Ivy Brothers in International Business Times: Why Employers Are Hiring From Harvard Again

International Business Times Singapore published a piece by William Geroge on 18 March 2026 on why employers keep narrowing their hiring to a short list of universities. Josh Kim, a partner here, is quoted through it.

The argument

The piece starts from a problem employers have rather than one students have. There are more qualified applicants than ever and fewer signals an employer can trust. A resume can be produced by a model. A portfolio can be polished by one. When several hundred applications arrive for a single role and there is time to interview a handful, a recruiter needs a filter that costs nothing to apply.

A degree from a university that admits a small fraction of its applicants is that filter. The reasoning has little to do with the coursework. Someone else already ran a long selection process on this person, and the recruiter can borrow the result.

Josh Kim put it to the paper as employers “managing risk under time pressure.” He was explicit that this says nothing about where talent actually sits. It describes what a hiring manager does when the clock is the binding constraint.

Where it bites hardest

The article singles out investment banking and the largest strategy consulting firms, which concentrate their recruiting on a short list of target campuses. Those firms run dedicated events, interview pipelines and internship programs at a small number of schools, most of them Ivy League or comparably selective. A student outside that list can still enter the industry, and will do it without the machinery that arrives on campus for the students inside it.

Kim described a family he had spoken to recently with one child placed at Dartmouth and an older child at a state school. Their account of the difference was about alumni networks and on-campus recruiting, where firms physically show up to hire. That is the part families tend to underestimate, because it stays invisible until a student is either inside it or outside it.

What we take from it

Two things, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that institutional prestige still carries real weight in specific industries, and a family thinking about banking or consulting is right to take target school lists seriously. Telling them otherwise would be comfortable and wrong.

The second is that the headline is shorthand. Employers are not literally hiring only from Harvard. They are economizing on judgment when they do not have the time to exercise it, which is a narrower claim. It applies hard in a few fields and barely at all across most of the economy. A family that treats one industry’s recruiting pattern as a general law about where a life goes will make worse decisions than the pattern justifies.

The full article is on ibtimes.sg.