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BDo Employers Really Care About Your College Grades?

I’ma senior editor in charge of Forbes’ education coverage.

Harvard: Do inflated grades helpstudents get jobs?

The short answer: Yes.

A much-circulated story in The HarvardCrimson this week got people talking about how much college gradesmatter. According to the Crimson, Jay M. Harris, Harvard’s Dean ofAdmissions, admitted that the median grade Harvard awards students is an A-,and the most frequently given grade is an A. Harvard’s grade inflation begs thequestion: Do high grades help students get internships and full-time jobs?

Harvard didn’t respond to my questions about why the schoolinflates grades, except to email a prepared statement confirming that DeanHarris’s comments were accurate and adding an oddly off-point assertion: “Webelieve that learning is the most important thing that happens in ourclassrooms.” When I emailed spokesman Jeff Neal, asking him to put me in touchwith career services (I wanted to ask whether Harvard’s intention was to helpstudents get jobs), he didn’t answer.

But I did reach career services directors at four other schools—New York University,Brandeis, Rochester Institute of Technology andPurdue—and they all agree: Employers do care about grades. Students shouldn’tthink that just because they’ve mounted the admissions hurdle, they can slackoff in class. To be sure, many small employers won’t expect to see a GPA on arésumé, but most large companies will. According to a survey of more than 200employers conducted in Aug. and Sept. of this year by the National Associationof Colleges and Employers, 67% of companies said they screened candidates bytheir GPA. NACE, A Bethlehem, PA non-profit, links college placement officeswith employers. Its members tend to be big companies with an average of 7,500people on the payroll, including Kellogg , Procter & Gamble and Bank of America .

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I also checked in with Dan Black, the director of recruiting forthe Americas at professional services giant Ernst & Young, which plans tohire 7,000 new U.S. grads in the coming year. He says, absolutely, he expectsto see a GPA on a résumé. “Grades certainly do matter when we’re recruitingstudents,” he says. “It’s really one of the only indications we have of astudent’s technical ability or competence to do the job.”

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The career services directors I spoke to all say that employerswant to see a GPA of 3 or higher, and many put the floor at 3.5. But Black saysthere is no hard cut-off. Even a student with a 2.1 could get a job at Ernst& Young if he had a good reason for his lagging grades, like being calledup for military service in the middle of a semester. The applicant with thehigher GPA doesn’t always get the job either. For instance a student with a 3.2could beat out an applicant with a 3.9 if the student with the lower gradeswere working 30 hours a week to put himself through school and at the same timeserving as class treasurer. “I’m always looking for people who can jugglemultiple responsibilities,” says Black.

One thing Black says that startles me: he gets to know theschools where he recruits, like U. Penn., so well that he can evaluate what itmeans for a student to get a B in a class with an especially tough professor.

Ernst & Young doesn’t recruit at Harvard because the schooldoesn’t have a business major but Black says that any grade inflation hasn’tgotten in the way of his Harvard hires doing a good job.

According to Trudy Steinfeld, head of career services at NYU,the companies that care the most about grades are investment banks,professional service firms like Ernst & Young and pharmaceutical companies.Even if a student is not applying in one of those areas, if he has a GPA over3.0, she recommends he include the average on his résumé. Do include honorslike cum laude and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, she adds. Manny Contomanolis, headof career services at Rochester Institute of Technology, agrees. He also saysit’s important to be honest because at least a third of the time, employersrequest a copy of a student’s transcript. Black of Ernst & Young agrees.“Nobody gets hired at EY from campus without an official transcript.”

At Purdue, career offices head Tim Luzader says many largemanufacturing corporations like General Motors, Ford, John Deere andCaterpillar, recruit on campus and they all want to see grades.”The see GPA asa threshold to manage their recruitment,” he says.

What should you do if your grades are lousy? There are a fewpossibilities. At Purdue, students have the advantage of some 30 career fairs ayear, where they can stand face to face with company recruiters and sellthemselves. “They can tell their story, whether they were working while goingto school or whether they had a disastrous freshman year but have donebetter lately,” says Luzader.

Steinfeld agrees that students can compensate for bad gradeswith a compelling story which they can put on their résumé, like describing aninternship where they did an analysis of workflow issues and improvedproductivity by 20%.

Another fix, suggested by RIT’s Contomanolis: If the GPA in yourmajor is better than your overall grades, only list that, or list both numbers.

What about small employers or startups? Do they care about GPA?Not as much. But if your grades are good, go ahead and list your average onyour transcript. Dean Iacovetti, director of recruiting at Apprenda, a softwarecompany outside Albany, NY, says he doesn’t expect to see GPAs on résumés, butif he does, and it’s a strong one, he takes notice. “If there’s an individualgraduating with a 3.5 from Cornell,” he says, “that’s someone I’d like to see.”