Where you to go to college is an employment filter

By General Education Advice

“It doesn’t matter where you go to college” is one of the most delusional comments that adults will say.

I can break this down in multiple ways: where you go generates the population of people that you will meet at a vital time of life; the location where you will be developing relationships and comfort with the area; and an asset that can be leveraged to help you gain employment.  The crazy people who say otherwise are talking about something else, which I’ll get to momentarily.  But to say that it doesn’t matter if you went to Stanford versus Western New Mexico St. (I hope a fake college name as I don’t want to insult anyone) is bananas.

To be clear, the unsaid part of the phrase means that one’s abilities, psychological make-up and overall character will be more important for the college applicant’s overall success.  No one is arguing otherwise.  The only real way to make this argument would be to say that we have two people who are identical in those ways.  One attends Stanford and one attends Western New Mexico St..  Now let’s make a bet as to who finds a job more quickly out of college.  Any takers? :).

I fully know that some of our Connecticut clientele, particularly those in Fairfield County, make such comments to lower pressure.  I get it!!! Indeed, the point that a college ranked 32nd in US News & World Report won’t make a big difference in terms of employment versus a college ranked 37th is well taken.  But verus a college ranked 137th…

College provides a filtering mechanism for employers to quickly sort out who to interview among thousands of applications.  Wall Street investment banks are inundated with 20,000-plus applicants for a couple of hundred spots.  They will interview at colleges such as Harvard and at Penn’s Wharton School of Business.  To a lesser degree, this is true in many industries.

We are in a knowledge economy.  Where your child attends college is the part of the resume that illustrates – fairly/unfairly- where that knowledge has been developed.