Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

Book Preface

Entering the Elite

Most Americans believe that hard work—not blue blood—is the key to success. Textbooks, newspapers, and novels are filled with Horatio Alger stories in which an individual rises to the top through personal drive and perseverance. Whether these narratives focus on Warren Buffett or Homeless to Harvard, the underlying message is the same: economic and social positions are achieved, not inherited from one’s parents. The people at the top are there because of their own intellect, unflagging effort, and strong character. Those at the bottom have their own weaknesses to blame.¹

Despite this widespread faith in a monetary payoff for hard work and belief in myths of a classless society, economic inequality is now greater in the United States than in many other Western industrialized nations, and American rates of social mobility are lower.² Contrary to our national lore, the chances of ascending from meager beginnings to affluence or falling from fortune to poverty are slim.³ The top and bottom rungs of America’s economic ladder are particularly sticky; children born to families in the top or bottom fifths of the income distribution tend to stay on those same rungs as adults.⁴ Children from families at the top of the economic hierarchy monopolize access to good schools, prestigious universities, and high-paying jobs.⁵

This raises an obvious but pressing question: In an era of merit-based admissions in education and equal opportunity regulations in employment, how is it that this process of elite reproduction occurs? Social scientists in a variety of disciplines have examined how historical and economic changes at home and abroad, social policies, and technological factors have contributed to the concentration of wealth and income at the top of the economic ladder.⁶ These studies inform us about crucial drivers of economic inequality, but they do not tell us enough about how and why economic privilege is passed on so consistently from one generation to the next.

Sociologists interested in social stratification—the processes that sort individuals into positions that provide unequal levels of material and social rewards—historically have focused on studying poverty rather than affluence. Recently, though, cultural sociologists have turned their attention to the persistence of privilege.7 Focusing on schooling, these scholars have illuminated ways in which affluent and well-educated parents pass along advantages that give their children a competitive edge in the realm of formal education.⁸ Missing from this rich literature, however, is an in-depth investigation of how elite reproduction takes place after students graduate, when they enter the workforce. We know that even among graduates from the same universities, students from the most elite backgrounds tend to get the highest-paying jobs.⁹ But how and why does this happen?

To answer this question, I turn to the gatekeepers who govern access to elite jobs and high incomes: employers. Ultimately, getting a job and entering a specific income bracket are contingent on judgments made by employers. The hiring decisions employers make play important roles in shaping individuals’ economic trajectories and influencing broader social inequalities.¹⁰ In this book, I investigate hiring processes in some of the nation’s highest-paying entry-level jobs: positions in top-tier investment banks, management consulting firms, and law firms. My analysis draws on interviews with employees of all three firm types, observation of their recruitment events, and in-depth participant observation of a representative firm’s recruiting department. I examine the behind-closed-doors decisions that these employers make as they recruit, evaluate, and select new entry-level employees from the ranks of undergraduate and professional school students; and I show how these decisions help explain why socioeconomically privileged students tend to get the most elite jobs.

I argue that at each stage of the hiring process—from the decision about where to post job advertisements and hold recruitment events to the final selections made by hiring committees—employers use an array of sorting criteria (“screens”) and ways of measuring candidates’ potential (“evaluative metrics”) that are highly correlated with parental income and education. Taken together, these seemingly economically neutral decisions result in a hiring process that filters students based on their parents’ socioeconomic status.

The book’s title, Pedigree, refers to the term that employers in elite firms used as shorthand for a job candidate’s record of accomplishments. “Pedigree” was widely seen as a highly desirable, if not mandatory, applicant trait. Significant personal achievements (such as admission to an elite university, being a varsity athlete at an Ivy League college, or having an early internship at Goldman Sachs) were interpreted as evidence of the applicant’s intelligence, orientation to success, and work ethic. Employers considered pedigree a quality based purely on individual effort and ability. Yet the original meaning of the term, still widely in use today, is synonymous not with effort but rather with inheritance-based privilege, literally meaning “ancestral line.” In that sense, the title evokes the book’s main argument that hiring decisions that appear on the surface to be based only on individual merit are subtly yet powerfully shaped by applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds. In the twenty-first century, parents’ levels of income and education help determine who works on Wall Street, who works on Main Street, and who reaches the top of the nation’s economic ladder.11

In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss foundational scholarship relevant to elite reproduction in hiring, describe the study I conducted, outline my argument, and provide an overview of the subsequent chapters. I begin by reviewing the literature on socioeconomic inequalities in education. This research is relevant not only because schools shape the pipeline of applicants to jobs but also because this scholarship reveals general mechanisms of social stratification.

Contents