Recently, I got into a debate with a friend about what determines your offer figures and she told me that the MBA graduates from target programs coming in her class at the firm (she is in a marketing leadership training program for an international consumer products company) received better offers and are often given better opportunity/treatment during the program. I never thought that target kids would get paid better or have access to fast-track opportunity after getting in just because of their school brand. My thinking is perhaps they had received multiple offers or had participated in more impressive extracurricular activities, which makes them the candidates with more potential/perceived value in the eye of employers, therefore more room for negotiation and higher offer. What do you think? Does this happen at your firm or my friend is wrong?
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On the sell side, if you are hired into a post MBA role within an Associate class, the pay is uniform with respect to salary, signing and relocation bonuses, and stub bonuses. The only thing that is not uniform is the end of year bonus which varies based upon performance.
Depends on the company and the industry. But it does happen.
Can you elaborate on this? Personally, I think if a company systematically implements a policy like this, it will just discourage non-target kids with high potential and retain prestige whores in the organization in the long term.
The problem with that rationale is that the risk of "missing high-potential non-targets" and instead "retaining prestige whores" isn't really a risk at all. The kid from Harvard already proved he's at least smart enough to get in to Harvard somehow. The non-target has not, so in truth the risk lies in hiring the non-target student. Actually, there's never any real reason to take a non-target at any firm that has the reputation or opportunity available to recruit target kids instead. That's essentially what constitutes the entire non-target problem...
I should know, as I went to a non-target.
To answer the OP: from my observation, there is definitely discrimination of sorts in certain stages of your career and in certain types of places. It mainly seems to take on the form of an idea that non-target hires don't have as much "pedigree." I can't speak to how this manifests itself in terms of pay structure, bonuses, exit opps, etc, but from what I understand it's kind of like this: if Peter Sullivan hadn't had a PhD from MIT in Margin Call, he wouldn't have been in the board room regardless of what he found in that model.
Interesting, I went to grad school at a semi-target that borderlines a target, yet I was never informed of this type of discrimination before this way or another way. That's probably because most of my classmates went into i-banking and economic consulting where compensation scheme for the whole analyst class is quite structurally standardized. I am working in corporate finance for a large regional commercial bank and have seen that the vast majority of my managers and even the CFOs went to non-targets and semi-targets. I guess preferential treatments for target kids are doled out more often in high-finance or leadership training programs then.
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