file under “it’s who you know”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/pol…
after Oxford, Chelsea Clinton signed up with McKinsey, a consulting company known as an elite business training corps. She was the youngest in her class, hired at the same rank as those with M.B.A. degrees. Her interview was more like a conversation, said D. Ronald Daniel, a senior partner.
I’m sure that her family ties had nothing to do with this.
The ballet is [ Chelsea's ] chief civic endeavor – she took lessons for years – and it is an impeccable choice: moneyed but low on the paparazzi factor, apolitical and yet evocative of one of New York? s most famous ballet patrons, Jacqueline Kennedy. On benefit committees, Ms. Kargman said, Ms. Clinton is a down-to-earth presence, recently helping to win an argument to keep entry-level tickets to an event to $75.
Barf.
July 31st, 2007 at 11:21 am
Because recent college international relations undergraduates have so many life experiences to pass on to their clients I can see why she would be a valued asset. Yeah right.
The usual McKinsey path is 5+ years of work experience, then on to a top tier MBA program- Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, MIT.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:44 pm
A solid math or physics PhD, or Rhodes/Marshall/Fulbright with a first-class humanities or social studies master’s thesis, easily punches the work plus MBA card, at McKinsey even more than at Accenture and the other second-tier firms. An Oxford MLit or MPhil is esteemed far above any business degree in later life at the boardroom and partnership level; above the cubicle floors, higher education is a signaling mechanism and a recreational consumption good.
So at most all that family ties are buying here is a pass on not having won the fellowship, and therefore having spent her year in drafty UK college rooms on her own dime. Under the circumstances, there are extramural fellowships (maybe not top tier, but Gates/Mitchell/Cooke/Gilman/Bosch/etc.) she could surely have walked on and collected; not needing the money, it does her modest credit that she didn’t hog one.
The name obviously guaranteed her a sympathetic honest look. The rest probably didn’t require even one influential phone call.
July 31st, 2007 at 2:56 pm
[quote comment="70521"]
The name obviously guaranteed her a sympathetic honest look. [/quote]
Yes, I’m sure that that’s all the name contributed.
July 31st, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I just bounced this off a classmate (physics PhD and tenure, McKinsey associate, now middleweight oil company CEO) who knows the inside track. He says “daughter of a Rhodes scholar” would have been worth about a field goal plus one extra time out, and “daughter of two US presidents” maybe the coin toss.
That influential phone call, though? Don’t try it! McKinsey is a funny place.
July 31st, 2007 at 4:15 pm
[quote comment="70539"]
That influential phone call, though? [/quote]
I never suggested, nor do I believe, that one was made.
What would be the point?
To do it conveys the signal that “with our asymmetric information, we have reason to believe that she won’t get in on either her merits alone, or her merits and her name”.
…which is a pretty damning statement.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:07 am
Joshua said:
“A solid math or physics PhD, or Rhodes/Marshall/Fulbright with a first-class humanities or social studies master’s thesis, easily punches the work plus MBA card, at McKinsey even more than at Accenture and the other second-tier firms.”
So are you saying Chelsea has any of these accomplishments?
August 1st, 2007 at 1:21 am
So are you saying Chelsea has any of these accomplishments?
I thought I was quite clear; she read an MPhil with distinction at University College, Oxford, but she neither applied for nor received one of the usual fellowships to get there. The overseas endowments ask about need in the interviews, unlike the NSF and Hertz, so it would have been pretty brassy for her to apply. As I said, her father’s Rhodes does count a bit at McKinsey, certainly more than his later endeavors. They run their business that way; it seems to work.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Maybe you’re being clear and I’m just being dense? When I trim out the fancy footwork (refuting phone calls no one accused anyone of making, defending business models not under attack, sports analogies that went way over my head, etc.), it sounds like what you’re saying is that McKinsey typically hires folks with a humanities major / master’s combo. Maybe they do – what do I know? – but if there are qualifications to your “yes, that’s what I was saying”, then I think we’re back to Travis’ initial observation. Aren’t we?
