Colleges and universities have been implementing controversial new diversity reforms, including dropping standardized test scores, that eliminate objective criteria in academic admissions or advancement. Now, HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, has drawn attention to its LinkedIn posting asking applicants to to remove “all undergraduate and graduate school name references” from their résumés. In order to achieve diversity goals, the company wants applicants to only list the degree and not where it came from. It is equity through obscurity. It is as irrational to eliminate any consideration of an academic institution as it is to rely exclusively on the academic institution.
The company insists that it is adopting this new policy as part of “ongoing work to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.” However, the identification of these institutions does reflect “merit and performance.”
There can be vast differences in the academic rigor of academic institutions. To only go by the degrees is manifestly illogical. It is akin to saying that you competed on a baseball team but not reference the specific team or league to gauge the level of performance. You could have played for the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp or the New York Yankees.
I certainly agree that schools can perpetuate an elitist culture through such rankings. Moreover, many students cannot afford to go top universities or were faced with economic or social barriers in their elementary, middle, or high school educations.
Additionally, there can be too much importance placed on school affiliation. Despite my personal and intellectual regard for him, I was highly critical of the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he told American University law students that they should not envision Supreme Court clerkships. I have also been a long-standing critic of the hold of Harvard and Yale on the makeup of the Court.
However, the problem of blind elitism is getting better overall. There is not a huge divide between the top ten and the many of the college and universities in this country. Moreover, many top schools have been criticized for standards that devalue or undermine academic excellence.
Nevertheless, there remain significant differences in the quality of education between many schools. That is particularly the case on the graduate level. It is also true that some schools excel in particular areas. For example, with a son about to go to medical school, I have learned that the top medical schools do not track the conventional rankings when it comes to many specialties. In weighing the selection of a doctor in primary care, you would necessarily consider the applicant’s medical school to appraise their training.
Likewise, the ranking of top social working schools have universities like the University of Chicago but also schools that are not ordinarily competitors like Case Western, Brandeis, and Pittsburgh. Students in these areas work extremely hard to gain admission and to train at these top schools. These schools invest heavily in these areas to stay competitive with top faculty and ample resources.
HR&A Advisors obviously is free to adopt any evaluation system that it sees fit for new applicants. Yet, removing the name of the academic institution for applicants denies many applicants a measure of their prior work and achievement. It also denies the employer relevant data or information on the background of an applicant.
All of these applicants achieved the distinction of securing undergraduate or graduate degrees. However, it is willful blindness to suggest that all degrees are the same or that there is no difference in particular degrees between institutions. Many students make considerable financial and familial sacrifice to go to a more rigorous university or a university with a top program. That effort should not be simply discarded by employers.
Finally, the approach of HR&A Advisors appears virtue signaling without real substance on a practical level. If students submit their transcripts or faculty references, the identity of their schools will be obvious. Moreover, in interviews, it will be hard for applicants to discuss their academic training while redacting any reference or hint at the academic institution. For example, if a student studied under a well-known figure in real estate or business studies, is she supposed to avoid mentioning the professor’s name to conceal her educational institution?
It would seem to be more logical to have training or guidelines to address threshold bias. The school affiliation alone should not be a determinative factor in decisions. It can be weighed with a variety of other factors in a holistic consideration of the candidate’s record. Identification of the potential bias can go a long way to reducing its impact on hiring decisions.
The alternative is to treat educational institutions as the equivalent of bleach, products that are largely identical on a chemical level. Is the difference between academic institutions merely the bottle and the label? Even as a critic of the current orthodoxy controlling higher education, I do not believe that all universities are fungible. The solution to bias is not blindness but balance.
I am retired now but in the past I was an Electrical Engineer and a Manager. As a Manager I would never hire someone without knowing their schooling, training background, and past working background. I did have issues over time as people I hired expected more money then they were worth as their college training was not as good as it was when I went to school. I spent time teaching my Engineers how to prepare proper Engineering Documents and would spend over a year to bring an Engineer up to speed on all our equipment, policies, and ways to do business.
So how can you check if the applicant is being truthful about their degree when you don’t know what school they attended?
All colleges are not equal.
(That alone should warrant ID)
Wow, the $150 spent on that online degree my cousin Vinny bought last week from The University of Elbonia sure paid off quick!
