Reply to How do Americans view universities abroad such as McGill, St Andrews, or similar?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I work for an international company (non-US based) with offices all over the world.  Worked with people from all over.  I would take a kid from a top 30 US university over any others any day.  That admission process you do not like is what makes people better executives.

Would I hire someone in US that went to one of those places?  Sure.  But no leg up and maybe a bias outside of DC and NY against.  [/quote]

You're everything that's wrong with the American undergrad system.

When excellent students get rejected from top universities, you end up hiring from a smaller pool of potentially great candidates. The people who knock on your door are the academically strong students accepted by top schools. You're not seeing, or you're perhaps rejecting, the academically strong that were passed over in favor of someone with an "interesting" profile, because that someone with an interesting profile isn't going to be successful enough to come and apply at your company.

You're shooting yourself in the foot, basically.

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You are only correct if you think getting good grades = good employee.  I don’t think that is necessarily true. Some of the reasons the other kid is l”interesting” are the qualities that will make that kid excel in a workplace later—or maybe start their own business.  Grades and test scores really aren’t everything.[/quote]

You're correct that a few students with lower grades or test scores but high emotional IQ or soft skills can also be successful, but in recent years, US colleges have gone completely overboard in depressing the importance of grades and test scores. This elevates and benefits those who are admitted on soft skills, and gives them a chance, but it leaves out in the cold excellent students who people like you might be unwilling to consider just because they got the short straw during college admissions.

So where we differ is that you trust admissions officers to make the decision for you, and I most certainly do not. Admissions officers aren't the gods you think they are. Most of them are quite young with a very narrow, inexperienced, world view. They do not have students' best interests at heart. They work for the university, to boost its ranking and therefore endowment, donations and research funding, via yield protection and various other more or less ethical measures. It's not the pure, clean, business you think it is, that delivers the best candidates to your door.

Please stay aware of this when assessing candidates.

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