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Do Employers Really Care About YourCollege Grades?

I’m a senior editor in charge of Forbes’education coverage.

Harvard: Do inflated grades help studentsget jobs?

The short answer: Yes.

A much-circulated story in The Harvard Crimson thisweek got people talking about how much college grades matter. According tothe Crimson, Jay M. Harris, Harvard’s Dean of Admissions, admittedthat the median grade Harvard awards students is an A-, and the most frequentlygiven grade is an A. Harvard’s grade inflation begs the question: Do highgrades help students get internships and full-time jobs?

Harvard didn’t respond to my questionsabout why the school inflates grades, except to email a prepared statementconfirming that Dean Harris’s comments were accurate and adding an oddlyoff-point assertion: “We believe that learning is the most important thing thathappens in our classrooms.” When I emailed spokesman Jeff Neal, asking him toput me in touch with career services (I wanted to ask whether Harvard’sintention was to help students get jobs), he didn’t answer.

But I did reach career services directorsat four other schools—NewYork University, Brandeis, Rochester Institute of Technology and Purdue—and theyall agree: Employers do care about grades. Students shouldn’t think that justbecause they’ve mounted the admissions hurdle, they can slack off in class. Tobe sure, many small employers won’t expect to see a GPA on a résumé, but mostlarge companies will. According to a survey of more than 200 employersconducted in Aug. and Sept. of this year by the National Association ofColleges and Employers, 67% of companies said they screened candidates by theirGPA. NACE, A Bethlehem, PA non-profit, links college placement offices withemployers. Its members tend to be big companies with an average of 7,500 peopleon the payroll, including Kellogg , Procter& Gamble and Bank ofAmerica .

I also checked in with Dan Black, thedirector of recruiting for the Americas at professional services giant Ernst& Young, which plans to hire 7,000 new U.S. grads in the coming year. Hesays, absolutely, he expects to see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades certainly domatter when we’re recruiting students,” he says. “It’s really one of the onlyindications we have of a student’s technical ability or competence to do thejob.”

The career services directors I spoke toall say that employers want to see a GPA of 3 or higher, and many put the floorat 3.5. But Black says there is no hard cut-off. Even a student with a 2.1could get a job at Ernst & Young if he had a good reason for his lagginggrades, like being called up for military service in the middle of a semester.The applicant with the higher GPA doesn’t always get the job either. Forinstance a student with a 3.2 could beat out an applicant with a 3.9 if thestudent with the lower grades were working 30 hours a week to put himselfthrough school and at the same time serving as class treasurer. “I’m alwayslooking for people who can juggle multiple responsibilities,” says Black.

One thing Black says that startles me: hegets to know the schools where he recruits, like U. Penn., so well that he canevaluate what it means for a student to get a B in a class with an especiallytough professor.

Ernst & Young doesn’t recruit atHarvard because the school doesn’t have a business major but Black says thatany grade inflation hasn’t gotten in the way of his Harvard hires doing a goodjob.

According to Trudy Steinfeld, head ofcareer services at NYU, the companies that care the most about grades areinvestment banks, professional service firms like Ernst & Young andpharmaceutical companies. Even if a student is not applying in one of thoseareas, if he has a GPA over 3.0, she recommends he include the average on hisrésumé. Do include honors like cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, sheadds. Manny Contomanolis, head of career services at Rochester Institute ofTechnology, agrees. He also says it’s important to be honest because at least athird of the time, employers request a copy of a student’s transcript. Black ofErnst & Young agrees. “Nobody gets hired at EY from campus without anofficial transcript.”

At Purdue, career offices head Tim Luzadersays many large manufacturing corporations like General Motors, Ford, JohnDeere and Caterpillar, recruit on campus and they all want to see grades.”Thesee GPA as a threshold to manage their recruitment,” he says.

What should you do if your grades arelousy? There are a few possibilities. At Purdue, students have the advantage ofsome 30 career fairs a year, where they can stand face to face with companyrecruiters and sell themselves. “They can tell their story, whether they wereworking while going to school or whether they had a disastrous freshman yearbut have done better lately,” says Luzader.

Steinfeld agrees that students cancompensate for bad grades with a compelling story which they can put on theirrésumé, like describing an internship where they did an analysis of workflowissues and improved productivity by 20%.

Another fix, suggested by RIT’sContomanolis: If the GPA in your major is better than your overall grades, onlylist that, or list both numbers.

What about small employers or startups? Dothey care about GPA? Not as much. But if your grades are good, go ahead andlist your average on your transcript. Dean Iacovetti, director of recruiting atApprenda, a software company outside Albany, NY, says he doesn’t expect to seeGPAs on résumés, but if he does, and it’s a strong one, he takes notice. “Ifthere’s an individual graduating with a 3.5 from Cornell,” he says, “that’ssomeone I’d like to see.”