Pedigree by Lauren A Rivera
How elite students get elite jobs.
Pedigree refers to the term that employers in
elite firms as shorthand for a job candidate's record of accomplishment.
Pedigree was widely seen as a highly desirable, if not mandatory, applicant
trait. Higher education has become one of the most important vehicles of social
stratification and economic inequality in the United States.
Income, wealth and other types of economic
capital are the most obvious resources that well-off parents can mobilize to
procure educational advantages for their children. The US is one of the few
Western industrialized countries where public primary and secondary school
funding is based largely on property values within a given region.
Consequently, high-quality public schools are disproportionately concentrated
in geographic areas where property values are the highest and resident tends to
be the most affluent.
At the secondary school level, children from
economically privileged homes are more likely to attend schools with plentiful
honors and advanced placement (AP) courses, athletics, art, music and drama
programs; these schools also are likely to have well-staffed college counseling
offices. Attending school with such offerings not only enhances students
cognitive and social development, but also helps them build academic and
extracurricular profiles that are competitive for college admissions.
The choice of investment banks, consulting firms
and law firms may strike some readers as a comparison among apples, oranges and
pears. But for insiders, these three types of companies are peer organizations
collectively referred to as elite professional service (EPS) firms, which work
together and depends on one another for survival. It is also known as ‘the Holy
Trinity’ or Ivy League “finishing schools.”
The chances of hiring at EPS firms might seem to
have become an open contest. But hiring at elite firms is a sponsored contest.
Anyone may apply, but in reality, employers consider only those applications
sponsored by existing elites: either prestigious universities or industry insiders.
Bucketing merit - the process of resume
screening.
To bucket resumes, evaporators reported ‘going
down the page’ and the qualities that evaporators, most commonly used to sort
applications in the following order of preference.
School prestige, extracurricular activities,
grades, employment prestige, what did at last job, consistency of experience,
career progression, & diversity.
Percent of Holt interviews whose performance in an evaluate category was debated during calibration by Gender and race
Overall:
Polish - 45%; Case structure - 19%; Case
math - 30%; Fit - 19%
Females:
Polish - 35%; Case structure - 0%; Case
math - 60%; Fit - 10%
Males:
Polish - 49%; Case structure - 26%; Case
math - 19%; Fit - 23%
Blacks:
Polish - 50%; Case structure - 50%; Case
math - 63%; Fit - 0%
Whites:
Polish - 31%; Case structure - 20%; Case
math - 29%; Fit - 24%
Asian /Asian Americans:
Polish - 33%; Case structure - 33%; Case
math - 33%; Fit - 0%
Indian / Indian-American:
Polish - 75%; Case structure - 0%; Case
math - 13%; Fit - 0%
Hispanic / Hispanic American:
Polish - 89%; Case structure - 0%; Case
math - 22%; Fit - 33%
Behind popular narratives of economic positions
as entirely earned, there is a well-developed machinery in the US that passes
on economic privilege from one generation to the next. Elite professional
service (ESP) firms - employers that serve as gatekeepers to high salaries and
good jobs - play a critical role in this reproduction of privilege. In theory,
the hiring practices of these firms are class neutral; elite employers simply
seek to hire “the best and the brightest”. But in practice, as this book has
shown, the way that these firms evaluate the worth of job applicants and make
hiring decisions strongly tilts the competition for elite jobs toward students
from socioeconomically privileged families.
By studying stratification to some of the
nation’s highest-paying jobs use to make selection decisions, high-status
extracurricular activities, polished interactional styles, and personal
narratives of passion, self-reliance and self-actualization - were not artists
or highbrow but were indeed classed.
However, hiring decisions were not made on the
basis of cultural capital alone. Cultural capital worked together with social
capital, visible status characteristics, and applicant and evaluator behavior
to produce hiring outcomes and inequalities. Moreover, in certain cases, having
the right social capital could compensate for a lack of cultural capital.
Over the past century, elite universities have
shifted their admissions criteria to focus more heavily on students'
extracurricular interests, well-roundedness, personal qualities, and personal
stories. Elite corporations have followed suite, intentionally importing the
logic and criteria of university admission into their hiring practices and
heralding them as best practices.
Furthermore, elite schools and firms have a
symbiotic relationship, providing one another with valuable resources. Having
workers from the most elite ranks of American society could enhance the
reputation and prestige of firms and industries. Employing elite workers could
also facilitate feelings of comfort and trust among high-status clients.
Furthermore, selecting new hires based on
cultural similarity could enhance cohesion and job satisfaction among
employees. Creating a group of close-knit coworkers who have the potential to
become instant friends and playmates could foster motivation and organizational
commitment among junior employees; this might compensate for the grueling hours
and mundane tasks requires of these workers. A strong social network of
like-minded others is a critical marketing tool that firms use to attract a new
applicants year after year despite the difficult lifestyles associated with
these jobs.
Who is elite?
In many American’s eyes, being upper class or
elite means the freedom from thinking about monetary constraints and/or having
no one richer to which to compare oneself. Following the work of sociologist
Shamus Khan, I define elites as individuals who have ‘vastly disproportionate
control’ over scarce, valued resources that can be used to gain access to
material or symbolic advantages in society at large. There are economic elites,
which I define as individuals who fall within the top quintile of household
incomes - a group whose children monopolizes access to society’s formal avenues
of mobility, including the educational systems. There are educational elites
who possess formal educational credentials of the highest magnitude and/or
institutional status. There are also occupational elites, who work in the most
prestigious fields of employment. Elites in my study may fall into any of these
three categories. Given that education, occupation and income are
highly-controlled, many fall into more than one.
