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Amusingly people from 'elite' schools often will not say where they went to school by name in casual conversation. This seems to be especially true for east coa
by sulam 10y ago
Amusingly people from 'elite' schools often will not say where they went to school by name in casual conversation. This seems to be especially true for east coast schools that are particularly elitist (a subset of the Ivies). This gets especially absurd when they say something like "oh, I went to school in New Haven" (Yale people do this semi-reliably).
In other words, there is a signaling and counter-signaling mechanism here. An investment banker saying they went to school in Philly is expecting you to understand they went to Wharton, and the only acceptable clarifying question is something like "oh, undergrad or for your MBA?"
Asking me not to say I went to an Ivy on my resume is fine -- I can disclose it in 50 other ways that will be obvious to the people who care and much harder to censor.
Instead my practice is to literally not look at people's resumes. This isn't perfect -- some co-workers will choose to ask about a project listed on the resume they are interested in, and I don't think that's a horrible idea usually. I simply don't like the assumptions I start to generate when I read people's resumes.
- foobarian 10y agoMy experience is it's out of not wanting to appear elitist or boastful when talking with people who went to other schools. As soon as the name comes out there is an almost hostile change in attitude e.g. "ah look we got a 1-percenter here to take our jobs".
- allemagne 10y agoI could see that being the case from time to time, but saying something like "oh I went to school up in New Haven/Boston area/San Jose" seems like an obvious humblebrag in most contexts.
- lloyd-christmas 10y agoAs someone who went to one of those schools, it's more simply that they all compete with one another and nobody feels like having those conversations anymore after the age of 25. The people that go to those schools tend to gravitate to NYC/Boston/Philly/DC, and we all know each other since those schools are all fed by the northeast boarding schools.
- allemagne 10y agoLike a euphemism for "I went to XYZ but let's not talk about it" perhaps?
- Retric 10y agoYet, they often bring it up in conversation. Anyway, school names tend to be worth vastly less in an interview than getting to that point. Face to face Ivy grads are better than average when selected randomly, but because of the selection effect people at elite institutions often get a negative bias to Ivy grads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox PS: You see similar things when look at people from say MIT by SAT score you would find the lower scores tend to be better indicators than high ones. Which is the same issue, people with low scores need other factors to get into the door.