My wife, who works for a large gasoline company in Silicon Valley to told me that the head of Human Resources skips over any job applicants with a degree from BYU.

The reason given is that two previous IT guys from BYU simply couldn't do the job.

While this is discrimination, when you have hundred of applicants it is possible to skip over people for any reason possible.

Is a BYU degree a negative in the work place? It seems that way in the SF Bay Area.

Comments?

Maybe not discrimination. Other schools with bad reputations get the same treatment, and schools that consistently produce good grads are preferred by employers. It's probably about performance and not religion.

Yes, as much as we all want to hate on BYU, I am a BYU grad in the Bay Area with more than 20 years in the workforce and the vast majority of Church leadership in this area consists of BYU grads who are successful make A LOT of money - they have to in order to afford to live here. I don't think you can make sweeping generalizations just on school choice alone.

It appears to me that the head of the Human Resources is a jerk.

There is a lot of very capable people from BYU who deserve being hired--according to their brains, degree, grades, and capibility. My son-in-law is one of them. He has a winning personally that goes with his good brain, and IBM was one of those companies that sought him to join them.

It is a good idea to be careful of being prejudiced---judge by the person, not just the school. Some companies value BYU employees because of their reputation for being honest and honorable (my son- in law being one of these, with his advanced economics degree). Now, he is at the top of his field, and still sought out by other companies.

Sharapatta,

Actually, I agree with you. What I printed did occur in one of the big gas companies I can't name.

But I think it is more to the point of 200 aplicants for two positions and how particular they can be.

Is a school everything? NO. I attended UCBerkeley and a Cal-state university. I got a better education at Cal State, EB

Thank you

I have not, to my knowledge, been discriminated in this manner and I would think this phenomenon is relatively rare, likely confined to folks that have a particular axe to grind against the Church.

As far as not being capable of doing a particular job because of BYU -- I think it is a stretch to simply say it must be because these folks went to BYU, IMHO. Other obvious factors could have played a role.

Point being - in my active days, I don't recall many struggling and/or underemployed BYU grads in this area.

I'm distressed that my sons' diplomas bear the name of the worst mass murderer in US history up to 9/11.

And I would be afraid that an interviewer may judge them with the same description Richard Dawkins' used for Mitt Romney--"a massively gullible fool!"

Worst mass murderer in U.S. History since 9/11? Seriously, I am no fan of Brigham Young, but do you have some facts or statistics to back that statement up? Are you excluding slave owners or US Army's extermination of Native Americans? If you are talking about the Meadows Mountain Massacre, then one can find numerous examples in American History that far exceeded the number of victims. I am not disagreeing with you that BY was a bad dude, but the statement made seems excessive.

I didn't say "since," I said "up to." And, I'm not talking what armies have done.


http://1857massacre.com/MMM/byoung.htm


I'd wager that historian Will Bagley would agree with me.

Jim Jones?

Brian, the HR guy needs to pull his head out of his ass! He's also probably in violation of a Federal Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) law. Most large employers have strict protocols to insure that they are fair in hiring and that the offer goes to the most qualified individual.

EEO includes posting and publishing positions. Defining minimum criteria and preferred criteria, and sometimes (if it's a high profile position) rationale for why an individual wasn't hired.

And, employers can't ask about religion, national origin, or other personal factors.

I know folks of RfM hate the Y, but organizations are on very thin ice if they discriminate the way you described.

Also, David P. Gardner was the 15th President of The University of California. He was a BYU alumnus.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Gardner

Stay strong, Bro! The Boner.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/14/2017 11:50PM by BYU Boner.

BYU Boner Wrote:
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> Brian, the HR guy needs to pull his head out of
> his ass!

No doubt. Clearly the HR guy is missing on some good employees by using gross generalizations.

What the HR guy is doing, however, isn't a legal problem. Companies can decide not to interview potential candidates based on their education history -- including which college/university they did or didn't attend. It's not very smart, usually, but it is legal.

Now, if the HR guy stated that he was tossing any BYU-graduate resumes because they're mormons, then that *would* be legal trouble...:)

My husband got his Comp Sci degree at BYU and his first job out was as a reference thru my brother. But he did well, was always busy learning new techniques and languages, until his skill became a high demand asset. He left the first for a better work environment, then changed companies again right before the crash. Almost a decade later he is at a top international company earning a good salary but also, transferred into a team with a work ethic and environment that he enjoys.

BYU boner,

What you say is true. But there is much sub rosa discrimination in hiring positions.

Stanford and UCBerkeley seem to get priority in hiring. Because of being local schools? Not sure.

While you cannot ask religion, your college transcripts give it away.

A couple of points that may prove controversial.

First, it is not just the San Francisco Bay Area in which bishops and stake presidents are wealthy. The church has been choosing rich people for such positions for a long time because they are prominent in their local communities and their "success" seems to indicate that God respects them. The fact that Bay Area leaders are rich, meanwhile, does not necessarily mean that a BYU degree is particularly valuable. If the prerequisites for becoming a Stake President include being a BYU graduate and professionally successful, you can't conclude anything about causality.