He can now work in the Human Resources Department of HR&A promoting ethics, virtue, and diversity.
Darren, does Vinnie have a broken nose?
Harvard Med vs. Compton Community College Nursing?
_____________________________________________
The D and E scores matter.
The combination of the Difficulty of the school’s curriculum and the Execution of the student provide the best picture of his efficacy.
It is demoralizing to get rid of meritocracy. Merit is all you have control over. This movement prioritizes race and where you were born. This creates a Nihilistic hopelessness in students. Why study? Grades don’t matter if you’re the “wrong” color.
Success and responsibility are being criticized as character flaws, which Asians and Jewish people deemed too successful.
Without a meritocracy, you’re helpless to improve your lot in life. Like in Communism, where only those in government thrive.
What is it? You can judge the success of a country based on the education of the people?
What needs to happen is for the sane part of the country to form their own education system that focuses on not just meritocracy, but the basics. Strive to educate every single student to succeed in life.
Not indoctrinate.
At some point, companies will either have to choose to hire based off of DEI standards or other much lower standards, and fail.
Or hire based off of things like grades, degrees, and where a candidate went to school. Hiring those candidates, the company will have a much higher chance of succeeding.
If you go to their website, they have a tab for “Team” which lists their partners, officers, and so forth. Virtually all the bios include the name of the university from where they got their degrees. University names for me, but not for thee.
I have been following the research on nuclear fusion recently. Only a handful of educational institutions graduate students who would qualify to work on this experiment. Only a handful of Professors are qualified to teach the people working on this project. Should we then find it unreasonable to know the educational background of these specialists? Are we now required to lower our expectations of a future green planet because of the “New Woke” religion? Enough is enough and resistance to this philosophy is required. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need is not a new philosophy even when cloaked in the new call for equity. We can look at the failures of nations who have embarrassed this approach around the world if we have eyes to see.
Judging prospective employees by which school they went to instead of their discipline eliminates the bias associated with the name of school instead of the prospective employees merits, the degree.
Hiring decisions based on the prestigious name of a school is not always going to give you what you expect. It’s like hiring based on the title “I graduated from Harvard” is al one needs to decide on. That may deprive another from a little known school who is just as qualified.
Bill gates never went to college. Yet he was once the richest man in the world. His skill was what stood out, not what school he went to.
Bill Gates attended Harvard College. He studied there for about two years. At Harvard he met Steve Ballmer who later served as CEO for Microsoft.
Bill gates never went to college.
Bill Gates went to Harvard. He dropped out half-way through to start Microsoft with Paul Allen.
I attended Harvard when the Social Network was in theaters. I found it very ironic that the school paid for us to attend the movie given Zuckerberg’s failure to graduate.
Larry Page
Jack Dorsey
Mark Zuckerberg
Used to be people would display their degrees, diplomas, certifications, awards on their office walls.
Soon that will be verboten.
Only woke memes allowed. The more woke memes, the better chance of promotion.
What? Actual competence or job performance?
RACIST!
I guess they aren’t checking the validity of their degrees then. Not checking the school’s transcripts?
Initially, I thought, “What the heck? The latest idiotic and moronic virtue signaling from the woke?”
But then thinking on it, with the quality of higher education, or should I say the lack there of as of late, this might not be a bad idea.
Puts that community college grad on the same level as that Ivy league grad.
HARVARD, come clean your dirty underwear or I’ll post it on LinkedIn
Just looking at this from a business standpoint.
Hiring is expensive. Onboarding new hires is expensive. What measurables are you going to measure? This is the first step to get an interview.
A college graduate has a thin resume to start with. Internships count, community service stuff. Awards and recognition maybe, but you cant say who from. How do you fact check grades with out knowing where to check? My kids were proud of there college accomplishments and used well known profs in their resume. (3 classes with Prof. Stupendous and member of one of their research projects)
People just get more stupid
Ah yes….apply that to Medicine, Aviation, Lawyering, Engineering….what could possibly go wrong!
Go Woke…Go Broke!
The Dumbing Down of America continues!
