St John’s Hiring Pause & Budget Challenges

Did someone on here really just say or imply, "screw the standards"? That's outright scary. Do you realize how many alums are embarrassed of the rankings and the reputation? When you let in a bunch of students who have no business in college to begin with, you dilute the pool of truly qualified students who want to be as competitive as possible. The public perception tanks and suddenly your alums by in large will not donate. There are real consequences of having no standards. By comparison, it's like being in the AAC where the bottom drags the conference down vs. the Big East where it's strong from top to bottom. Reputation and perception matters. How do you think parents start suggesting schools to their kids they want to be as successful as possible? They go off which schools have a certain level of prestige and are known for being competitive. It would help us much more if we were seen as more of a reach school vs. a safety school for undergrads. We are bare bottom in the conference academically. You can dress that up any way you like and use buzz words and all that, but at the end of the day it still exists.
 
[quote="Proud Alumn" post=366838]Yes these are good things but nothing that will substantially change the reputation of the school as long as we keep enrolling a large percentage of bottom-half of their class and bottom-half SAT score students.[/quote]

Reputation? Sorry but these rankings are by and large the product of a flawed system that allowed Northeastern to game the results without proportionately improving the quality of education.

If you and I were in a debate, I would challenge you to name 3 substantive things beyond average sat score of the freshman class to differentiate sju from say syracuse, or marist, or even boston university for that matter.

You likely couldn't do it, because of your swipe at reputation, our pharmacy school students average above 1400 on the sat, which would get them into bc, Villanova, or holy cross. Jsj could tell you better, but we have an impressive number of Fulbright scholars. Jsj is the chair of the Tobin school of business and the improvement in that building alone are stunning. For years we maligned a certain large donor who quietly used his contacts at Goldman sachs to provide dozens of internships and ft positions for sju students.[/quote]

Your are throwing a lot on the wall there but nothing sticks. I’m not just talking about rankings. The school’s reputation is just not very good. In my industry within the world of finance, SJU grads just don’t get considered for the top level jobs at the top level firms. I would say that SJU grads probably struggle to get as much consideration as Pace grads. Every school has the occasional regular success story. That shouldn’t be our indicator of success. Getting the bulk of our grads opportunities for good to great jobs should be a goal.
Our pharmacy school students may have an average 1400 SAT score. Ok. Relative to other pharmacy schools in the country SJU is ranked in the bottom half. The school everyone points to as being such a standout is relatively bottom half.
I said from the beginning that SJU has thousands of good to great students. I think many of the high school students with elite grades who go to SJU do so with scholarship and financial considerations as a prominent factor. Which is terrific that SJU offers this type of assistance so students can attend. What isn’t wonderful are the far too many students with poor grades who still get in.[/quote]

I commend alums like Beast and JSJ who contribute vast amount of time and money to alma mater. That said, to your comments, I agree that highlighting some accomplishments in a very large urban university does not change public perception based on other very important factors like retention and graduation rates, ranking of key university programs nationally, graduate research initiatives, etc.
While I fully support the mission to educate children of the poor and immigrant families, those students being admitted to St. John's with below B averages and low SAT scores are contributing an disproportionate number of non graduating students. The business model is still tuition driven at all costs and I am not sure the current president has improved the model very much. While it is great to get Catholic school kids admitted that should be a very low goal for any elite Catholic university. Those students may be from the bottom 50 percent of their class. The admission of 30 students from Townsend Harris is great but the majority of those students go to St. John's on full rides and are non-Catholic. The goal is to admit more highly qualified students who do not need financial aid to survive. Only improving public perception will attract that type of student. So, while all of you are right to some extent, the president should have found a way to improve that perception and quite frankly no one I have discussed this with thinks he has and while some inside the administration's circle may circle the wagons to highlight the positives the fact remains that being ranked below a Seton Hall or a DePaul or a Providence is not progress.
In the basketball sense it is like those old FOADS from Marillac Hall who still only saw positives in the utter stagnation of the basketball program under the previous staff.
My niece graduated from Townsend and never even bothered to apply because of the perception by most Townsend student advisors who are the best of all the NYC high schools.
 
[quote="Class of 72" post=366895][quote="Proud Alumn" post=366838]Yes these are good things but nothing that will substantially change the reputation of the school as long as we keep enrolling a large percentage of bottom-half of their class and bottom-half SAT score students.[/quote]

Reputation? Sorry but these rankings are by and large the product of a flawed system that allowed Northeastern to game the results without proportionately improving the quality of education.