BTW, I think what Travis is implying is even more true now since she’s moved on from McKinsey to some hedge fund or other. If you’re hoping to avoid regulatory attention, hiring people who politically connected at both the state and national level is probably not a bad move.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:27 pm
[quote comment="70689"]Joshua said:
“A solid math or physics PhD, or Rhodes/Marshall/Fulbright with a first-class humanities or social studies master’s thesis, easily punches the work plus MBA card, at McKinsey even more than at Accenture and the other second-tier firms.”
So are you saying Chelsea has any of these accomplishments?[/quote]
Joshua responds “no, I was being clear…”, but I don’t think he was.
Chelsea has background X. Josh then says “if you had background Y…”…which Chellsea DOES NOT HAVE. Winning a Fulbright scholarship is a signal of merit. Paying your way to Oxford is – at best – a signal of lesser merit (and, if your dad is a former president of the US, may not signal anything beyond “this person does not drool”).
As with affirmative action of the racial variety, affirmative action to help the children of presidents (and, can we all agree that at least in theory such kids are going to find the rails greased a bit for them?) likewise makes it difficult to figure out what has been earned on merit and what has not.
August 1st, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Joshua, one place you lost me:
1. To some extent, these scholarships take need into account
2. A daughter of a US president isn’t needy, so they wouldn’t have given it to her
3. From 1 and 2, somehow, we must assume prospective employers will give her credit for having received one anyway?
Does anyone who can’t plead need get the same assumption from prospective employers? Or just the politically connected?
August 1st, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Maybe you’re being clear and I’m just being dense?
I’ll try once more. Management consulting houses typically require evidence of executive-caliber ability relevant to their practice. At the entry tier, they just want high board scores, GPA, and a prestige BA diploma; Anderson/Accenture actually has a point system that determines your starting salary and initial pecking order slot, based in large part on the caliber of your school. These jobs are up-or-out, typically after two years of very long hours and with a 2/3 attrition rate. Each tier is “equivalent” to about three to five years of distinguished relevant life experience outside the firm.
There is another track which takes you straight into the third tier, which is approximately MBA level. (Your chance of getting here by internal promotion would be about 1 in 10, and your chance of getting from here to partner, the fifth tier, without a stint running a company is also about 1 in 10.) McKinsey, uniquely, basically starts at this level.
The criterion, again, is evidence of ability, not actual achievement, and is highly socially constructed. The most common track would be (preferably top) college, five years of work, and a top MBA or quick finance PhD. Other tracks that make obvious sense for specialized fields include hard-science PhD, or JD with field experience in international relations or patent law. Precocious CFO or COO might work, too, if you really made it fly before age 25. (A dotcom CTO or CEO is more likely to be tapped for partner, six years later after cashing out.)
One highly non-obvious track, valued considerably higher than the thundering MBA herd, is Oxbridge scholar in something pensive yet elusively relevant. For some reason, a year or two amid the dreamy spires converts a top American BA into executive potential. Most of the value here is signaling and scarcity, so there are caveats. I don’t understand them all in perfect detail, but they clearly include:
(1) Only Oxford, Cambridge, and possibly Edinburgh and Trinity Dublin, count. Well, maybe LSE; I imagine McKinsey wants to have one brilliant young Marxist on call at any given time.
(2) Your trajectory has to describe an unbroken arc of high promise, no second chances.
(3) You have to spin the tale. Rhodes and Fulbright interviews are the audition. Coming back from England, you’d better be able to explain how the works of Spenser and your high-school volunteer stint in rural Mississippi are going to help us expand cellphone infrastructure in western Brazil, with conviction and without missing a beat. What they’re looking for is the promise that at age 45 you will dominate a corporate boardroom just by walking to the head of the table, and that’s a job for the whole man. Watch Bill Clinton do it; it’s his sole marketable skill, but he’s one in ten million. What McKinsey sells is future leaders at your service; even among actual proven leaders, only a minority have it. It’s all perception.
