Going to college matters. And while the refrain, in both popular and scholarly discourse, is that going to any college matters, the real answer is that it depends on where you want to head after graduation. It’s not just that certain schools are known for excellence in a given field or offer coursework and training relevant to a specific career path. Rather, the most prestigious employers are going directly to a limited set of schools to hire new talent, systematically skewing the playing field toward students from a handful of schools.

While many recruiters see on-campus recruiting as a quick and easy way to source junior-level recruits and link students to open jobs, the real result is that the school a person attends has an outsized influence on which career doors are open to them — and which are not.

I saw this first hand while researching the hiring practices of top-tier investment banks, management consulting firms, and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision-makers in these firms under the condition of anonymity and conducted ethnographic observation of on-campus recruiting activities. These organizations, also known as elite professional service (EPS) firms, have some of the most well-developed and longstanding on-campus programs. They have become such a deeply entrenched part of life at top schools that these companies and their recruiting practices have been referred by students and administrators as “the deluge,” “the onslaught,” and even “the path of least resistance.”

How It Works — and How “Regular” Applicants Get Ignored

In the EPS world, on-campus “school lists” have two tiers, based largely on prestige. Core schools are typically the three to five most elite institutions in the country from which employers draw the bulk of their new hires. Firms invest deeply at these campuses, flying current employees from across the country — if not the globe — to host information sessions, cocktail receptions, and dinners, prepare candidates for interviews, and actually interview scores (or even hundreds) of candidates every year.

Target schools, by contrast, include roughly five to 15 additional institutions, where firms host a handful of recruiting events, accept applications, and interview candidates, but on a smaller scale. Prior to the start of recruiting season, firms typically set quotas for each school, with cores receiving far more interview and offer slots than targets.

So even before applications are received, employers allocate jobs based on alma mater, skewing opportunities toward (and against) students from particular campuses.

This leaves most students from nonlisted schools out of the game. Of course, the firms I researched did accept résumés from students at other universities. However, in contrast to candidates from core and target schools who submitted their résumés to a designated review committee (or “school team”) at a firm, nonlisted students needed to apply directly to a firm through its website, usually to a general administrative email address. These applications were placed into a separate stream and were not considered as seriously as those of core and target candidates, if they were considered at all. Often, no one was charged with reviewing them. In the end, a personal connection to an existing employee or client was one of the few shots nonlisted students had at getting interviews, especially at organizations that were the highest status in their field.

One banking recruitment manager summarized the typical approach this way:

I’m just being really honest, it [an application] pretty much goes into a black hole. And I’m pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It’s tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to get someone to raise their hand and say, “Let’s bring this candidate in.” … Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at … the Brown candidates, you know, the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of everything else. … Unfortunately, it’s just not a great situation. There’s not an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school.

An HR head at a different bulge-bracket bank was similarly blunt about how often she looked at nonlisted résumés submitted online: “Zero. Zero. … I only have so many hours in a day and that is not my first priority. My first priority is the schedules on campus.” Consequently, for most nonlisted students, their fates in the hiring process are sealed by the school they attend.

“They’ve Done Two-Thirds of the Work for Us Already”

“Prestige” was the most common way a school got on a company’s list. But what does this really mean in practice? Partners and other decision-makers typically relied on their personal impressions and opinions of which schools were “top-tier,” rather than data-driven estimates of quality. When I asked how her law firm created its list, a recruitment director I interviewed explained:

It’s totally anecdotal. I think it’s based upon—and it probably lags in terms of time and updating—but it’s based upon a kind of understanding of how selective the school was in terms of admitting students and how challenging is the work. So it’s largely just kind of school reputation and conventional wisdom, for better or worse.

Lists tended to remain stable from year to year and did not necessarily map to national rankings. Some targets, for example, were more selective than cores; some nonlisted schools were more selective than targets.

Most decision-makers I spoke with also equated prestige with ability. They routinely described how the “best and the brightest” were concentrated in the U.S.’s most elite universities. One lawyer asserted that “number one people go to number one schools.” A consultant explained, “The top schools are more selective. They’re reputed to be top schools because they do draw a more select student body who tend to be smarter and more able.” In their eyes, school prestige represented an easy way to sort students by their “intellectual horsepower.”