If you and I were in a debate, I would challenge you to name 3 substantive things beyond average sat score of the freshman class to differentiate sju from say syracuse, or marist, or even boston university for that matter.

You likely couldn't do it, because of your swipe at reputation, our pharmacy school students average above 1400 on the sat, which would get them into bc, Villanova, or holy cross. Jsj could tell you better, but we have an impressive number of Fulbright scholars. Jsj is the chair of the Tobin school of business and the improvement in that building alone are stunning. For years we maligned a certain large donor who quietly used his contacts at Goldman sachs to provide dozens of internships and ft positions for sju students.[/quote]

Your are throwing a lot on the wall there but nothing sticks. I’m not just talking about rankings. The school’s reputation is just not very good. In my industry within the world of finance, SJU grads just don’t get considered for the top level jobs at the top level firms. I would say that SJU grads probably struggle to get as much consideration as Pace grads. Every school has the occasional regular success story. That shouldn’t be our indicator of success. Getting the bulk of our grads opportunities for good to great jobs should be a goal.
Our pharmacy school students may have an average 1400 SAT score. Ok. Relative to other pharmacy schools in the country SJU is ranked in the bottom half. The school everyone points to as being such a standout is relatively bottom half.
I said from the beginning that SJU has thousands of good to great students. I think many of the high school students with elite grades who go to SJU do so with scholarship and financial considerations as a prominent factor. Which is terrific that SJU offers this type of assistance so students can attend. What isn’t wonderful are the far too many students with poor grades who still get in.[/quote]

I commend alums like Beast and JSJ who contribute vast amount of time and money to alma mater. That said, to your comments, I agree that highlighting some accomplishments in a very large urban university does not change public perception based on other very important factors like retention and graduation rates, ranking of key university programs nationally, graduate research initiatives, etc.
While I fully support the mission to educate children of the poor and immigrant families, those students being admitted to St. John's with below B averages and low SAT scores are contributing an disproportionate number of non graduating students. The business model is still tuition driven at all costs and I am not sure the current president has improved the model very much. While it is great to get Catholic school kids admitted that should be a very low goal for any elite Catholic university. Those students may be from the bottom 50 percent of their class. The admission of 30 students from Townsend Harris is great but the majority of those students go to St. John's on full rides and are non-Catholic. The goal is to admit more highly qualified students who do not need financial aid to survive. Only improving public perception will attract that type of student. So, while all of you are right to some extent, the president should have found a way to improve that perception and quite frankly no one I have discussed this with thinks he has and while some inside the administration's circle may circle the wagons to highlight the positives the fact remains that being ranked below a Seton Hall or a DePaul or a Providence is not progress.
In the basketball sense it is like those old FOADS from Marillac Hall who still only saw positives in the utter stagnation of the basketball program under the previous staff.
My niece graduated from Townsend and never even bothered to apply because of the perception by most Townsend student advisors who are the best of all the NYC high schools.[/quote]

I’m, I can’t speak about the Townsend part but you are so wrong about the finance and top investment jobs. I can only talk about my class but I know at least 20 of my classmates works in investment banking ( in front office roles), the accountant weirdos do their big 4 thing (big 6 if add BDO & RSM) and those risk management people do whatever. Again, I can’t challenge you on everything else but us business graduates are doing fine.

Bringing up my sister again ( which is how I can stay current on business school affairs) is currently being asked for interviews for Morgan Stanley (S&T), Facebook and Google for financial analyst positions (Sidenote a lot of Finance students are headed to Tech with their expansion happening) , Financial Consulting for Deloitte and General Consulting for Protiviti. I sense she’s going to go back to Google ( Her Sophomore year internship was finance for YouTube). Again, everything else you could be spot on but getting the positions from top firms I challenge that.

For transparency reasons I did my summer Financial internship at the Federal Reserve but I had the opportunity to work investment banking for Citi. The only reason I didn’t take the Citi interview is because I saw how my friend William ( who did investment banking for wells Fargo and burned out) cried how much he hated it. That’s the only reason I’m not doing investment banking at a top firm right now.
 
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I can speak to my industry; I’m not as knowledgeable on the hiring by big tech firms. In investment banking and asset management, SJU grads don’t get the consideration of grads of other schools for the top entry level positions. They will to some extent for operational, administrative, or assistant (ex wealth management) positions but not the high-level analyst positions at the top firms. In accounting I hope we do still get placement although our numbers had gotten worse some years ago and our CPA pass rate was terrible. I don’t know if that has improved in recent years.
 
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