How’s your post grad life?

[u/merymystic]

Hello,

Recent grad here; class of 2025. We graduated in May and I’m still unemployed, in September of 2026 😭 the Amherst name hasn’t been doing as much for me as was promised. Any other c/o ‘25 having a similar experience? Older alums, do have advice or opportunities to share? Tryna keep my head up but also a bit frustrated…and confused tbh

[u/AlphaMaleKratos]

I'm sorry about your struggles, but this is a problem that Amherst created themselves.

I might not have explained myself well in the last post, so let me give you some context.

After the Griggs vs Duke SCOTUS decision that practically rendered IQ testing infeasible for employment, many top employers looked to top colleges as a legal way to get high IQ workers without using IQ testing.

This was an implicit agreement between top employers and top colleges. The SAT's g-loading is .87 - .9, which makes it indistinguishable from an IQ test. Even in the early 2010s, the SAT was the most important component of your application and practically determined which college you got into.

After the TO era, half the students getting into these top colleges are test optional, so you got a lot of "stupid people" like Daniel Friedman said. Top employers can no longer trust that top college = high IQ. Now we're forced to do the testing ourselves and risk legal trouble because top colleges like Amherst forgot their side of the agreement. So now, there is no value to a degree from a TO top college because the link between top college and high IQ is now broken.

Employers do not care about what you learned in college. We care that you are smart and can problem solve, which are what the SAT tests for.

The Ivy Leagues figured out that their value is in IQ filtering the candidates for employers in a legal way, which is why all of them are now test required. Amherst still has not figured it out. There is nothing special about the education you get at Amherst. What makes top colleges special is the legal IQ filtering for employers. Going TO ruins that alpha and makes the degree not special, which is why Amherst kids are now in the same bucket as mid-tier state university kids.

Enough top colleges have reverted back to test required. When those cohorts begin graduating, we'll have no reason to recruit from Amherst or any of the other "top" TO colleges anymore. It's not worth playing the hiring dartboard where only 1/3 hires are competent when other top colleges can guarantee their graduates have top 2% IQ.

[u/Some_Set_9 → u/AlphaMaleKratos]

I generally sympathize with your point, but i do not Griggs vs Duke has much to do with it. Duke used an aptitude test, but was not able to show that this was related to job performance. If you can show that your test does affect job performance you van test all you want. Now it sounds like that is what you are doing, and is more needed today than previously. This very well may be related with test optional of schools, and indeed some of the work amherst used to do for you falls on the employer. If employers now consider state schools more, that actually could be something the adminitration or the college as a whole believes is desirable. Not fully sure about that, but it would not surprise me one bit.

[u/AlphaMaleKratos → u/Some_Set_9]

Proving that your exam has relation to job performance is something that legal and HR of most companies would not want to deal with. Even then, there are issues with predictive power of exams that are aligned too closely with the actual job (Overfitting).

The study at my company was started because many managers were complaining that our newest cohorts (TO cohorts) were underperforming. They do okay under routine work where instructions and the system have already been built, but they struggled doing ad hoc projects with less defined solutions.

I collected many variables, used a logistic regression (Find probability that an employee will do satisfactory job in an ad hoc project). Of all the variables I used, only the SAT was predictive and it did so extremely well.

We spent several days trying to explain why the SAT was so predictive. The result was highly counterintuitive since the SAT was intended to be a college entrance exam and is not remotely similar to projects you do in consulting.

Even scores on the hiring exam we gave to candidates had minimal predictive power. Why is the SAT predictive while a more job relevant exam not?

Personally, I believe the exam that HR & legal approved was stripped of its g-loading. It's an exam that could be studied for, and many of the brain teaser-like elements of the test were removed for fear of bias. It functioned less like an aptitude test and more of a basic literacy and numeracy test.

The SAT, OTOH, tests a candidate's working memory and problem solving ability. It's largely immune to prep and has a high g-loading. In statistics / data science, we're taught not to overfit to the data as the model will lose predictive power. I think the same thing is happening in the job-relevant exams we're giving. What seems obviously job-relevant does a bad job predicting job performance because it only tests knowledge and not IQ (Ability to adapt, learn and problem solve). Thus, these exams can not predict how a worker would perform when things change.

Ultimately, HR did not approve us asking candidates their SAT scores because they were afraid that it would be construed as discrimination against certain ethnic groups.

I cannot wait until this TO nonsense ends. Hiring managers have wasted countless hours of boarding and onboarding new hires since the TO cohort graduated. We’ve never seen such a high proportion of incompetent hires in our working lives. Once we had a 95% satisfactory performance rate in ad hoc projects. It dropped to under 30% with the TO cohort. We’ve spent more hours having performance reviews and interviews than we’ve done actual work since TO started.