Every year various university league tables are produced to allow discerning students to identify the best schools from around the world.  Most students will strive to earn selection at the best school in these league tables they can get.  They reason that entry into such a school will give them a better education and a better chance of getting the job of their dreams upon graduation.

In many ways, they are probably right, with busy HR managers looking to ease decision making by using mental shortcuts to determine whether candidates are worth hiring, and so resort to the signaling given off by the school, based upon their prestige and rank.  The best schools will be most selective in recruiting the brightest students, and will subsequently hire the best professors to teach them, which combined with the networks they will form and the minds they can learn from, are surely going to produce the best graduates?

It’s a logical line of thinking, but recent research has questioned whether it’s a logic that holds up in modern times.  The study aimed to test the relationship between the position of the university in global league tables, and the subsequent performance of graduates.  In total, they monitored over 28,000 students from nearly 300 universities in 79 countries.  The universities covered a wide range, from those in the top 10 of the Webometrics global university rankings to those scraping into the top 20,000.

The performance of each student was tracked for a couple of months while they worked in global virtual teams on actual consulting projects for a range of corporate clients.  This allowed the researchers not only to monitor their technical skills, but things such as their emotional intelligence, language proficiency, and creativity.

A worthy signal?

Did the logic hold?  Were graduates from the best universities better performers than their peers from less prestigious institutions?  Not really.  While students from the best universities did perform better than their peers, the improvement was actually incredibly small, with the researchers recording an overall performance boost of around 1.9% for every 1,000 positions in the university league table.  The difference between an elite institution and an average institution, ie one ranked around 10,000th), is therefore 19%.

This seems a large disparity in performance, but it also covers a huge range of universities.  When the difference in league table performance was more realistic (ie a few hundred positions), the difference in performance shrinks to around 1%.

The researchers found that this (marginally) higher performance was due to a range of factors, including both being able to select from a larger pool of candidates and have steeper competition among those candidates, as well as the provision of a more stimulating academic environment and better training in general.

The impact was rather muted in many areas, however.  For instance, the celebrity-status professors at elite universities and the highly-motivated peer group might have been expected to produce more motivated students, but graduates from lower-ranked universities were just as motivated and hard-working as their peers. This suggests these attributes are far more to do with the personalities of individuals than the school they attended.

What’s more, having people from elite institutions in your team may even harm how it performs.  The study found that graduates from elite universities tended to focus on instrumental tasks, with little attention paid to interpersonal relationships.  This led those teams to be more prone to conflict with poorer teamwork displayed.  Often, graduates from elite universities would see themselves as distinct from their peers from less prestigious institutions, thus allowing an “us and them” dynamic to form.

Who to hire

While the performance boost from hiring graduates from elite universities may seem to make it worthwhile, you typically have to pay a premium for that privilege.  For instance, the researchers highlight that hiring a graduate from a university ranked in the top 10 in the United States would require paying nearly 50% more than if you had hired graduates from colleges from within the City University New York (CUNY) system, who are ranked in the top 100 but not towards the top.

The research suggests that the added cost of hiring graduates from the best schools may not be worth it.  Perhaps most importantly, it should not be viewed as the guarantee of high performance that employers perhaps think it is, as the university rankings are not a great predictor of just what performance you’ll get from graduates.

Indeed, the researchers argue that any performance gap at the outset can be relatively easily closed by bolstering the training provided to people on the job.  They suggest that this might actually be a better investment than hiring elite graduates, to begin with.

The matter is further compounded by a second study, from the University of Chicago, which found that students from prestigious high schools actually performed worse academically when they graduated to university.  Where these people stood out, however, was in their social skills, which were found to be higher than their peers from less prestigious schools.

“We find that students from prestigious private high schools perform better socially but worse academically than others,” the researchers explain. “This is important because academic success does not predict earnings, but social success does: members of selective final clubs earn 32% more than other students, and are more likely to work in finance and to join country clubs as adults, both characteristic of the era’s elite.”

This initial boost was found to provide a long and enduring boost to the careers of those who were given this initial leg-up from the prestige associated with their school, such that even rigorous attempts to provide more equality later in life were wholly insufficient in closing the attainment gap.

Elite knowledge

The matter is further complicated by the rise in schemes like Coursera for Campus, where schools can augment their curriculum with modules from some of the finest academics and institutions in the world.  It creates a scenario whereby a graduate from a modest university may have actually taken modules from various elite institutions.

“The pandemic accelerated collaboration among institutions where students benefit from multiple signals in the labor market — the degree they earn from their university, and the course certificates from world-renowned institutions they earn along the way,” Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, told me. “While the degree continues to be the most transformative credential for students around the world, supplemental certificates from other renowned institutions can help them stand apart in a competitive job market.”

It’s clear that the school you attend clearly carries significant weight in the labor market as a signal of your talent and potential.  While it’s far from clear whether this signal is justified, it’s increasingly unclear as the education market fractures and allows for a more modular and lifelong approach to learning.

In an age where so much of what we have taken for granted is being reconsidered with fresh eyes, it is perhaps time to reassess just how we assess the skills and potential of people.