Ivy League Certifications? A second shot or a scam
Finance is getting more and more competitive making it hard to break into any field, especially when you don't have a target school on your resume.
Now, Ivy League schools like Columbia, Harvard, NYU, etc are offering certifications in finance, and while this may seem like a second chance at getting that prestigious name on your resume, it may have the opposite effect.
Multiple recruiters have said that this appears "desperate" and that having internship experience is 10000% more valuable.
What's your opinion? Is a 700$ certification from a target school a SCAM
I really think it depends on why you are taking it on how you are "selling" it afterwards.
When I was being asked if I wanted to start moving into a corporate development role at my prior company some years ago and before going to B-School, I had very little formal finance education. I was working with financial statements, doing modelling and such every day but given my educational background I had never taken a formal accounting or a finance class.
So my company as a part of my transition sent me to Wharton for one of their 1 week ish classes. It is not a certificate or a degree but it is in person at Wharton with some great professors (I think price is closer to 13K than 700usd though)
The class did give me some great tools and a way to structure my own learning going forward, it also opened up a broader spectrum to me, realizing that M&A was way more than just financial modelling but that it is truly a cross functional complicated exercise.
Did it help me in my job in Corporate Development? yes it did, not as a stand alone, but if you prepare well and continue learning after then it was great.
Did it help me break into IB after business school? I doubt it, but given how many of my interviewers went to Wharton it at least meant that we could talk about the bars around campus and it felt like we had something in common. Also it was easy to show that my interest in finance started before I went to B-School, so it did help my story.
Would I ever claim to have a degree from Wharton? certainly not! I did list it on my resume, as i think it tells my story, but I am very clear to state that this was a non-degree program!
It is a great program and if you are in my position or if you are in a industry role and all of a sudden gets asked to be a part of M&A for your company then it makes a lot of sense! Adding it to your resume straight out of undergrad on the other hand will in my opinion not really add any value. If you wanted finance classes in Undergrad then why did you not take finance classes?
I see all of these non-degree or certificate programs this way: If you feel like the content will help you, then it is great! but I would not do any of them as a resume booster and especially not right out of undergrad.
Brand yourself with truly meaningful experiences (internships, volunteer work, genuine scholastic accolades). These are 100% a scam and will make you seem either desperate or (worse) insecure. Anyone who has taken the classes will know that they don't give you a valuable learning experience. Thus, it reflects poor judgement to drop the expense you need to pay for enrollment. I had a VP who was obsessed with these - he's the type of guy who will tell you he went to an ivy league when asked where he went to school, but only for his MBA.
Be proud of where you went to school. If you ask someone who went to Princeton UG and Harvard MBA where they went to school, they won't tell you Harvard. Don't be the guy from the state school who still feels as though they have to compensate for this.
I embrace the hell out of my non target (arguably semi, but I think this is a stupid, qualification seeking distinction anyways). On that note, I would personally rather be seen as the gritty, intellectually curious work-horse than the entitled WASP. Obviously a lot of personalities in between, but I wouldn't trade anything for my background.
If I'm reviewing a resume and some one tries to sneak something like that into the full blown education section - to me that's a major major ding. It's so obviously just bs and the goal is to be misleading. Pretty much an auto ding for me.
That said, if you find the classes useful and will help in learning/story go for it. I'd react way more positively if it was under an "other" type section. Like just a random bullet point: Complete X certificate in finance from Harvard's extension program to develop finance skills or whatever. Then in a cover letter / interview you can talk about how you wanted to learn more so did an this course. But the fact that its from an Ivy is irrelevant, its more so you did the work to gain experience.
When I'm helping people with their resumes, I typically put stuff like this (and certifications from non-university institutions, like Udacity for coding) in the skills section. To me, the programs are at best a signal that you have a real interest in an area, nothing more.
Not sure scam is the word I'd use, but yes I'd say it's mostly a bad idea. IMHO it's helpful to understand how we got to this point.
The role elite schools play in the economy has gotten more ridiculous over time, and now it's jumped the shark like every once-great TV show does in its final seasons.
The schools used to be about educating people, and that worked as long as the customers (students) viewed it the same way. But over time, the customers started viewing top schools as branding factories; you go there to get a piece of paper and that's basically all of the value. That cynical view of the business model didn't immediately ruin education, because the schools didn't jump on board with the customers right away. The last ~2 generations of students may have thought they were just buying a degree, but the schools stayed focused on their mission and actually tried to teach some things.
But now the schools are on board with the new money-for-credentials model, and you're seeing this play out with examples like these weak certifications and a proliferation of online masters programs and so forth.
When I was in college, I saw DeVry advertise on the subway. Then some years later, it was University of Phoenix. Now it's Columbia. This is to say nothing of the various non-college degree programs . . how many certifications are out there now? It used to just be CFA, now there seems like 15 different sets of letters you can buy.
I'm not sure how long this silly trend will last and how it will all end, but I am confident the money and time is not well spent for the customers.
I heard now you can write "#BlackLivesMatter" hundreds of times on your application essay and get into Stanford. I doubt this would work for me due to how much "white privilege" I have; maybe if I wrote it 1,000 times it would carry similar weight...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/04/06/his-appli…