Survey: Businesses Don't Care If Their Employees Went to Yale

Employers value applied skills and knowledge in the field more than where a candidate went to school.

Traditionally, a degree from a high-profile university was a pretty surefire way to get a good job. But business leaders are now echoing Google by saying that college pedigree and major don’t matter as much as people think in hiring decisions.

A new Gallup survey finds that in hiring decisions, only 9 percent of business leaders say that the school on a candidate’s diploma is “very important,” compared to 84 percent assessing knowledge in the field and 79 percent looking at applied skills. 

 

Public perception has certainly not caught up to the shift: 30 percent of the public thinks where a candidate went to college is a very important factor for managers making hiring decisions and 50 percent say it’s somewhat important. 

 

There’s a similar though less pronounced gap, when it comes to college major.

 

“For business leaders, what your major was, where you went, none of that matters as much—it’s the skills,” Brandon Busteed, the executive director of Gallup Education told Quartz. “They think that if you go to Princeton and you major in engineering and have the skills I’m hiring for great, but if you majored in engineering in Princeton and can’t do the job, what does it matter?”

 

That might be more aspirational than true in practice. Busteed points out that many top companies still hire from a narrow set of institutions. But the survey points to a greater emphasis on hiring people with specific skills.

 

School rankings have been found to matter when it comes to pay, an effect which rises over time. Graduates of elite private schools in particular get paid more according to a report from the Century Foundation (pdf). Elite industries like professional services and finance put more weight on top schools in hiring decisions.

 

Google’s head of people operations Laszlo Bock told the New York Times that top graduates can lack “intellectual humility,” and that schools frequently don’t deliver on what they promise.

 

“You can read those figures a couple ways,” Busteed says. “It could be that higher education is really not preparing people at all and we have a broken system, or just a fundamental misunderstanding. Either way it’s a tragedy, and either way we need a dialogue about how how to change.”

 

Educators seem to think that they’re effectively preparing students for the job market: 96 percent of college provosts say students are prepared, compared to 14 percent of the public, and 11 percent of business leaders. If schools in general aren’t doing a good job of preparing students, then companies over time could be less willing to pay a premium pay for graduates of prestigious schools.