The bosses who don’t care about your Ivy League degree

The chief executive of CG Financial Group in Johnston, Iowa, says academic credentials don’t impress him like they used to. He worked with many graduates of top-tier colleges in previous jobs at MetLife and ING Groep, where he was a vice president, and says they too often approach clients’ challenges like textbook case studies, rather than real-world problems.

“If I were hiring somebody to be my right-hand person today, there’s not a chance in hell it would be an Ivy League person," says Gipple, who graduated from the University of Northern Iowa and manages a network of about 500 advisers.

Traditionally a springboard to the top of the résumé pile, a degree from a prestigious university can now prompt questions about its value or even work against job seekers.

In extreme cases, it’s disqualifying. A group of 13 federal judges signed a letter in May saying they will not hire law clerks who enrolled at Columbia Law School this fall because of how the school has handled campus protests. A spokeswoman for the university referred me to a statement issued when the letter was publicized, which says the school’s graduates “are consistently sought out by leading employers in the private and public sectors, including the judiciary."

More often, people who studied at Ivies and similarly elite schools like Stanford, Duke and the University of Chicago say they’re used to snide remarks about their alma maters being woke or elitist.

That skepticism has intensified in the last year after a landmark Supreme Court case exposed inner workings of elite-college admissions and upended affirmative action. Evidence presented in the case revealed, among other things, that 43% of accepted white applicants at Harvard were recruited athletes or children of alumni, donors, faculty or staff.

Bryan Mark Rigg, president of Rigg Wealth Management in Dallas, says his Ivy League degree used to command universal respect from clients and colleagues.

“Going to Yale has opened up doors left and right," he says.

He says he now gets mixed responses when people learn where he went to college. Diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on campus have gone too far, in his view. And while Rigg, who is Jewish, says he never caught a whiff of antisemitism as a student, he considers anti-Jewish bias a big problem at top universities, citing campus protests against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza.

“Some people will say to me ‘Would you ever send your kid to an Ivy? They’ve lost their way,’ " says Rigg, 53. “I have to agree with them."

America’s changing perception of elite universities was evident on the campaign trail. President-elect Donald Trump, who holds an Ivy League degree himself from the University of Pennsylvania, chose as his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, who has bashed selective colleges, despite having graduated from Yale Law School.

Looking elsewhere for talent

Karen Berman grew up in a working-class family, lost her father in high school, then went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Harvard and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at Penn. She says her Ivy pedigree represents perseverance.

The nonprofit consultant has grown concerned about whether students at her old stomping grounds are developing critical-thinking skills on campuses that consistently land near the bottom of free-speech rankings. An internal Harvard report last month found roughly half of professors and students are afraid to express their views on controversial issues.

Berman says she feels the loss of open dialogue and civil debate takes some of the shine off her credentials.

“What should I do—take it off my résumé?" she asked when I pressed about what it feels like to be an alum and a critic of these institutions. It was a rhetorical question because, truth be told, the advantages of brand-name diplomas generally outweigh the drawbacks.

For proof, look no further than the booming market for college admissions help, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Even sharp Ivy League critics, like hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman, acknowledge the value of alumni networks, and blue-chip banks and consulting firms continue to prize graduates of what their recruiters call target schools.

Bain & Co. still recruits from “the usual suspects" but the share of new hires who come from those schools is shrinking, says Keith Bevans, the firm’s head of consultant recruiting.

That’s partly because those few dozen schools don’t produce enough high-quality graduates to keep up with Bain’s head count needs. And, he adds, the firm has started conducting Zoom interviews where the interviewer doesn’t know the job candidate’s university affiliation.

“You’re purely judged on the merits of how you did in the interview, not my preconceived notions of how many people I should expect to like on a certain campus," Bevans says.

McKinsey & Co. uses a problem-solving game to weed out job candidates whose skills don’t live up to their credentials, and to identify talented people that might have been overlooked in the past. The firm’s latest crop of business analysts includes graduates of tiny Grinnell College in Iowa and Santa Clara University, which admits almost half of applicants.

Broadened recruiting is partly a response to the way some elite universities have de-emphasized grades and SAT scores, says Blair Ciesil, a partner who co-leads recruiting at McKinsey. Grade inflation makes a sparkling GPA at a prestigious college less meaningful, she says. (For instance, about 80% of the grades awarded to Yale undergrads in recent years have been an A or A minus, according to a university report.) With a lot of top colleges no longer requiring applicants to submit standardized-test scores, McKinsey is sometimes missing a data point that historically informed hiring decisions.

I told Ciesil that the McKinsey game, called “Solve," sounds like a contemporary version of the chalkboard that reveals a surprise genius in “Good Will Hunting," a movie in which the janitor is more gifted than the students at MIT.

“I’m stealing that analogy," she said. “Wouldn’t we be lucky to find our Matt Damon through the test?"

New York real estate attorney Adam Leitman Bailey doesn’t bother with games. He simply refuses to hire recent Ivy League grads, mostly because he thinks a lot of them get by on connections instead of talent and grit.

He notes that some top law schools, including Harvard and Yale, don’t rank students or give letter grades. Bailey, who got his law degree at Syracuse University, says he prefers to hire associates who rose to the top of less-glamorous schools because he believes competition prepares them for legal battles.

“It’s wonderful that we have these incredible institutions like Harvard and Yale, who produce presidents and leaders and big thinkers," he says. “But that’s not what I do for a living, and it’s not the type of lawyer I need."

Write to Callum Borchers at callum.borchers@wsj.com