My other point is that discriminating on the basis of a university degree is not clearly illegal; in fact, it is not even unusual. The big financial institutions, consultancies, and law firms only recruit at a small number of universities. It is rare to find a BYU graduate, or a University of Utah graduate, in those firms unless they have gone on and done additional degrees at more prestigious places.

At "lesser" companies such discrimination happens all the time, too. Employers are within their rights to throw away applications from community colleges, junior colleges, and colleges that they find insufficiently "prestigious," or with which they have had bad experiences, unless they do so on the basis of legally protected characteristics. Race would be one such characteristic, gender identity another, and religious persuasion yet another. But if the company is disregarding BYU degrees for business reasons, as opposed to anti-Mormon prejudice, that practice is probably legal.

In the case Brian describes, with 200 applicants for a couple of jobs, the HR people are going to throw applications away as rapidly as they possibly can--and educational institutions will be used for that purpose. To do otherwise would be a waste of time. It is statistically likely that among those whose applications get trashed for superficial reasons is the candidate who would be the best person for the job. But that does not mean the process is illegal or even wrong from a business perspective. What most companies want for most jobs is "good enough," not "spectacular." HR just wants to avoid hiring someone who will fail.

I'm going to agree with the points Hie, Brian, and Lawyer made. But, I'd add, HR policies have to cover many facets for large organizations, such as--are Federal grants or contracts accepted? A lawyer's delight is when an individualize has been discriminated against and the organization has NOT followed its own policies, or the policies violate EEO and other Federal regulations.

Of course, connections, favoritism, and sadly discrimination are still existent. But, gone are the days when an HR directed can say with impunity, "I'll not put you into this position because men don't do well wth children." A statement issued to a job-seeking male BYU alumnus in Buena Park, California in November 1976. Then again, it may have been my religion :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2017 04:37PM by BYU Boner.

Again, I think you are establishing too high a standard for employers. The one specific instance you mention is gender--a man with children--and that involves a constitutionally protected characteristic. "EEO and other federal regulations," likewise, include things like race, religion, age, etc. That's about it. Moreover, a company can usually violate its own policies as long as it does not contravene the legally enshrined rights of specifically protected groups. In fact, a court normally won't even hear a case about discrimination unless it is framed as a violation of those groups' enumerated rights or bribery.

University background is not a protected category. Employing "connections, favoritism and prejudice" is an HR division's job. Companies explicitly hire people with connections in, say, China if that is a market they want to enter. They explicitly favor people from certain colleges and with certain resumes, and disregard people without those backgrounds.

I have literally seen a company state openly that it did not want people from one of the great Bay Area universities because, in that firm's experience, its graduates generally wanted to leave NYC and go back to California as soon as possible. That same company openly said that it was not interested in people from any but five universities because those were the only places that produced people who were, without exception, capable of the work. Even beauty is an acceptable basis for preferring one prospect over another if that is a prerequisite for the job--in restaurants, modeling companies, etc.

The exceptions, again, are when the constitution or law specifically protects certain categories of people. There equity is required. Almost anything else is legally acceptable.

I'm not a lawyer. You know the law better than I do! I probably did set the bar too high for fairness in corporate hiring practices.

I don't really disagree with you about fairness, Boner.

It's just that as a practical matter employers can't afford to give everyone an equal chance. Using Brian's example, can you imagine the cost of looking equally at each of 200 applications for just two jobs? The HR department would grind to a halt--either that or it would have to be staffed like the federal government. So employers use shortcuts like college or field of study, etc., to make their decisions.

We do the same sort of shortcutting in our personal lives. When hiring people, we generally look to things like credentials, reputation, experience rather than evaluating potential employee individually and equally. In some percentage of situations that is unfair to the people we overlook, one or more of whom may be better than the person with the most sterling resume. But we are busy and can't spend lots of time on things like choosing a doctor, dentist, accountant, hairdresser, housekeeper, gardener, math tutor, etc., from the pool of people who would like our business. So we go by things like reputation which are proxies for actual capability, perhaps correct 80% of the time but surely not always.

All of this is discrimination, of course. But most forms of discrimination are legal even though that is highly unfair to a lot of people, including almost certainly everyone on this board at one time or another.

Thank you for your posts and taking time to explain things so well! I learned a lot from what you've written, "lawyer!" My very best wishes, and I'd hope you'd post more.

That's the reality and is not necessarily discrimination.

The same is true of work experience at a respected firm or a minor discredited one.

Are these attributes always indicative of competence? No, but neither is it discrimination to depend on them.

I don't think i could hire a TBM, it's more than just the school. I don't think i could deal with the invites to family home evening or them leaving JS testi-money pamphlets around, or hearing them explain that the death of a loved one is ok because i they'll be in a better place hearing a message about celestial swinging.

There are so many good schools and candidates, why pick anyone from anywhere with any flags that indicate potential problems.

My brother had certain colleges that he preferred to hire from and some he preferred not to hire from based on his prior experience with how the school's graduates performed for his company.

