Recruiters Think Big (State Schools)

Despite a seemingly bleak job market, a recent Wall Street Journal survey of 479 companies revealed that recruiters hired over 43,000 grads in the previous year. Even more surprisingly, recruiters stayed away from the Ivy League—of businesses’ top 25 schools, Harvard didn’t make the cut.

Instead, recruiting managers prefer scouting at big schools, with larger number of potential employees and long-term partnerships with specific departments, according to WSJ. Nineteen of the 25 schools that apparently produce the best graduates are state schools. Funny enough, Cornell is the only Ivy that made the list.

One of Harvard’s own, Economics professor Claudia Goldin, told the WSJ that “we have none of the basic bread-and-butter courses that serve you well in much of the industry” and that’s why we weren’t favored. Although one could argue that the Science and Cooking course might include such "bread and butter," it still may not lure Google Inc. and General Electric to campus.

Fortunately, another Journal article reports that chief executives tend to retain close ties with their alma maters. So get close to that Economics concentrator down the hall who wants be the next Mark Zuckerberg '06 (and therefore has friended every Harvard student on Facebook).

Photo courtesy of Joshua D. Samuelson/The Harvard Crimson.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

CORRECTION: September 17, 2010

An earlier version of the Sept. 14 Flyby post "Recruiters Think Big (State Schools)" suggested that Google may not come to Harvard's campus. In fact, Google is recruiting on campus.