actual performance. That's because if you got into a "super-elite" school -- which essentially means Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Wharton (University of Pennsylvania), and Stanford -- you must be smart. Plus, time spent at those bastions in turn will make you "polished" and attractive to corporate clients. It is, according to Rivera, a largely self-perpetuating hiring process that prizes efficiency: Why spend effort looking for "that one needle in the haystack" at a "safety school" like the University of Michigan or, heavens forfend, Bowling Green, when the run-of-the-mill Yalie's still a prince. Even "second-tier" Ivies like Brown, according to Rivera, are suspect for the top firms.
