Elite Jobs

From Vox - 

Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard at college.

By Henry Farrell

An excerpt - 

Lauren Rivera is an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of management. Her recent book, “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs,” examines how inequality is produced by subtle social patterns of education and informal skills as well as big political and economic forces.  I asked her four questions about the book.

One of your most counter-intuitive arguments is that students from working class and lower-middle class backgrounds are less likely to get elite jobs, because they concentrate on studying rather than their social life at college. That’s the opposite of what the conventional wisdom would suggest. How does these students’ devotion to academic seriousness hurt their job prospects?

LR – Working and lower-middle-class children are less likely to participate in structured extracurricular activities than their more privileged peers while growing up (and when they do, they tend to participate in fewer of them). This hurts their job prospects in two ways. First, it affects the types of schools students attend. Elite universities weigh extracurricular activities heavily in admissions decisions. Given that these employers—which offer some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs in the country—recruit almost exclusively at top schools, many students who focus purely on their studies will be out of the game long before they ever apply to firms. Second, employers also use extracurricular activities, especially those that are driven by “passion” rather than academic or professional interest and require large investments of time and money over many years, to screen résumés. But participation in these activities while in college or graduate school is not a luxury that all can afford, especially if someone needs to work long hours to pay the bills or take care of family members. Essentially, extracurriculars end up being a double filter on social class that disadvantages job applicants from more modest means both in entering the recruiting pipeline and succeeding within it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/23/why-are-working-class-kids-less-likely-to-get-elite-jobs-they-study-too-hard-at-college/?postshare=2301443202355602&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All