Her richly described account is mesmerising — and horrifying. For what it shows — as my Brooklyn friends instinctively know — is that academic qualifications alone are not the key to an elite job. Nor is an Ivy League education sufficient per se. Instead, what these companies are looking for in the interview process is what they often describe as “polish” or “pedigree” — as evidenced in thousands of tiny social cues and cultural patterns.
It is children from elite families who tend to monopolise these subtle social cues, often in ways that nobody (including the elite) will admit. “In prior eras, elite reproduction . . . commonly took the form of parents handing the reins of companies or family fortunes to their adult children,” Rivera writes. “Today, the transmission of economic privilege tends to be indirect. It operates largely through the educational system.”
That word “pedigree” encapsulates a paradox. In decades past, the term denoted good ancestry; carefully bred dogs, horses or people were deemed to have it. But today, admissions officials in US companies use it in a different way: candidates being interviewed for jobs are deemed to have “pedigree” if their résumé is filled with wide-ranging accomplishments such as playing music, being captain of a sports team, doing philanthropic work, and so on.
In theory, this “pedigree” is meant to reflect individual merit and talent; in practice, though, it is hard for students to engage in extracurricular activity unless they come from an elite background to start with. Of course, some non-elite students manage to do this. But a private high school, full of privileged kids, tends to provide a more supportive background than a public institution, even a highly competitive school.
[source : Gillian Tett, Why ‘pedigree’ students get the best jobs, FT, 22nd May 2015]
The research was done in the USA, but the system exists here too. We all know it. We see it.
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