I have a degree in Software Engineering, but it’s from Tight Bungie College. Now I get to be in a level playing field with someone who graduated from MIT in the same field. LOL
That’s going to work great until they realize they have hired a pack of do nothing louts from the local community college .
as a prospective employer I would immediately disqualify any applicant who did not list the educational institutions where their degrees were earned. Likewise I currently would disqualify any applicant from a known WOKE University or College as I would perceive them to be a future problem child to my company.
Ah. But just think how low your ESG score will be with such a rebel attitude.
remove “all . . . name references”
And to extend that (irrational) policy: On proposals to prospective clients, the Unnamed Compnay will remove all references to HR&A Advisors. Let prospective clients guess who they might hire.
It would not be difficult for a skilled interviewer to make supposition of where the applicant attended school. “Vanna, give me a vowel.”
This type of thinking is consistent with a committee decision in a government or institutional setting, one more regulation, one more hoop to jump through.
Having said that, there is a strange attraction of students toward getting brand equity with where they attended university. It reminds me of casual tourists who are bent on getting selfies in front iconic monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, Mona Lisa, Ponte Vecchio, etc. They will walk right by a true treasure in order to check all the boxes of what has been deemed famous and valuable.
This point was made by an experiment a few years ago of having the violinist Josh Bell busk in the D.C. Metro station. Scores and scores of people hurriedly passed by him as he was playing a three-million-dollar violin and he had commanded steep ticket prices the night before in a performance center. Finally, after some time, a passenger recognized the quality of his playing and stopped and asked him who he was.
It is the setting.
My guitar teacher conducted business in the back of a music store. I could hand him a tape and he could hear it once, play it and then could score the music as if taking dictation. He was not famous nor had the desire to pay that price, but I would have put him up against any of the most famous guitarists in the world and he would have done as well or surpassed them. We have been programmed to value brand.
So, where is the balance? Tough call. Yes, the quality of the education is important, but there are very good institutions and talented teachers in the lesser-known institutions. There are students who do not have a quarter of a million dollars to drop on an ivy league education nor are willing to be incumbered with the long-term ball and chain of student debt but are very capable and talented students.
E.M. – a thoughtful little essay. I do have one quibble with: There are students who do not have a quarter of a million dollars to drop on an ivy league education nor are willing to be incumbered with the long-term . . . debt but are very capable and talented students.
In my experience, Ivy League schools have more money for student scholarships as well as an attitude of, if a student is good enough for us to accept them, their lack of funds should never be an impediment to attending. That being the case, in terms of the out-of-pocket cost, they tend to be cheaper for the competitive, but impecunious, student to attend.
If your folks make less than $120K/year, Harvard’s tuition is $0.
Anonymous,
That is a great thing! Does that include all living expenses? Boston is not a cheap place to live.,
What is the tuition, rent, food etc. for a student whose parents are making good money?
College tuition has risen far beyond the consumer price index and is out of control. I worked in program accreditation for years and graduate student debt is staggering, especially medical training.
E.M. – again in my experience (having put several kids through college and dealt with their financial aid offices), all colleges take into account living expenses when they put together a financial aid package. The low-income student who attends an Ivy will probably have to borrow some, but they’ll finish with less debt than if they attended a lesser-known private university. These are generalizations so there may be some exceptions, but that’s the trend I saw, both in negotiating financial aid packages and in seeing how much debt my different kids ended up with.
If they go to graduate school, they might incur much more debt, but that depends on the school and the field. In a field like computer science there’s more money in the pot so there’s a better chance of not incurring any additional debt from grad school, than in a social science or humanities field.
Less Young man from Kansas,
I will take your word for it regarding Ivy League schools. I am not sure who finally gets in, but I would guess that a large majority of applicants do not.
In-state programs offer the best value but many youth are attracted to going somewhere else. My daughter fell between the cracks and we paid full out-of-state tuition to a Big-12 university. She graduated in the top 10 students of her high school. It was not cheap.
Undergraduate training is a ticket to the game. The real training is on the job (in my experience). Graduate school tuition to larger state universities is steep, especially in medical training (not just tuition but all the other fees, equipment, etc.) and the average student carries 200K+ (And some much more) debt for that leg of the journey.
For many students, the big schools are out of reach but that does not preclude them from obtaining an excellent education.
Canna, give me a vowel, ok, I’ll take a W.