I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about social network theory in connection with some research on affirmative action in college admissions. My recent column on Fox News, which cites a study suggesting that attendance at a selective college offers no net financial benefit, generated a number of responses along the lines of, “That’s obviously crazy! Everyone knows that it’s all about who you play golf with.”
Now, intuitively, the networking boosters make sense to me. On the other hand, I think that the Dale and Krueger work indicating no financial benefit to attending a more selective school is a solid piece of scholarship that solves significant problems with prior research on this subject. How to reconcile these two impressions?
I have two preliminary thoughts:
First, while networking can be personally helpful, it’s primarily important because it is socially efficient. Networks share information about the strengths and weaknesses of particular individuals, and thus increase the efficiency with which each person is filtered into a job reflecting his or her comparative advantage. This may or may not be the job the well-networked individual would like to have.
Sure, I’ve encouraged people I know to hire people I like, but only when they are actually suitable for a given job. Conversely, I’ve seen resumes of well-known Washington professionals hit the circular file almost immediately in cases where personal knowledge of the applicant makes it obvious that the job is a poor fit. Networks can cut both ways. There definitely is such a thing as bad publicity in the professional context.
Still, assuming that (notwithstanding the observations above) being well known by the well known is of net personal benefit to most people, one wonders whether it is really as true as we often assume that a given student will be better networked if he or she attends a more well-known school. Sure, the overall population of the school will contain more of the future rich and powerful, but what about your particular circle of friends?
In my experience, people who occupy similar places in the academic food chain at a particular institution cluster together. Perhaps making friends with the sharpest standouts at State U. is just as helpful, down the road, as chumming with those just scraping by in the Ivy League. If that were true, it would reconcile the usefulness of personal networking with the apparent absence of financial benefits from name brand school attendance.
I have my intern looking at this now. Any relevent citations would be appreciated.
Posted by Marie Gryphon on July 22, 2004One possibility is that there are enough alternative networks that the benefits of going to one of the top couple of universities washes out pretty quickly, especially once you're out of school. So, f'rinstance, one of my social networks is East Coast collegiate parli debaters, comprising plenty of folks who went to better schools than I did. The people I'm still in touch with from NYU (and at the end of the day, by the time you're 2 or 3 years out you only really stay in close contact with, what, maybe a dozen people you went to school with?) have themselves mostly plugged in to further social networks related to wherever they ended up working out of school. The result is that if you mapped my social network now against, say, a random Harvard student, it wouldn't be immediately apparent, especially if you focused on second-degree connections and on out, who went where.
Posted by: Julian Sanchez on July 29, 2004 10:12 AM