Many also heralded elite universities’ admissions processes as best practices and essentially outsourced the first round of candidate screening to these institutions. One consultant summarized, “A lot of the qualities we look for in a person are the same qualities that Dartmouth or Harvard looks for in a prospective student or an applicant. So part of the reason we only recruit at those schools is because they’ve done two-thirds of the work for us already.”

From the perspective of the people I interviewed, limiting consideration to elite students was time- and cost-saving, while wading through “lower-caliber” candidates to find “diamonds in the rough” was wasteful. “The best kid in the country may be at Bowling Green,” one investment banker acknowledged. “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.” A consultant who helped oversee MBA recruitment at his firm agreed: “95 percent of our intake is from the top-five business schools. We create inequity in the process by doing this. There may be really good candidates out there, but it’s not worth the investment on our part to spend a lot of resources looking for them when we have a very good pool that’s easy to reach.”

A firm’s reputation, of course, mattered, too. Some employees articulated that selecting new hires with prestigious academic credentials was a means of heightening clients’ confidence in their company and the value of services provided, given the typically young age of employees and the high fees charged by firms. “Clients want to know that they’re getting the … top lawyers working on their case to justify the bills that we charge,” one lawyer explained. Students at elite schools were also seen as having richer networks that could be useful for generating new business either now or in the future.

Geographic proximity to a firm’s offices could, however, nudge a new or unusual school onto a list, as could employees who lobbied hard for a particular campus. One banker I interviewed explained how his well-regarded, but not top-10 liberal arts college, came to be included on his employer’s list of targets. “We started recruiting at [my school] because the CEO’s daughter was in my class there, and now two chairmen’s kids are there,” he explained. “[It’s] a good school, but it’s definitely those types of connections that make us recruit there.”

A consultant provided a similar illustration of how a Southern public flagship university ended up on her firm’s list of undergraduate targets:

It started because there was a partner who was an alum and who just pushed it hard and so we ended up with actually having quite a big recruiting team associated with that school. Which maybe normally we wouldn’t, given [our firm’s] location and their ranking and what not.

This in some ways points to the unconscious motives at play as well. People tend to define merit in their own image. Most employees in the firms I studied are themselves graduates of prestigious schools and believed in the validity of the selection processes that chose them. In fact, the small number of employees I spoke with who opposed the rigid use of school lists (and the strong emphasis on school prestige in hiring more generally) tended to have graduated from less elite schools.

“We Just Refuse to Look at Them“

For many students, the problem with the list is obvious: it severely constrains the types of job opportunities available to them, regardless of other abilities, skills, or achievements listed on their résumés.

For employers, the list may seem like the most efficient way to make good hires. But in reality, it can limit their ability to attract top performers. University reputations are based on much more than the caliber of students who attend; perceptions of schools include factors such as institutional wealth, alumni donations, athletic programs, and even the year in which a university was founded. National rankings can also be gamed. Likewise, many high-achievers, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, attend less prestigious universities for reasons having nothing to do with ability. Yet, by adopting exclusionary school lists and school quotas, firms systematically close their eyes to talent that resides elsewhere. As one attorney summarized, “There are a lot of smart people are out there. We just refuse to look at them.”

Ultimately, this narrowing of candidates has implications for corporate diversity. Research shows that diverse teams and organizations can outperform homogenous ones. Additionally, clients (who tend to be more diverse in terms of alma maters and demography than the EPS firms themselves) increasingly use diversity as a performance metric when selecting service providers.

And although many believe that elite schools cherry pick the best and the brightest regardless of personal background, elite schools are highly skewed demographically toward white students and those from affluent backgrounds. While some prefer to attribute these patterns to differences in abilities, the reality is that biased admissions practices keep diversity low in these institutions.

Many of the professionals I spoke with lamented a lack of racial diversity in their companies and blamed the applicant “pipeline.” But by limiting consideration to students at listed schools, which often have relatively low levels of racial diversity, firms are defining the pipeline in an artificially narrow manner. The career services director of a top MBA program I interviewed put it best when she said, “Firms are scrambling for diversity. They want gender diversity, racial diversity, you name it, and [they] go to great lengths to attract diverse applicants. They are all fighting for the same tiny piece of the pie. But they are focusing on that slice rather than expanding it, which is the real problem.”

