What's in a Name?

A Prestigious Alma Mater Can Be Overrated on the Job

By Adelle Waldman
WSJ.com

Years after Emily Leffler left Oberlin College, completing just two semesters there, she still found herself mentioning that she had attended the prestigious Ohio liberal-arts college, even though she eventually finished her undergraduate studies at a public university.

Ms. Leffler worried that people would make assumptions about her based on the school where she earned her degree. "Even if it was in my own head, I felt it," says Ms. Leffler, 28 years old. So she'd slip in to a conversation that she started at Oberlin. "I'd name-drop," she says. "People know Oberlin. It holds weight."

For many young people, the cachet of having attended an esteemed college or university is a valuable asset. Some think the prestige factor opens doors when it comes to landing a job in competitive fields, while others rely on the power of their alma maters' social networks to build friendships and career connections.

How Much Does It Matter?

And it's for good reason, according to some career consultants. Prestigious schools typically maintain extensive alumni databases that can be valuable tools for job seekers. "You have a ready-made list of contacts," says Kate Wendleton, president of fiveoclockclub.com, a career-coaching firm in New York. While the benefits are there for a select few, "having gone to a prestigious school gives you such an edge in a job search. It's really unfair" for others who didn't go to elite schools, she says.

But how much does a brand name matter?

Research suggests that attending a prestigious school doesn't make a person more likely to be xsuccessful professionally (as measured by income). Princeton University economist Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale of the Andrew Mellon Foundation unraveled some myths about the importance of brand-name degrees in a 1999 study when they found that students who were accepted to elite universities but chose instead to attend less-selective schools did as well in adult life as their peers who had attended top-tier institutions. In other words, it is the quality of the students selected for admission to elite schools, not what happens on campus, that made the difference.

Even so, cachet apparently has a value all its own.

Matt Schneiderman, a 28-year-old senior editor at a national men's magazine in New York, agrees. He attended Haverford College, a highly selective, relatively small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. He thinks people who attended elite schools tend to talk too much about their alma maters.

"With most people you don't know where they went to school," he says. "But you always seem to know who went to an Ivy League."

Of course, it's not just Ivies that have distinction. In California, going to a college in the University of California system, as opposed to a California State University school, is what counts, says Carmen Rojas, 27, who attended UC-Santa Cruz as an undergraduate and is currently in the graduate program at UC-Berkeley. "If you're in the UC system, you're A-OK," Ms. Rojas says.

Others take a different tack. Sheila Wienek, who graduated from Princeton University in 1999 and now runs a marine biology lab in Los Angeles, says she often is reluctant to tell people where she went to college. "It can sound pretentious," she says. So instead, she tends to say vaguely that she attended school in the Northeast, unless she is asked directly.

Still, the 27-year-old acknowledges that it can work the other way, if it turns out the person she is talking to attended a similarly prestigious school. Then, "we have something in common," she says.

"My dad wanted me to go to a school with name recognition, where everybody knows it and knows it means that you are smart," Ms. Wienek says. That was partly because her father didn't have the opportunity to attend an elite school himself. "Both of my parents were the first in their families to go to college, and they went to local state schools in Massachusetts," Ms. Wienek says.

In some career fields, like law, it's typical that top-tier firms may want to hire only graduates from top-tier schools, says Emory Mulling, president of Mulling Cos., an outplacement and career-consulting firm in Atlanta. And while it also may be true that some companies prefer to hire only Wharton School or Harvard M.B.A.s, those firms represent a small minority of all the jobs out there.

Mr. Mulling says going to a prestigious school matters when one is applying for a first job, but evidence of success on the job is more important in the long run. "It's about how hard you are willing to work, not sitting back on your laurels" or name-dropping your school, says Mr. Mulling. "If you have seen some Ivy Leaguers who didn't do a great job, you start to focus on prestigious track records, not prestigious schools."

Position to Compete

Take Matt Bonds. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Georgia in Athens and is finishing up a second Ph.D. in ecology. The 28-year-old knows his alma mater may not rank among the most elite graduate schools in the country, even though its ecology program is highly regarded.

But he thinks that we will be in a good position to compete with graduates of schools like Harvard and the University of Chicago for academic jobs when he is finished. "I feel like it's publications that count," he said, noting that he had published a paper co-written with one of his undergraduate professors at Francis Marion University, a small school in South Carolina. That was an opportunity he probably wouldn't have had if he had attended at a bigger-name school, he says.

As for Ms. Leffler, she has held several interesting jobs, including working as a programming director for the State Department's internal television station in Washington, since graduating from the University of Maryland in Baltimore. And she recently changed her tune on name-dropping and even dropped Oberlin from her resume.

"Once you get to your late 20s, it's about what you've done, regardless of where you went to school," she says.