Category Archives: Educational Counseling

Career Advice 💡Focusing the numbers that do not add up 🧮

An on-campus recruiter came to your school and presented a slide deck showing some detailed metrics of the company.

You saw the revenues, profits, growth rates, and many other important financial metrics. Of course, such information is important for all prospective employees while they are trying to make a sound decision.

Then, you saw the slide, which was about the growth of the company in terms of headcount. The company had a cumulative annual growth rate of 25% for the last decade with respect to its net headcount growth.

What can you do to check whether this number is true?

You checked the company’s total headcount 10 years ago and found out that there were 500,000 employees working at the company at that time.

So, currently there should have been 3,725,290 employees now working at the company, which is more than the total population of your country!

If this trend were to continue for the next 44 years (which is of course very unlikely), almost every living human on earth would be working at this company.

This is an exaggerated story but I have witnessed similar stories in such company presentations.

TL;DR
Being on the lookout of such illogical trickery regarding numbers will serve you well in your career.
In this article, I will expand on the tactics used by some of the ‘prominent’ companies to lure you into their companies and what you need to do to prevent this from happening to you. They might be more desperate than you think. I also recommend a few books that unveil ‘the glamor’ of these companies and reveal the façade.

What was the chief end of business education and what is it now?

What was the chief end of business education and what is it now?
—
In June 1909, Edwin Gay, the first dean of the school, wrote to a friend:

I am constantly being told by business men that we cannot teach “business.”
I heartily agree with them; we do not try to teach business in the sense in which business men ordinarily understand their routine methods, or in the sense in which you speak of teaching young men to be “money makers” or “to get the better of their competitors.”

We believe that there is science in business and it is the task of studying and developing that science in which we are primarily interested.

It is our aim to give our young business men the breadth of horizon, as well as the equipment of information and grasp of principles which will enable them … to be better citizens and men of culture as well as broader men of business.

Taken from Philip Delves Broughton’s Ahead of the Curve

Deciphering Employment Reports of Universities and Business Schools: Understanding the tactics and developing smart strategies

Employment Outcomes of Professional Degrees 📖
Transparency in a business school’s employment report is important (or for any professional school for that matter).
Of course, under pressure, some schools may choose to be less transparent to whitewash trends going badly.
Although in the short-term this may not affect the school much, in the long-term the quality of education and the students, as well as the reputation of the school if it has one, will erode dramatically.
Do you look at a school’s employment report before even applying?
How do you spot discrepancies in a business school’s employment report, though?

On Quality of Education 📖

Do you think that your children or your prospective employees have the same quality education as you had before them?
Is it declining? Or as some claim, is it the quality of the students/prospective employees that is declining?
It is hard to solve this chicken-and-egg problem, which is additionally exacerbated by the inability to achieve much regarding equity and equality in education.

Deciphering College Admissions: The Importance of Standardized Test Scores 🔮

Deciphering College Admissions: The Importance of Standardized Test Scores 🔮

There is this debate of whether the standardized tests for admission into top colleges are really significant and whether they really measure the academic capabilities of the incoming class properly.

Recently, some top colleges have even ditched the standardized tests completely. Nonetheless, some of them reneged on the decision to ditch standardized tests and reinstated these tests as one of the required components of their applications.

Furthermore, the college hopefuls are lulled into thinking that their standardized scores are evaluated in isolation from other academic components of the application. Generally, this will not be the case and the importance of the standardized tests vary among top universities.

For Princeton, the standardized test scores are still very important; for MIT, they are important; but for Cornell and Stanford, they are just considered (but there are other academic indicators that they think are very important, such as rigor of secondary school record and academic GPA).

So, do your research and prepare accordingly!

Are you a STEM major planning to work in a STEM-related field after graduation? 📐Learn the job market you are entering post-graduation💼

Are you a STEM major planning to work in a STEM-related field after graduation? 📐
Learn the job market you are entering post-graduation💼
Start with fundamental data:
-The weight of STEM occupation within all occupation: 6.65% (Based on 2020 estimates)
-The weight is projected to increase to 6.82% in 2030.
-That is approximately a CAGR of 0.25%. So, on average US is projected to add 400K jobs each year, 100K of which are projected to be STEM jobs, between 2020 and 2030.
-In the US, 36.6% of all bachelor degrees are STEM and only 27.6% of all STEM majors work directly in a STEM job.
-For the last couple of years, approximately 2MM bachelor degrees are being granted each year.
-So, what are the odds of you landing on a STEM-related job in the US?
➡️You can do similar back-of-the envelope calculations for other occupations/college majors if you are able to scrap/find relevant data.

Doing the simple math in college admissions 🧮

46,000 applicants apply to a top-tier university in a given year. The university has only 2,000 seats for the incoming freshman class. The university’s statistical model based on historical measures implies that 40 students will enroll in a typical year out of 100 students admitted to the university.

How many students does this university need to accept so that beds and classrooms are filled at full capacity?

What is the admit rate of this university?

The same university wants to move up in the college rankings. One tactic the university could utilize is to increase selectivity and enrollment. So, the university rolled out a binding early decision (ED) round in addition to its regular decision rounds for the next admission cycle. That year, the university received 5000 ED applications and admitted 1000 students. In the regular decision rounds, the university received 41,000 applications. The class size for the incoming freshman did not change, staying constant at 2,000. The yield rate for the regular decision was expected to be 25%.

What was the overall rate of admission and yield for that year?

Did the university improve its yield and admission rates compared to those in the previous year?

Forward-looking or backward-looking 🏫

‘The irony of college admissions is that the decision whether to admit someone is based on the future, not the past. It ultimately hinges on a judgment about the potential of that teenager over the next four years on a college campus, not what they’ve done the previous four years in high school’

Taken from Jeff Selingo’s ‘Who gets in and Why’
—
Does not this apply to all admissions (college, grad, and the professional schools)?

This is a domain in which predicting the future through the reliance on the past data may not work well.