Meritocracy, Ho!

I didn't know if we covered this gem here, yet, even though it *is* two years old.

It also doesn't really apply to law firms in the way in which it appears in this article.

"If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do:

1. Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places.

2. Don’t work your rear off for a 4.0. Better to graduate with 3.7 and a bunch of really awesome extracurriculars. And by “really awesome” I mean literally climbing Everest or winning an Olympic medal. Playing intramurals doesn’t cut it.

That’s the upshot of an enlightening/depressing study about the ridiculously narrow-minded people who make hiring decisions at the aforementioned elite companies. The author of this study—Lauren Rivera, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University—gained inside access to the hiring process at one such (unnamed) business, and picked the brains of recruiters at other firms."

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/brown-and-cornell-are-second-tier/27565

As a Canadian, I'd exhort all those prospective "second tier" students to immigrate. Queen's and U of T will open any door north of the border, and at a much lower cost. Plus Canadians are a friendly bunch.

This is one of those purposely provocative pieces that contain a few ounces of truth and a pound of exaggeration. The gist is true of top investment banks, where - frankly - these metrics aren't a bad proxy for the personality that "fits" the culture - ultimately those hiring hire like in kind.

This is much less true of the pedigree at the top law firm. Middle of the Harvard class is absolutely not preferred to a Columbia law review candidate. That's false. One need only look to the Supreme Court to see that this Harvard thing is half true! (Being funny here - look up where the Supremes went to law school.)

Most of all, life isn't fair and whining over elite hiring is a rich person's crying game. Let's look instead at the number of women and people of color in top jobs. Let's look at the number of CEOs who rose from poverty in the US. Those are the stats we should read and care about changing. They aren't pretty.

Just my 2 cents.

That and the fact neither Brown nor Princeton have a law school.

Although Columbia is now drifting down in the minds of law students everywhere.

Word on the street is that it's HYS or bust if you really want to be somewhat safe.

This is from Time magazine:-- Ginsburg is Columbia; one other is Morthwestern)
Harvardites and Yalies, pointing to grads like Sotomayor, argue that their schools have long been meritocracies. True enough. Still, powerful alumni like Obama tend to brandish them the way English lords flaunt the Oxford-Cambridge Old Boy network. "It's a perfectly incestuous academic cartel," says Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar and professor at the George Washington University School of Law (another top 25 school) who teaches a course on the Supreme Court. Turley notes that after Kagan's White House presentation, most of the breathless buzz from cable TV pundits was "how plugged in she is to that exclusive Harvard-Yale club, that she knows the other justices because of their law school associations. It's a self-replicating system."

Actually right now - don't go to law school at all!

Which leads me into my next exciting discovery from NBC that...

"Many on Wall Street thinks Cheating Breeds Success"

http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/161209.html#Post161209

That's all I've got to say about that.

Did you actually read that paper? It is the most poorly conducted study I have ever read in a peer reviewed journal. Then again, it is sociology. I don't usually read the mush. The author, a Yale Harvard grad, selected participants herself. "Because elite populations are often difficult to access, referrals and my uni- versity and prior corporate affiliations were helpful in gaining consent and building rap- port with participants.". Ha ha. And her affiliations? Yale and Harvard lol. And she interviewed everyone herself knowing her hypothesis. And she did no reliability checks to see if she may have been biased. And she interpreted her own interview data. And guess what she found. Ha Ha. My only question is how in the world did the "study" get published? Is research in sociology that bad?