Elite Colleges Are Back at the Top of the List For Company Recruiters (msn.com) 23
The "talent is everywhere" approach that U.S. employers adopted during the white-hot pandemic job market is quietly giving way to something much older and more familiar: recruiting almost exclusively from a small set of elite and nearby universities. A 2025 survey of more than 150 companies by Veris Insights found that 26% were exclusively recruiting from a shortlist of schools, up from 17% in 2022.
Diversity as a priority for school recruiting selection dropped to 31% of employers surveyed in 2025, down from nearly 60% in 2022. GE Appliances once sent recruiters on one or two passes through 45 to 50 schools each year; now the company attends four or five events per semester at just 15 universities, including Purdue and Auburn. McKinsey, the consulting firm that expanded recruitment well beyond the Ivy League after George Floyd's murder, recently removed language from its career page that said "We hire people, not degrees." The firm now hosts in-person events at a shortlist of about 20 core schools, including Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.
Most companies now recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, said William Chichester III, who has directed entry-level recruiting at Target and Peloton. For students outside elite schools or those located near company headquarters? "God help you," he said.
Diversity as a priority for school recruiting selection dropped to 31% of employers surveyed in 2025, down from nearly 60% in 2022. GE Appliances once sent recruiters on one or two passes through 45 to 50 schools each year; now the company attends four or five events per semester at just 15 universities, including Purdue and Auburn. McKinsey, the consulting firm that expanded recruitment well beyond the Ivy League after George Floyd's murder, recently removed language from its career page that said "We hire people, not degrees." The firm now hosts in-person events at a shortlist of about 20 core schools, including Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.
Most companies now recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, said William Chichester III, who has directed entry-level recruiting at Target and Peloton. For students outside elite schools or those located near company headquarters? "God help you," he said.
no (Score:1)
Companies assume that the admissions offices of the best universities do a decent job sifting through the sludge being pumped out by public schools today so the best universities are more likely to produce competent graduates. When you have brighter, harder working students plus more rigorous courses you tend to get better graduates. It's obviously not true across the board, but assuming that better candidates come from better schools should always be the starting point of hiring. The way hiring used to wor
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AI Reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
This was an inevitability, and not just because of the tightening job market. The real gasoline dumped on the tire-fire of employment (especially tech employment) in the United States is AI. It used to be that, when I posed a job opening, I got maybe 100 applications over the course of a few weeks from people who moderately embellished their resumes. And that's because the conventional wisdom was to spend the time to put together a really class-A application to the jobs that were the best fit for you.
But AI has changed the math.
Now the hours-long process of fine-tuning your resume to fit a job description and crafting a nice cover letter to go with it are the work of a click or two. Candidates have every reason in the world to apply to as many jobs as they can. It's a classic prisoners dilemma; sure, everyone else is worse off if the HR departments are flooded but if everyone else does it and you don't, you're never going to land a job.
And so the firehose opens and the job ad that used to get me 100 resumes over the course of a month gets me 1,000 resumes over the course of an hour.
And, just for funsies, most of them are wildly unqualified. AI is happy to lie on your resume for you and getting it not to do that is hard. So now not only do I have a ton of resumes to go through, I have a crisis of trust on my hands. Who, out of all of these applicants, are telling the truth and who's basically echoing the job-ad back to me?
In that situation, it makes a ton of sense to lean back on trust relationships. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc have reputations to uphold. I can count on them to police their candidates. My local university wants to maintain a good relationship with area businesses; if their graduates are BSing me in their resumes I can meet the head of their career center for coffee and get them to deal with it.
There is no solution here. The employment market is a feedback loop. The bigger the applicant:job ratio grows the harder it is for employers to adequately consider and respond to applications, turning the application process into something more akin to a lottery ticket than a proper application. The more converting an application to a job feels like random chance the more incentivized applicants are to prioritize quantity over quality, driving the ratio ever higher.
Nothing short of a sudden and profound cratering of the unemployment rate is going to slow this arms race. This isn't the end state of the market; it's going to get worse before it gets better.
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Even better, get involved with local universities. Most programs have a capstone course or senior project of some kind and plenty are looking for industry involvement. It's a gre
AI will void the value ... (Score:2)
... of most of not all written human formal interaction. This is what's happening right now.
Prepare for incoming.
Concurrent with a hiring slowdown (Score:2)
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No Paper, Thank God! (Score:2)
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reading between the lines... (Score:2)
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WTF are we to do ...
That's what war is for: With more people chasing a dwindling resource (middle-class pay-cheque), war is inevitable even though winner-takes-all capitalism has eliminated most of the middle-class (who would pay for that war).
War has useful side effects: Reducing the number of people and their rights (mostly democracy), normalizing theft (of foreign wealth) and creating new customers (the foreigners just robbed), while increasing the wealth of ruling class, yet again.
Civil war is worse because there isn
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Oh grow the fuck up.
Not everything is about whatever your TDS has you upset about this morning.
I think the Venezuela thing was possibly justified but stupidly done politically.
The Greenland thing is just 100% stupid to to bottom.
But not everything is about your politics.
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PSA 1: Be really effing careful about education spending and planning with specific goal(s) because the cargo cult of paper mills won't provide magical job security at the end of the rainbow.
Not true that only the top schools are recruited (Score:2)
The article is misleading as it suggests that only the top-N schools are recruited from. That's not true. What the article says is that companies are recruiting from a smaller set of schools However, each company has a different set of schools. So, if we look at the union of all these different sets of schools, I'd imagine that most of the top-100 or top-150 schools are still covered. For example, the article mentions Auburn, which is a good school but nowhere near a top-25 school.
My guess is that this
UMD (Score:1)
University of Maryland is considered a "Public Ivy". There are plenty of grads from there where I work. Before the Trumplicans destroyed Goddard, many STEM grads landed there, too. I did NOT go to either an elite university or UMD. I went to UMUC / UMGC. I was hired for what I was already doing as much as for graduating from college and I've made the best of it.
Manhattan Institute City Journal 2025 Rankings (Score:2)
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hint (Score:1)
... They never weren't.
The churn was across everyone else.
The well connected remained well connected and enjoyed the benefits. A well placed friend of mine landed his college dropout daughter an "internship" for north of $100k.
It's never been, and never will be, any different even if the roster changes.
Education in USA? (Score:1)
Perhaps not 100% relevant to this post, but...
There is no real need for statistics to assess highh school in or education in general in USA.
People who choose a criminal as a president (ok, perhaps democracy concept does not exist in USA) is a factual indicator that education in USA, be it from high schools or not, is not working as it should.