The Supreme Court Just Disrupted Elite Firm Hiring, Too

If top investment banks, consulting and law firms care about a diverse entry-level recruiting pool, they’re going to have to develop a wider pipeline.

_{By Emma Whitford, Forbes Staff}

As the University of Pennsylvania’s main commencement speaker in 2014, John Legend walked thousands of soon-to-be graduates through the career path he took when he graduated from that Ivy League school in 1999. “I had many of the traditional opportunities in front of you now, and I took a job at the Boston Consulting Group,” recalled Legend, who majored in English with an emphasis in African American Studies. “I had followed the path that the Penn graduate was supposed to take, but I didn’t fall in love. I immediately started thinking about how I could leave BCG and become a full-time musician.” Since ditching consulting, he’s won 12 Grammys, including Best New Artist in 2006, two Emmys, an Oscar and a Tony.

The nonchalance with which Legend alluded to UPenn graduates being funneled into jobs at one of the most prestigious consulting firms in the country neatly illustrates how elite employers have for decades treated elite universities as their main pipeline for entry-level talent.

If the Supreme Court’s 6-to-3 decision in June ordering an end to race conscious college admissions leads to less diversity among the graduates of these schools (and evidence from California, where voters banned affirmative action in 1996, suggests it will), the talent pipeline that companies rely on will also become less diverse. That means employers are going to have to recruit more widely—if, that is, they’re committed to maintaining at least the level of diversity in hiring they have now.

In fact, the global chair of none other than Boston Consulting Group acknowledged as much in a LinkedIn post reaffirming the firm’s commitment to inclusion. “Regardless of how universities evolve, business leaders including BCG have a responsibility to ensure that value-creating diversity goals are still achieved,” wrote Richard Lesser. “This may require broader networks for sourcing talent and new models for developing talent that are not afforded some of the benefits of today’s leading schools.”

“Companies might have to look at other schools or other ways to recruit talent that fits their economic needs,” says Marcus Childress, co-chair of the law firm Jenner & Block’s DEI protection task force.

Just how narrow is today’s pipeline? For her award-winning 2015 book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, sociologist Lauren Rivera, now a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, interviewed 120 hiring decision makers at 24 top-tier professional service firms—investment banks, consultancies and law firms. These employers, as she described in her book and a Harvard Business Review article, typically recruit extensively from only three to five of the most elite institutions, flying employees to campus for information sessions, cocktail parties and dinners and interviewing scores or even hundreds of candidates from these “core” schools. The firms also typically each have a “target” group of another 5 to 15 schools, where they offer more limited recruiting and interview slots.

“Firms allocate specific numbers of interview slots—and in many cases, offers—to each campus before students’ qualifications are ever reviewed,” Rivera tells Forbes. “So competition is systematically skewed toward students at elite institutions. Everyone else is left fighting for the scraps.” She adds that this phenomenon hasn’t changed much in the eight years since her book was published, though recruiters may have added a school or two.

Rivera, who studied hiring at these professional service firms for her Harvard PhD thesis, found students at the most elite universities—even those majoring in the liberal arts and with no business experience—have increasingly gravitated to certain elite business firms. “At Harvard, over 70 percent of each senior class typically applies to investment banks or consulting firms through on-campus recruitment,’’ she writes. In one campus newspaper ad, she points out, an investment bank advertised to Ivy League students with the tagline “no experience wanted.”

Seniors attending colleges that aren’t in one of those two groups were usually stuck applying through a firm’s website and were unlikely to get an interview unless they had a personal connection at the firm, through a current employee or client. Rivera offered this telling example of how connections can work for those who don’t go to the most selective schools. A banker she interviewed explained the firm had recruited him from his well-regarded, but not top-10 liberal arts college because the bank CEO’s own daughter was in school there. Now the school has become a regular on the bank’s target list.

In other words, real world connections to the economic elite count for a lot, but young folks may also be able to enter that world by going to the right schools. (This could be one reason why research suggests the income benefits of going to an elite school are more substantial for underrepresented minorities and for students from lower-income families than for other graduates of these schools.)

Rivera explains recruiters focus on elite schools as a shortcut to identifying applicants with “intellectual horsepower,’’ saving themselves time, effort and money. “The best kid in the country may be at Bowling Green,” one investment banker told her. “But to go to Bowling Green [and] interview 20 kids just to find that one needle in the haystack doesn’t make sense, when you can go to Harvard [and have] … 30 kids that are all super qualified and great.”

Yet Rivera says her ongoing research on elite law schools shows that graduates from those schools don’t perform any better as associates than graduates with other educational backgrounds once they start their jobs. “So much goes into gaining admission to and enrolling in an elite university that has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence or work ethic and instead is based on opportunities that we know from decades of research are tilted in favor of children from white and wealthy families,’’ she observes. Notably, the Supreme Court hasn’t outlawed admission preferences for legacy applicants—those whose parents or grandparents attended the school.

One irony that emerges from Rivera’s research: Some hiring officials she interviewed “lamented a lack of racial diversity in their companies and blamed the applicant ‘pipeline.’” In other words, they wanted elite schools to offer up an even more diverse candidate pool, but weren’t looking farther afield themselves.

That’s what Dave Wilkin, CEO and co-founder of talent mentorship platform Ten Thousand Coffees has found. “Organizations rely on colleges to do a better job in diversifying their engineering, business and other programs,” he says. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, he adds, “This is now going to fundamentally change, which will risk how organizations can rely on colleges to foster the diverse and inclusive representation of … early talent.”

Annette Tyman, a labor and employment partner at the law firm Seyfarth Shaw, agrees. “There are certainly some jobs where you do need that college background or experience, but that may not necessarily be so, and that’s the kind of thing that employers are going to have to challenge in their own hiring practices,” she says.

Rivera, for her part, is skeptical about whether companies will actually consider talent from other institutions. “How seriously they will consider these applications—given these deeply entrenched stereotypes linking educational prestige to underlying merit in our country—is an open question,” she says.

Plus, there’s another issue hanging over how elite firms may adjust to less diversity in the graduating classes of elite colleges: the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision could have a chilling effect on companies’ own employee and board diversity initiatives, as they worry they’ll be sued next.

That’s already happening, says Ishan Bhabha, co-chair of both Jenner & Block’s education practice and its DEI protection task force. “The threats have already arrived,” he says. “[Companies are] already being sued over program initiatives. I think this decision is going to increase the volume and the severity, absolutely, but it’s already here. The wave is starting as we speak.”

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