Recruiters favor students at state schools, study shows

Last week, The Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey finding that top companies prefer to recruit from large state universities rather than from Ivy League schools or small liberal arts institutions. According to the 479 recruiters that responded, Princeton is not among the overall top 45 schools for recruiting graduates.

The schools identified are the “top picks for graduates best prepared and most able to succeed” in entry-level positions.

Penn State — with its 80,000 students — led the ranking and was one of 19 public schools to dominate the top 25. Cornell, the largest Ivy League school and the only Ivy ranked by the recruiters, came in at 14th. Penn and Stanford were among “the next 20 recruiter picks.”

Director of Career Services Beverly Hamilton-Chandler said that the study’s results should not worry Princeton students. “I don’t think that anyone should read that article and think, ‘I made the wrong choice,’ ” she said.

Employers tend to focus on large schools because they can reach more potential hires on a smaller budget, the Journal reported.

“Recruiting is a very expensive proposition for any operation. They’re looking for ways to reduce their costs,” Hamilton-Chandler said, adding that state schools can provide “a large population of people in the various disciplines.”

Many state schools also offer what Hamilton-Chandler called “faculty-monitored co-op situations,” which allow students to work with companies in an academic research setting and put what they have studied into practice. “That would be why [recruiters] might have a preference like that,” Hamilton-Chandler said.

In the Journal report, recruiters did not look to Princeton as a top school for students studying economics, computer science, engineering or the liberal arts. The survey also included majors not available at the University, such as business, marketing and advertising. Stanford placed 16th for business and economics students and 11th for engineers, while Harvard was ranked 4th for business and economics.

Hamilton-Chandler downplayed the significance of these results, expressing uncertainty about the wording used in the original survey and pointing to differences in schools’ academic philosophies.

“We are fully liberal arts,” she said. “And there is value in those liberal arts courses.” Instead of getting an education to prepare for a specific job, she said, Princeton students develop skills and learn to apply them successfully.

Although the Journal report said that companies appreciated the intellect, communication abilities and critical thinking of Ivy League graduates, the recruiters looked elsewhere to fill the majority of their jobs. “Many companies said they need people with practical skills to serve as operations managers, product developers, business analysts and engineers,” the Journal noted.

Physics major David Tsao ’11 said that his coursework has cultivated critical thinking skills that have served him well in summer positions. “Even though that might not seem extremely practical,” he said, “I can adapt more easily to new situations that come up even if it isn’t something I’ve done before.”

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Tom Armbruster, a recruiter for the U.S. State Department, said that applicant qualities outweigh impressive resumes. During the oral examination, candidates are selected for how well they display 13 qualities of successful diplomats, including judgment, oral communication and ability to work with others. “That may be a competitive advantage for the Ivies,” he said. In the end, he added, the department looks for “integrity, motivation and dedication to public service and that can certainly be found everywhere.

Armbruster currently serves as a diplomat-in-residence and is in charge of recruiting from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

According to Hamilton-Chandler, new employers contact Career Services every year looking for students.

Last year, employers conducted 3,870 interviews on campus — an increase of 7.2 percent from 2009 — according to data provided by Career Services.

Hamilton-Chandler added that her office also reaches out to alumni and organizations they would like to recruit on campus. “It’s never a sense that we’re just sitting and waiting for them to come,” she said.

Reaching out can be a big part of bringing recruiters to campus.

“For me as a recruiter I say yes to every invitation I get,” Armbruster said. “It doesn’t really matter to me if it is a big school or not.” When he visits institutions on his own schedule, he said, “I’ll try to get to as many schools as I can in a given area. It’s pretty democratic in that respect. I definitely get to a lot of schools and treat them pretty much the same.”

The results of the Journal survey were compiled by assigning a number of points to each school according to the ratings that recruiters had given them. The scores were weighted according to the number of graduates that an employer had hired the previous year.

The survey was completed by 57 percent of the recruiters that the Journal contacted. The recruiters work for what the Journal called “the nation’s largest public and private companies, nonprofit organizations and federal agencies across every region of the country and spanning nearly two dozen industries.” Size was determined using figures provided by Standard & Poor’s, NASDAQ, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the trade magazine NonProfit Times and other published reports.

Small companies were not included in the study because they tended to interact with only a small number of colleges. Such is the case for Insight Venture Partners, where Nikhil Basu Trivedi ’11 worked last summer and will return after graduation. He said the venture capital firm actively recruits students from only Harvard, Princeton and the Wharton School of Business at Penn.

Gaining experience and building relationships with companies over the summer remains crucial to landing a job after graduation, Hamilton-Chandler said, and students interviewed for this article agreed.

Tsao said he is applying to graduate schools, but is also considering taking a gap year to set up a business with friends to pursue sales of their own software. “The fact that I was able to have a preview of what being an entrepreneur would be like makes me a lot more comfortable,” he said, referring to his own summer spent writing code and seeking potential buyers.

His past internships with a defense contractor and a biophysics laboratory were also “rewarding,” he said. “Choosing a job — it’s a very stressful decision for a lot of seniors. Having any sort of experience that will give information about what it will be like day to day — that’s very valuable.”

“We can’t stress enough the value of an internship,” Hamilton-Chandler said. Though she spoke of many opportunities of this kind for Princeton students, she noted that the University will not provide academic credit for them, which is something that some employers require. “If there were a way to have that notated on a transcript, that would be more than [what] we have now,” which is a letter asking the employer to consider what the experience adds to the candidate’s portfolio, she said.

Princeton does appear in the report alongside “a wide array” of 58 “cream-of-the-crop” schools, meaning that at least one of the survey respondents named it as its number one choice.