Blue-Chipped
In The News Monday, October 26th, 2009
“Blue Chip companies refuse interviews on GCSE results” writes Victoria Bell in the Daily Telegraph.
Apparently, top firms like KPMG, Deloitte and PWC won’t interview anyone without top grades from GCSE onwards. It seems that if for whatever reason you underachieve you have no chance of being a beancounter or consultant.
Seems more than a little harsh to punish young people for being human and making mistakes along the way i.e. growing up. They’d rather employ someone who has simply been very fortunate (rich?) and/or has not grown up yet. No wonder these firms keep getting into trouble with regulators regarding their business practices and the advice they hand out. Maybe if they did employ ordinary people they’d make better decisions.
Saying that, they deal in numbers all day and know very well that quantifying everything simplifies decision-making. This is just another example.
UCAS have complained that this is not the intended purpose of the points system but why reinvent the wheel when you have a ready-made solution to recruitment problems.
Ultimately, however, this is simply employers responding to grade inflation brough about by the expansion of post-16 education in the UK.
More interesting, though, is the possiblility that those students who may have wished to pursue a Blue-Chip career may actually decide against it very early on if results aren’t perfect. Demotivated, it could even mean that a university education is reconsidered by the more gifted but discouraged students. What would Government say if middle-class parents got wind of an emerging pattern of increasingly competitive recruitment requirments that only the very ‘best’ could ever achieve?
In short, then, in an ironic twist even for those with socio-cultural capital staying on may not be such a great idea after all .