Now, Chelsea Clinton is an exception, but “exception” is a normal part of the job description here. Her honors and thesis at Stanford make part of the scarcity cut; there were surely Marshall scholars, and perhaps a majority of 2nd-rung fellows her year, who won their fellowships on less. Getting an Oxbridge slot usually reserved for the big fellowships counts for more. The actual residency in the UK and the MPhil/MLit thesis don’t really matter, though it’s part of the tale and she’d need to be able to tell it superbly. The fact that her dad was a Rhodes scholar counts twice: once because it signals that she’s been raised as a player, and twice because it’s given him a life which gives her endless material to play from.
The rest all sits on her. If she can’t give a spellbinding personal interview out of all that (for “rural Mississippi,” substitute “when Bernadette Chirac asked me”), McKinsey couldn’t care less. If she can, she’s got most of the credentials, and an easy plausible story why she didn’t sit through a semester of Fulbright interviews the fall her mother was running for the US Senate, just to save her parents in tuition over two years what Chelsea raises when she stops by for appetizers at one fundraising dinner.
So yes, Travis has a point that “who you know” is necessary grist for her mill here (as “broken home” no doubt was for her dad), but it strains everything I know about the rarefied world of elite management consulting to suggest that the teaser alone adds up to saleable product. George W. Bush at the same age would have been blocked at least four times between college graduation and this job offer, and there aren’t enough chips in all of Texas to cash in for a free pass. (So would Al Gore.) McKinsey cannot afford to have Arbusto Energy tied to its neck. (With his active contributions to the boards of Google and Apple, the post-political Gore could probably now join McKinsey as a partner, though it’s hard to see why he would. If he’d done the same at Worldcom and Dell, no sale.)
Up or out is only to be expected after a couple of years at McKinsey; I doubt she was in it to make partner. Hedge fund is at best a lateral move, since she’s neither a trader nor a quant. The NYT suggests she’s in that for the money, which I can easily believe if she wants financial independence out of the way quickly on her way to accomplishing something else.
August 1st, 2007 at 3:07 pm
Does anyone who can’t plead need get the same assumption from prospective employers? Or just the politically connected?
I don’t know about prospective employers as a class; probably not. For McKinsey, the only answer is “tell us why you think so.”
I interview each year for my alma mater, and we are constantly reinforced to rely heavily on this same standard. It doesn’t even slightly surprise me that other schools with comparable entering class scores win one UK extramural fellowship for every 10 or 20 of ours, nor that future leadership in many life fields correlates at similarly disproportionate rates. Sure, it’s the “old network,” but the reason it endures is that we find them in the first generation. Two years ago we had a kid with 1150 SATs and second-decile grades at an average school, who was a dead lock certain admit after a jawdropping 90-minute interview.
I wrote him up fair, he got in, and you’ll know his name in twenty years. I have no idea where or in what context.
August 1st, 2007 at 3:25 pm
Travis writes:
Winning a Fulbright scholarship is a signal of merit. Paying your way to Oxford is – at best – a signal of lesser merit (and, if your dad is a former president of the US, may not signal anything beyond “this person does not drool”).
Ah, I see. Part of the confusion lies here: you can’t just apply as a US citizen to have the UK give you a free master’s degree at taxpayer expense and rent you historic college rooms. The exception involved is practically a diplomatic matter; there are very few slots for Americans and Canadians. The fellowship pays your living expenses, typically under $15k per year, but a residential college has to actually invite you to read. John Harvard’s old college, Emmanuel at Cambridge, for instance, has one room and one slot reserved just for the American daughter university. Cecil Rhodes rates 32 of them scattered across the Oxford and Cambridge colleges; John Marshall about 40. I don’t know how many wildcard slots like Chelsea Clinton’s there are in any one year, but it can’t be above the low double digits. If you drool, your last name had better be Hawking.
October 10th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Ha! A mutual friend reminded me today of a former housemate of mine, one class below, whom I knew only slightly. She followed roughly this trajectory, with only a magna thesis followed by an abbreviated stint (no degree) at Balliol, Oxford and thence into the diplomatic circuit. Very sharp girl, amazingly well spoken. But she ended up a stay-at-home mom.
June 29th, 2008 at 1:58 am
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