A friend of mine who was an investment analyst on Wall Street told me that he did not get all of the career opportunities he had hoped for due to not having an Ivy League undergraduate degree.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2017 08:23AM by summer.

This is nuts. You are jumping to a sweeping conclusion about all BYU degrees based on one hearsay comment that you don't even know to be true.

He might be referring to one, some or all of them.

Yes,in my opinion, a BYU degree is highly respected. Our daughter graduated from there and applied for an HR position for a large nationwide company and wanted to live and work in southern California. Within a couple days, she had a phone interview, then they wanted to interview her in person, so she flew down 3 days later, and they hired her that same day after the interview. Our son in law graduated from the "Y", with a degree in Business and shortly afterward went on to receive his master's from there also. He is making a six figure income now.

valkyriequeen Wrote:
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> Yes,in my opinion, a BYU degree is highly
> respected.

Some BYU degrees are "respected," some aren't.
Business/law degrees from the Y generally are.
Science degrees generally aren't. For very good reasons.
The rest...it probably depends more on the person with the degree than the degree or its origin. :)

I'd quibble about the science degrees. Back in the Pleistocene, when I was an undergrad, I got a degree in math with a side order of CS and EE. I thought there were some pretty impressive engineering projects going on, especially considering that BYU is not a research university. I thought the undergrad engineering programs were well respected. They certainly served me well.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2017 03:54PM by Brother Of Jerry.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
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> I'd quibble about the science degrees.

Good quibble.
CS and engineering are just fine.
Biology is especially suspect, chemistry and some others as well. Deserved or not.

And that's the thing -- "officially" BYU doesn't teach "young earth creationism" in its biology classes, but that's the *impression* lots of people out in hiring land have -- that they do. And that spills over into the other science degrees as well, because often people hiring don't have the time or motivation to do up to date research on what BYU is or isn't teaching, and they go by what they've heard.

I didn't say it was fair :)

Networks of alumni & all that. So to this human resource s person BYU is not part of their network.

I've heard rumors that rm s were frequently hired by government agencies like the FBI.... I don't really know if this is actually so. Would that be network recommending or hiring friends, or a group hiring folks easy to reprogram for roles, who were trained to be all in, to give everything they wouldn't care if they were under cover they'd already done 2 years in a pose/assumed role.
And they were sincere, or could be driven through discomfort by idealistic commitment already and could do it again (under different circumstances or needs for an employer.) When authenticity is experienced or defined by a life role and commitment to doing it well, not defined inherently individually. Maybe there are some employers who are looking for that and want it desperately.

Possibly this human resource person needs a problem solver or litigation avoidant note how to get around laws corporate employee, as opposed to a black and white concrete young l d s idealist.

I do not think it is illegal to call back applicants from preferred college programs, that is entirely different than religious discrimination. Why else would teens and parents give everything for certain college admittance !

Really byu grads will be preferentially interviewed and hired in their own alumni network, who are we kidding? They have plenty of support one human resource department who prefers other alumni networks is just how the world goes. I don't think it means anything. For instance, do you think a math or physics grad student would make a greatly obedient submissive to orders compliant maid, or factory worker for long? Problem solvers need to be hired by people with problems to fix or avoid, compliant obedient folks need to be hired by people where all the decisions are made for them, where all the thinking is done. Don't worry! Surely byu alum network is sufficient to hire everyone and get them all into ththe right jobs.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2017 04:31PM by paintinginthewin.

Yes, the Mormon candidate in Utah was CIA or something. I heard they're preferred because they're good at following orders without question.

Actually,the reason they were preferred is because they often had lived few places,had a little bit of foreign experience,spoke a foreign language and easily passed a top secret security clearance. Same goes for the FBI.

However,Afghanistan and Iraq have produced thousands of well qualified veterans that already have security clearances that fit even better into their organizations.

Mormons aren't as in demand as they once were.

I think the employer may be using that as an excuse. While his real reason is religious discrimination.

No one can accuse him of discrimination if he says the school isn't preparing them for the workforce.

It sounds like religious bias to me.

BYU is not a top tier school. But it isn't rinky dink either. It has pretty high standards to be accepted, especially at BYU-Provo.

Does anyone really carry their degree around as part of their CV? Don't they just give the what, where, when, and how?

Joking, legality, and ethics aside, I don't know that I would want to work for someone who discounted potential employees in such a manner. I'd like to think that workplace diversity is a benefit and such policies could seriously hinder diversity.

FD, I have a BYU degree.

Those who mentioned practicality are correct. A secular example:

When I was hired by the city, there were about 500 applicants for 4 positions. They'd use things like penmanship to weed out applicants at the beginning even though programmers rarely need to write anything by hand. Personality was a consideration for everyone who was interviewed because they didn't want any assholes who would make life difficult. That was legal because those criteria aren't in the list of protected grounds for discrimination in the province.

My supervisor told me what happened after I was hired. They also told unsuccessful candidates who the successful candidates were. They got ignorant phone calls from some of them, which proved the city right. We had all gone to the same school and knew each other, so school wasn't a consideration in this case. Now the only thing they tell unsuccessful candidates is that they didn't get the job.