The bosses who don’t care about your Ivy League degree
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It’s hard to get a job at Charlie Gipple’s financial advisory firm if you went to the wrong college—like Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
The chief executive of CG Financial Group in Johnston, Iowa, says academic credentials don’t impress him like they used to. He worked with many graduates of top-tier colleges in previous jobs at MetLife and ING Groep, where he was a vice president, and says they too often approach clients’ challenges like textbook case studies, rather than real-world problems.
“If I were hiring somebody to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person," says Gipple, who graduated from the University of Northern Iowa and manages a network of about 500 advisers. Traditionally a springboard to the top of the résumé pile, a degree from a prestigious university can now prompt questions about its value or even work against job seekers.
In extreme cases, it’s disqualifying. A group of 13 federal judges signed a letter in May saying they will not hire law clerks who enrolled at Columbia Law School this fall because of how the school has handled campus protests.
A spokeswoman for the university referred me to a statement issued when the letter was publicized, which says the school’s graduates “are consistently sought out by leading employers in the private and public sectors, including the judiciary." More often, people who studied at Ivies and similarly elite schools like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago say they’re used to snide remarks about their alma maters being woke or elitist. That skepticism has intensified in the last year after a landmark Supreme Court case exposed inner workings of elite-college admissions and
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