There is also burgeoning evidence that students from the most elite schools are not always the best job fits in the first place. For example, professors Ronit Dinovitzer and Bryant Garth found that, in large law firms, students from top-tier schools are significantly less satisfied on the job than other employees and want to leave within the first year or two of being hired, well before they have worked long enough to recoup the recruitment and training dollars spent on them.

An Expensive Status Quo

On-campus recruitment may also not be as time- or cost-saving as employers believe. Certain top schools charge companies large annual fees to participate in on-campus recruitment. On top of this, firms devote significant personnel to on-campus efforts, often creating a separate “school team” of employees to serve as the public face of the firm for each listed university. They then fly revenue-generating employees all over the country to attend social events and interview students every year. Some top consulting firms now even designate a school “ambassador” or “captain” for the most elite cores, a consultant who is removed from client-work throughout the duration of the recruiting season and physically sits on campus (often in a student lounge or cafeteria) for several months making him or herself available to students to answer questions about the firm and conduct practice interviews on demand.

Because so many employers flock to these campuses, organizations also have to fight fiercely to woo prospective hires. EPS firms spend vast amounts of money on lavish recruiting events every year designed to convince core and target students to apply to jobs and accept offers. One firm in my study budgeted nearly a million dollars per year for social events on one core campus alone.

Finally, restricting recruiting to elite schools carries large training costs. Given that the most prestigious schools — from undergrad to law to business — are less likely to offer practical instruction in the skills necessary to perform the jobs that their graduates will soon fill, firms must provide new hires with extensive training. Companies usually have current employees or costly experts train their new hires around the clock for a period of two weeks to two months; during this time employees receive high salaries but do not generate revenue. This situation is most extreme in law firms, where some clients, aware that first-year associates are still in training, now refuse to pay for legal work performed by these employees for an entire year.

Better Practices

Companies that want to limit the downsides of on-campus recruitment can begin by adopting a more expansive definition of educational quality to include universities on their list that exhibit both high levels of academic achievement—including job-relevant coursework or hands-on training—and diversity. They can also designate specialized recruiting streams for nonlisted students, including dedicated staff and recruiting weeks.

To be effective, however, nonlisted programs cannot be starved of resources. If firms dedicate only a single person to review thousands of résumés, staff will likely continue to push nonlisted applications without personal connections straight to the bin. Nothing will change.

To make a wider pipeline less overwhelming, firms could perform more intensive screens on grades, which for elite students are currently used only as a basic threshold in determining interview slots. They could also put more emphasis on the tasks performed at prior jobs, which I found employers tended to underweigh in résumé review.

Before interviewing an applicant, recruiters could also use performance-based exercises not tied to attendance at particular schools. In the finance world, for example, the Bloomberg Aptitude Test measures knowledge and skills relevant to investment banking. Tellingly, students from top schools often are not the best performers.

Enacting these types of changes, while relatively cheap and easy, is likely to encounter fierce resistance, at least among organizations that have limited hiring to cores and targets for decades. Because these companies — at least those that weathered the Great Recession — are doing quite well economically, some do not perceive a need for change. “These firms have been doing this for quite a long time, so I would imagine that they’ve allocated a lot of time and resources to sort of figuring out a [hiring] process that works effectively,” a male banker told me. “I would think if it weren’t working, that they would have adapted. And a female lawyer noted, “It seems like we have really excellent associates, so [the hiring process] works the best it can.”

But by maintaining the status quo, firms are not only missing out on high-quality, under-utilized talent pools, but may be allocating recruiting resources in an inefficient way.

EPS firms may be one extreme in the on-campus recruiting world, but they may represent a harbinger of hiring patterns to come. One survey estimated that three-fourths of American employers now use on-campus recruitment to select new hires — and that perceived university quality is a top driver of which schools are targeted.

It’s evidence that we’ve all but crystalized the link between elite schools and elite jobs. The adoption of “school lists” and “school quotas” now formally reserves top-paying employment opportunities for graduates from a small number of universities and locks out the vast majority of college and professional school students nationwide.

This is risky for both students and firms if nothing changes.