Comments on Lauren A. Rivera’s “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs”

This book has the capacity to radically change the national conversations we’ve been having in recent years, conversations that have been dominated by the topics of race and gender. Those two topics could be forced into the shadows by this book, which concentrates on class background, but only if people on the right actually say suitable things about it.

Before getting into that, however, let me say something about the book and its author. Lauren A. Rivera, a professor of management at Northwestern University, comes from the lower class with a father from Puerto Rico, who was absent in prison when Rivera was growing up, and a mother from Eastern Europe. She grew up in a mixed neighborhood with both rich and poor, and she happened to get into an excellent school at age eleven, an event that opened a lot of doors for her.

Since she had gone to elite schools, she had been “vetted,” and so was able to conduct studies of the various schools and firms that are part of the elite since the elite thought she was one of them. Here’s what she found. Elite firms in law, management consulting, and investment banking go to the elite schools for recruiting. The most desirable schools are core schools (like Harvard), with the some lesser elite schools (like Stanford) considered as target schools. Applicants who didn’t go to such schools, the author learns, generally have their resumes tossed without a glance. But for those at the core schools, the elite firms roll out the red carpet. They put on several lavish recruiting events throughout the school year, and they even train students at those schools in how to do an interview. The result is that many of the students entering those schools who had no thoughts of becoming an investment banker end up doing so because, first, it is easier to accept a job from people who are chasing you than it is to pound the pavement looking elsewhere, and second, these jobs pay two to four times what the applicants would get at other jobs they might get.

Who are the lucky people getting these jobs? They are primarily people from wealthy backgrounds. Incidentally, this is one of the themes of my latest book, except that I focused on academia, with a glance at the columnists at the NY Times. It is the wealthy who are getting these jobs, and as I also mentioned in my book, the interviewers tended to believe that those who didn’t get into the elite schools were intellectual failures.

It is true that not everyone from an elite school who came from wealth would get these jobs, and some people who had neither of these advantages did get them. But the latter group is the exception, and there were no guarantees. Poorer people might get through to the top if they had served in the armed forces, if they had connections, if they were good at interviewing, and so on.

One thing this book is good for is helping people from the lower ranks realize what interviewers at such places are looking for. This section was an eye-opener for me, and it seems that I had typical working-class beliefs on what was important. I would have thought that grades were all-important, but they were far down the list. (Likewise, cover letters and transcripts were not looked at.) Instead, the extracurricular activities that one engaged in were much more important, because the interviewers were very concerned with finding people who would fit in with the firm’s culture. And of these activities, they preferred sports over more intellectual activities, so the athletes were preferred over the nerds, and the sports they preferred were not basketball and football, but crew, squash, lacrosse, etc. (that is, sports for the rich).

Along these lines, what I found incredible was that they assumed that anyone who went to an elite school was capable of doing the quantitative problems that were likely to come up on the job, no matter what their major was, and based on my experiences this seems highly unlikely to be true.

Another surprising (to me, anyway) feature the interviewers looked for was having a good story about oneself. The story had to be about the decisions one made and the things one achieved rather than – leftists will cringe! – one’s victimhood. Stories about how helpless one was in confronting powerful social forces were not wanted.

Now at the beginning I pointed out that this book could change the political scene, but only if those on the right work at it and say the right things. For example, for years we have heard the same rhetoric from the right against any deals with the Iranians (about how untrustworthy the Iranians are and how horrible the consequences would be if Iran got the bomb), yet somehow no one until the very end confronted Obama and his progressive supporters wondering why getting jailed Americans back was not part of the deal. Think about how different things might have been had this point been brought up time and time again. With that in mind, the right needs to say certain things constantly.

For example, when leftists complain about how upward mobility in the U.S. has stalled, people on the right need to point to this book and say, “People get elite jobs via elite schools, and schools are under the control of progressives. It's not our fault.” It’s not as though they are recruiting at fundamentalist Christian churches. When affirmative action is mentioned, people on the right need to say, “Why not include class background along with race and gender?” When progressives complain about racists who think blacks aren’t as intelligent as whites, people on the right need to say, “Leftist elites think that anyone who didn’t get into an elite school is an intellectual failure.” They can then reference this book (p. 88) as partial proof of that. True, perhaps the people at these elite firms are not on the left, but academia is run the same way, and professors are almost uniformly on the left these days. The point is that people on the right need to say these things constantly or the opportunity for change will be lost.

Having said all that, let me suggest that it is very unlikely that affirmative action will ever include class background. The left is run by the rich, and rich leftists, no matter how progressive they are, will not want their child, in whom they have put so much time and effort getting them into the best pre-schools up through college and beyond, being disadvantaged by people who went to ordinary schools. They just won’t allow that to happen, and they will work hard to ensure that the topic is never raised. But that is why the right needs to mention it as often as possible. (Yes, I know that people on the right would prefer to get rid of affirmative action, but this is an important tactical move.) Make them squirm. Force them to say whether they want it or not, but either way, the right can make them look bad. If they don’t want affirmative action to include class background, then they are vulnerable to looking as though they don’t care about the poor, and if they do want it, they can be asked why they didn’t push for it decades ago. Like I said, either way they can be made to look bad.

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

A couple of points... If this Rivera is right -- and she might well be -- then these top firms must be under-performing compared to what they would be if they hired by merit (unless they are involved in rent-seeking scams where connections rather than productivity matter). Simultaneously the more-capable graduates from non-elite schools are underpriced, so non-elite firms that hire them should be doing especially well as a result.

It would be hard to empirically test this, but it seems to me this is what Rivera's argument implies.

Second point: if so, it should be possible to bid the capable grads from non-elite schools away from their current underemployment and come out ahead. (Maybe this is what headhunters are doing.) Do you agree?

[John Pepple]

I definitely agree, though I hadn't thought that far ahead. I had merely thought that it wouldn't be very smart to use these companies since they didn't seem to stress actual abilities very much.