How Important Is Your Undergraduate Degree Brand?

Harvard. MIT. Yale. All brand names associated with top quality, top price education, and rightfully so as these institutions repeatedly churn out outstanding graduates (along with a ton of average ones, and a few substandard ones, like any school). That said, as colleges make decisions about who to admit, I’d like to throw out a controversial point of view:

The “brand” of your undergraduate degree is largely irrelevant in today’s marketplace.

Where you go to college is much, much less important to me as a hiring manager and as an executive than what you did while you were in college. Quick backstory – when I was 16, a junior in high school, I was looking around at what colleges I could go to. My parents took me on the summer road trip to visit a bunch of schools, and I submitted applications all over the place. I was admitted into about 80% of the schools I applied to, including Johns Hopkins, RPI, Cornell, and a few others.

In the end, I chose a small liberal arts college not too many people had heard of, Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. What made me turn my back on the “brand name” prestigious schools that had gladly admitted me?

Two things made F&M win out over any other school back then (this was 1993, mind you):

1. Air conditioning in the dorms. I’m a wimp when it comes to heat.

2. Computer networks in the dorms. At most schools at the time, even prominent schools like RPI and MIT, networked dorms were simply not a reality. F&M had made the investment in information technology, and it won the day.

These two things fit my personality and what I wanted to get out of college more than all the brand prestige ever could, and looking back, I wouldn’t change my decision a bit. The experiences I had in college at F&M could not be replicated at another school.

I graduated from F&M in 1997 with a Bachelor’s in Political Science & Government. The degree is largely unused, and has been since the moment Pomp & Circumstance faded from Hartman Green. I immediately took a job in information technology (there was no IT major in college, just computer science) at Sony Electronics, and my studies in political science, as well as the brand of my degree, have been ignored ever since.

What made F&M valuable was not the degree or the brand, but the experiences I had on campus. At F&M, I worked in the theater and took a course in television production, took courses in Islam and Japanese, and generally accumulated different ways to think, for myself and how other people thought.

The point of all this? If you’re choosing a school because it’s the “brand name” school, I urge you to carefully consider whether it’s the best school for YOU, for your personality, for what interests you, and for who you want to become. A lot of the brand name schools tout as a reason to attend their vast alumni networks, and I don’t doubt those networks have value.

Looking at my LinkedIn profile and my Twitter followers, I think my personal network dwarfs the access that the average college graduate has, even from a brand name school. The beauty of new social networks means that no matter what school you go to – or if you never went to college at all – you can still create a powerful network that rivals schools covered in Ivy. That argument, then, that only at a brand name school will you get access to a coveted network, rings false.

Choose the college or university that fits who you are and FEELS good when you visit. Spend a day or two if you can, read the school newspaper, check out the students on Facebook, MySpace, etc. and then make a decision.

A final thought. Your school’s brand, whatever school you choose, is influenced by its graduates. If you are a superstar, when you matriculate with a bachelor’s degree from a brand name school, you’ll be just another addition to their rolls of distinguished alumni. If you matriculate from a smaller, less well known school and make a real splash, you’ll have dramatically more impact on the school and its reputation.

How important is the brand of your undergraduate degree? Utterly irrelevant, especially in a day and age when college graduates in the workforce are a dime a dozen. What you LEARN and DO in college is far more important than where you WENT – and as a hiring manager, I will be looking for what you’ve accomplished and what you can do to make my company better.

Quiz question: how many people in my social media networks had heard of Franklin & Marshall College prior to reading this blog post? Poll below.

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