Covid, technology, and a changing workforce have led employers to cast a wider net for collegiate talent, even as they sour on Ivy League grads.
Hiring managers have long used the reputation of a new college graduate’s alma mater as an indicator of an applicant’s ability and expected job performance. Elite national consulting, banking and investment firms focused their recruiting on the Ivy League and a handful of the other most selective schools. Big companies looked more widely, but still often favored a limited number of highly ranked universities. Regional firms would tap graduates of schools with the best reputations in their geographic area.
“There was a notion that the reputation of the school was a proxy for the type of talent you might get,” observes Christine Cruzvergara, who served until early 2019 as associate provost and executive director of career education at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, one of the “Seven Sisters”—elite schools for women established when most of the Ivy League excluded them.
But both Cruzvergara and employers have moved into a new phase. She’s now chief education strategy officer at Handshake, the online job board (founded by a member of the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2017) that today links 15 million college students and recent graduates with 900,000 employers.
As for employers, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic; platforms like Handshake and Zoom; labor shortages; and a recognition that a diverse workforce is good for business, they’re looking at a broader swath of graduates and even applicants with needed skills, but no college degrees. By Handshake’s count, 72% of the nation’s 500 biggest companies each now hire from 200 colleges or more.
The widening of the recruiting base has come at the same time as some employers have been souring on graduates of the eight uber-elite Ivy League universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell.
When Forbes surveyed readers of our Future of Work newsletter earlier this month, 37% of those with hiring authority said state universities were doing better than five years ago in preparing job candidates and 31% thought non-Ivy League private colleges had improved. But just 14% thought the Ivy League schools were doing better than five years ago, while 20% said they were doing worse, making this the only segment in which negative appraisals of the trend in job readiness exceeded positive ones.
The result? Of those hiring folks, 33% said they are less likely to hire Ivy League graduates than they were five years ago, with only 7% saying they are more likely to hire them. By contrast, 42% said they are more likely to hire public university grads and 37% said they are more likely to hire grads of non-Ivy League private colleges than five years ago. Only about 5% said they are less likely to hire from either group.
Forbes used answers to that survey, along with such federal education data as median SAT and ACT scores, to come up with a list of 20 “New Ivies”—10 public, 10 private—that are now producing the hard-working, high-achievers that employers crave.
Reputations do still matter, but they aren’t set in stone. “When hiring managers see an elite brand, that suggests something to them about a level of academic excellence, rigorous selectivity and the like. Are those necessarily good indicators of how well somebody is going to perform on the job? Not really, but hiring managers don’t have much else to go on in a lot of cases and particularly for people who don’t have a lot of work experience,’’ says Matt Sigelman, president of The Burning Glass Institute, a Philadelphia think tank on the future of the workforce. “Part of the advantage that some brands convey is a scarcity value,’’ he adds, noting that the supply of Harvard grads is limited and all of them are presumed to be academically talented, whereas only the top of the class at a big state college is presumed to be at that same level.
“It only takes a quick scan across any organization to say ‘Who are my best colleagues, who do I love working with?’” says Cruzvergara. “I guarantee a majority of us would list individuals that didn’t go to the most prestigious institutions at all. That narrative doesn’t match our reality.”
Danielle Mulvey, cofounder of the All In Company, in Dana Point, California, which provides pre-hiring assessments and other tools for employers, is one of those in our survey who said she’s less likely to hire Ivy League grads these days. “I don’t know if it’s an impact of Covid, but there seems to be less work experience from their undergraduate years, and I value people with work experience and not me being their first job out of college,’’ she says.
Moreover, as our survey of readers with hiring authority demonstrates, schools’ reputations’ are dynamic—and not as rooted in history and geography as they may have been in the past. Before the pandemic, many companies still spent their recruiting dollars attending career fairs at colleges near their headquarters or local operations and forming pathways with regional universities nearby.
Just as it did with other aspects of office work, the pandemic pushed more of that recruiting online as hiring managers ditched in-person interviews for Zoom calls and on-campus career fairs for virtual job boards. What were initially solutions to keep business moving during the pandemic have become valuable tools for employers to discover talent. And once they started recruiting workers online from even more geographic areas, employers naturally became familiar with a greater number of schools.
Just one person can forge a path between a college and a company, Handshake’s Cruzvergara observes. “Once they’ve hired somebody and that graduate does well, now [that school] is fair game. They’ll say ‘We’re willing to go back to that school.” Think of it this way: the best-known elite colleges have always had powerful and far-flung alumni networks. But graduates of lesser-known schools are now building more dispersed networks, too, burnishing their reputations and raising the job prospects of alumni.
In addition, many colleges have become increasingly proactive about building ties with companies and a “product” that’s in demand. “There’s a bunch of schools, and Georgia Tech is one of them, that have been really aggressive at making sure that they’re not only attracting great researchers, but they’re also building into their academic programs the kinds of experiences that make sure that students graduate with work ready skills and with future ready skills,’’ Sigelman says. Not coincidentally, Georgia Tech is on Forbes’ New Ivies list.
The desire for a more diverse workforce—as well as talent shortages—are additional reasons employers are casting a wider net. PwC, the second largest U.S.-based accounting firm, with 364,000 employees and $53 billion in revenue worldwide in 2023, is now using both on-campus and virtual events, as well as job boards, to attract 200,000 entry applicants a year, reports Rod Adams, the firm’s talent acquisition and onboarding leader. The result: it’s now hiring candidates from about 700 universities and colleges a year.
“We’re continually focused on expanding our net to reach people from a vast range of experiences and diverse backgrounds,’’ Adams says. For example, PwC now recruits from 36 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, up five-fold from 2017. It’s also pouring money into collaborations with HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions.
This is about more than diversity. There’s a shortage of qualified CPAs. So PwC has set up a program that pays students to work part-time, while they earn a tuition-free masters at Northeastern University in Boston. It has even started investing resources in community colleges in a bid to help those students “access career paths they might not have originally considered,’’ Adams notes.
Other big players are also reaching out to community colleges. Bank of America, the nation’s second largest bank, reports it has partnered with 30 community colleges to develop a curriculum in financial services. With internships an increasingly important pathway to jobs, its Global Technology Team began offering summer internships specifically for community college students as a pilot program in 2022. Satisfied with the results, it continued the internships for 2023 and now 2024.
Even those who recruit from a more limited number of schools are looking at a more diverse mix—and using technology to widen the geographic pool. Booz Allen Hamilton, a military and government contractor based in McLean, Virginia, recruits from a core group of 20 colleges, based in large part on the location of its offices, says Tom Downs, director of diversity talent acquisition and talent pipeline programs. The core includes the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, both members of the New Ivies, as well as Howard University in Washington, D.C. and Morgan State University in Baltimore, both HBCUs.
Post-pandemic, Booz Allen is back to doing more in-person recruiting events—some 75 last year. But Covid-19 permanently expanded the way it looks for talent. It found about 10% of its college interns this year on Handshake. “Now we can reach out and touch you via (Microsoft) Teams and Zoom or whatever,’’ Downs says. “For the future, we’ll always see a hybrid opportunity to engage.”
