Download Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs AudioBook Free
Americans are trained to assume that upward mobility can be done for anyone who is ready to work hard, no matter their social position. Yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree requires listeners behind the closed down entrances of top-tier investment banking companies, consulting companies, and law companies to reveal the reality about who really gets chosen for the nation's highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn't, and just why. Drawing on ratings of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring procedures at some of America's most exclusive companies, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers specify and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job candidates from economically privileged backgrounds. She unveils how decision makers attract from ideas about skill - what it is, what best impulses it, and would you (and will not) own it - that are deeply rooted in sociable class. Showing the "right stuff" that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, sociable, and social resources for the candidates and their parents. Challenging our most valued beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as an even playing field, Pedigree exposes the category biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how sociable status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economical ladder.
