Why? That seems like a dumb way cutting of potentially very talented candidates. Seriously it removes over 90% of candidates, if not more. That seems unsound.
You know there's a very well known joke that it's hard to get fired as a trader for underperforming the market by buying Apple, well it's hard to get blamed for hiring a bad intern if you hire him from MIT.
> well it's hard to get blamed for hiring a bad intern if you hire him from MIT.
Whew! I had four paid internships while I was at MIT and for two of them I got nothing meaningful accomplished. I learned a lot from that but for those two I was of no use to the companies.
Even decades later I still feel bad about that, so it's nice to think that nobody suffered as a result.
The goal is to hire efficiently, not hire every single qualified candidate. If 10% of MIT graduates are qualified but only 1% of graduates from a no-name school are qualified, why spend 10x the effort to try to recruit from the latter?
Jane Street gets a shit ton of applicants. Every slightly ambitious college grad applies there. Same for experienced roles, it's full of FAANG folks hoping to get in.
Their aim is not to hire every good candidate. Maybe they are fine with just 10% of the candidates if they could be top choice of good enough chunk of candidates.
