Feature Article: Change in College Admission Needs a Hand… From the Working World

If you ask most parents and their teenage children about why they are interested in attaining a Bachelor’s degree, most will report that it’s about getting a better job, making more money, and having an overall better life. Many of the same families will also tell counselors like me that the cost of college is a big deal…unless the child is admitted to a highly selective college, in which case, they will find the money…somewhere.

The perception has only gotten stronger over time – the idea that gaining entry into the most difficult or well-branded colleges in the nation will somehow guarantee future financial success. Well, if you have read any prior episodes of the CKQ, you know this isn’t always true, but let’s take the time to provide some updated information.

Payscale.com provides an annual list of the Bachelor’s degree programs that pay the highest entry-level money (by school, not by degree), and yes, you will see names like MIT (#2), Stanford (#4-tie), Caltech (#4-tie), Harvard (#6), Princeton (#9), Dartmouth (#15), UPenn (#19), Yale (#22), and Rice (#25) in the top echelon of college earners, but included in the same group are schools like: Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science (#6), SUNY Maritime College (#10), Colorado School of Mines (#11), Santa Clara University (#13), Webb Institute (#23) and the Franklin Olin College of Engineering (#24). Many of these schools are not well known (or not known at all) by the general population (ask yourself how many of these schools YOU really know)!

So we have a system, or better stated, a pursuit process, that is predicated on information that can sometimes be misleading. That said, there are still plenty of hiring managers and HR directors who still use things like college rankings and name-brand colleges to inform them of their hiring decisions. THIS IS THE REAL PROBLEM. Now I’m not suggesting that hiring managers are wrong to think that schools like Harvard and Princeton and Yale are pumping out graduates that are extremely talented. Far from it. What I am suggesting is that looking exclusively at that information is silly. What is the program or position you are looking to fill and how qualified is not just the school, but the candidate, on his/her own merits, to do the job?

Here’s an example. I spoke with a high-ranking employee who has made numerous hiring decisions for a well-known, publicly-traded company based in the Bay Area (sorry, no names are going to be divulged to protect privacy and my legal hind quarters). The positions she needs to fill are exclusively computer science-based jobs. She discussed with me the quality of many of the schools in California in this specific area, for her specific needs: “Stanford is great; Berkeley is good; Santa Clara is good; San Jose State, not so good; UCLA is good, but my favorite school to hire from is Cal Poly SLO.” While not terribly surprised, I asked why. “The kids know what they are doing. They have experience coding and working problems in real-world ways. Once I see an application that says Cal Poly SLO on it, I’m usually good with hiring them without having to dig much deeper.” In case you were wondering, Cal Poly SLO ranks #76 on the most recent Payscale.com rankings. This is a powerful statement she made. Let’s dig deeper into its meaning.

So this experienced employee of a Fortune 500 company has explained to me that she can look at where you earned your degree and decide if you have the knowledge to do the job. How? Why? There is so much missing or unknown information that I can’t really fathom how this is a sound practice. What was the student’s GPA? What specific courses did they take, and what were their grades in the major, versus the overall GPA? Did that student participate in any special programs or projects that would have given them a tactical or operational-level advantage over other grads who simply had the degree?

Then there’s the other side of the ledger. What about the college or university itself? Has this hiring manager looked into the overall strength or weakness within the Department of Computer Science at these schools? Is the degree offered a BA or BS in computer science? There’s a difference! How many courses are required in the major to graduate? How strong are the professors in the field? How many students, on average, are in the classroom within the major? My guess, and it’s only a guess, suggests that the closest thing to research most hiring managers and HR managers take on is looking at…wait for it…the U.S. News and World Report Rankings. I would imagine they start with the overall rankings (which would be fairly worthless in the talent evaluation) and maybe the individual majors ranking (which is better, but still nowhere near perfect). I have found that the level of research on this side of the ledger can also be predicted, in most cases, based on the ethnicity and life history of the hiring manager or HR manager. If that person has recently resided in a nation like Korea, China, or India, the likelihood that they will use rank and prestige levels and little else in the hiring process is quite common, as those nations, perhaps above all others, use little more than grades and test scores to determine worth when it comes to college admission and career selection. Why stop now?

All of this is part of the vicious cycle that has become modern college admission decisions. If we can provide a better, broader perspective on the world of college and show the depth of quality education that is taking place in our nation’s colleges to the HR/hiring manager population, I think we, as a nation, would find a better, fairer, and more productive hiring process, based on real merit, and not brand awareness. There are plenty of people interested in this idea…and a significant group that really likes the status quo.

One of my personal goals for 2020 and beyond is to try and address this problem at the regional and national levels. If you are reading this and think you have an opportunity to open a door that would he me solve this important problem, I would greatly appreciate it if you would contact me at your leisure. My email and phone number are at the back of this journal.

Thank you.