Fabio Rojas, pivoting off Bryan Caplan, thinks through a new paper on hiring in "investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms." Among the conclusions:
• Elite firms have no time to sort through people.
• Nearly all applicants from low status schools (e.g., the "public Ivies" like Michigan or Berkeley or any other non-[Harvard-Yale-Princeton] school) are tossed in the trash without review.
• There’s a signalling of habitus – applicants need the right interactional skills, the right major, the right extra-curriculars, showing similarity to the recruiter
• There’s modest amount of evaluation based on performance (SAT or GPA), but not a lot.
McArdle is horrified. Manzi is more than a little skeptical:
It’s not the top four schools, but more like 40 or 50 highly competitive schools and 10 or 15 highly competitive MBA programs, that get you access to these firms. Further, while the odds of getting an offer are higher from the most highly ranked schools, a large fraction of each incoming class normally comes from schools not ranked 1–4.
If you get into, for example, Michigan, UCLA, Emory, or the University of Texas, work hard to get good grades in a difficult major, and score very well on standardized tests, you will likely be able to get an interview with one of the leading strategy firms.
(List of the top 5 colleges ranked by graduates' average starting and mid-career salary from PayScale)
The Dish 
