What School Did You Go To?

In Ireland, there's a common question you still get asked. Not university. Secondary school. I am over fifty and it still comes up, in a way that tells me exactly what it was always doing. It was never really a question about education. It was a question about where you started.

I want to talk about a different version of that same question. Not secondary school this time. University. It is the CV screen.

Every market has its own version of the list. In the US it is Ivy League. In the UK it is Russell Group. In France it is Sorbonne, ESSEC, Sciences Po (this list is indicative, not exhaustive, and I am sure I have missed others). Every country has built its own shorthand for the same idea, that a small number of institutions can stand in for judgment about a person's capability before anyone has read a single line about what they actually did with their career.

I am going to call this what it is. Snobbery. Nobody puts it in a job description. It gets treated as a screening criterion instead.

To be clear about what I am not saying. This is not about discrediting anyone's place. It is about what happens next, when that name on a CV gets treated as the whole story about a person, rather than one early chapter in it.

Here is what that shorthand assumes. That getting into one of those institutions was mostly about ability, full stop. It wasn't, not entirely, and anyone who has worked in admissions or hiring long enough knows it. Access is shaped by income. By geography, by which town or country someone happened to grow up in. By whether anyone in the family had done this before and could tell them which boxes needed ticking, which essay to write, which door to knock on. Yes, there are scholarships. But let's be clear, the numbers are limited, and they do not close the gap they are meant to close.

None of that has anything to do with what someone is capable of at thirty, or forty, or fifty. It has everything to do with the circumstances they were born into, who their parents were, where they happened to land. Screening a CV by university name is asking the corporate version of what school did you go to, and getting the same answer it always gave. Not who is this person now.

I have screened thousands of CVs across my career, in HR leadership and now in search. Some of the strongest people I have placed came through universities nobody on the hiring panel would recognise. Their careers, once someone actually read them, told a stronger story than half the shortlist above them. I have also watched capable people filtered out before anyone read that far, because the name at the top did not match what the company was looking for.

Hiring only from a small circle of familiar universities is an old boys club by another name, whatever it happens to call itself in a given country or industry. It overlooks exactly the people this piece is about, the ones who never had that opportunity in the first place, not because they lacked the ability, but because of where they started. Some of the strongest hires I have made came from outside that circle entirely.

I still get asked what school I went to, more than three decades after it stopped telling anyone anything useful about me. Every CV screened for the right university name is asking the same question, in a newer suit, and calling it standards instead of what it actually is.

What school did you go to?

Just kidding. But I would like to know what you think.