John Kasich and the Fading Republican Establishment
But she was also interested in how the most prestigious banks, consultancies, and law firms were responding to pressures to make their companies more racially and culturally diverse. Rivera embedded with corporate recruiters working élite campuses, interviewed the partners, canvassed the applicants. She found that even when the members of firm’s leadership were looking for diversity, they were drawn to candidates whose experiences mostly matched their own. Investment banks were thrilled to find an African-American candidate they wanted to hire, but she was more likely to be a Princeton midfielder than the valedictorian at Spelman.
.. Recruiters, Rivera found, tended to have an exceptionally narrow idea of what qualified a candidate as élite. One partner told her, “Someone will show up and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School], but I am an engineer at MIT and I heard about this fair, and I wanted to come and meet you in New York.’ God bless him for the effort, but it’s just not going to work.” When recruiters considered a candidate beyond an exceptionally small group of élite schools, it was often because the candidate had a personal connection with someone at the firm, and those candidates “were almost exclusively white and from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds.” One of Rivera’s conclusions was that the system of selection in these firms was not what we would call a meritocracy but rather something more confined and particular: a system of individual sponsorship, in which the élites hand-pick their successors.
.. Kasich told a voter that the response to inequality was not to raise taxes but to encourage workers to develop more skills. A middle-aged woman stood up in the crowd, sounding astonished, and asked if Kasich was “seriously suggesting” that; even for people she knew with master’s degrees, she said, it could be hard to find work. Kasich suggested that maybe their degrees were of the wrong kind, or simply wrong for the region. Maybe they needed to move.