Well, my main question is how much (if at all) would someone’s college GPA affect their employment opportunites in the future? I am more concerned about a low GPA and how it could possibly negatively affect the chances of getting a job, but I guess I’d also be interested in how a high GPA could positively affect those chances. For what it’s worth, I’m a graduating senior and expect to finish with a GPA in the 2.7 - 3.0 range. I am a little worried that this may be too low for some positions.
Here in an example of a job ad I found recently. What struck me from this ad is that it had a minimum GPA requirement for the position, even though it looked like they were targeting prospective employees who had been out of school for 5+ years.
Here’s an excerpt from the ad:
Can your GPA really come back to haunt you that long after you graduate? I could see where GPA would be more of a factor for those just graduating college with no job experience, but wouldn’t you place more emphasis on past job experience once someone has been working in the real world longer than they’d been in college?
So, I guess I’d be interested to know not only how my GPA could affect me now, as well as how it could affect me down the road? As far as affecting me now, I really have no directly related job experience to my degree (MIS) so I don’t really have anything besides course work to point to in trying to get a job. I do have some more indirectly related job experience that I will also focus on, but nothing first-hand directly relating to IT.
I’d also like to know how “bad” my GPA (2.7 - 3.0) would look to a potential employeer. I tend to think of it as more or less average or a little below, but not necessarily “bad”. Please don’t hold back, and please let me know if it would be a strike against me in looking for a job.
Depends on a number of factors like school, profession, job market and so on but generally, yes, GPA does affect your employment opportunities and can continue to affect them for many to come.
For example unless you went to a top 50 or so school and had a really good GPA, you might imediately be excluded from jobs in finance, investment banking, consulting or management training programs in Fortune 500 companies. These tend to be competitive jobs that attract the creame of the academic crop. Not to mention that low grades can cause problems if and when you choose to go to grad school. Regardless of work experience, you aint getting into an MIT grad program or Harvard Business School with a 2.9 (Anything under a 3.0 is “not good”).
The good news is that all companies are not equal. You may not get hired as a lead developer at Microsoft or a consultant at Accenture but you could still find work in the IT department of a non-IT company or at a smaller IT firm. With a little luck and hard work, you should find something.
THe bad news is that grades can affect you down the road. It isn’t so much that an employer will neg you because of low undergrad grades. What will happen is that people with higher grades may advance faster than you since they may land a prestigeous job with lots of opportunies for training and experience right out of school while you’re playing 12 month shuffle until you get a job you want.
I graduated in 2000 before the economy crashed. During that time, I only had one potential employer quiz me on my GPA. It was a very rude headhunter that was scouting for a high level statistics person for one of those fancy looking marketing consultancies in harvard square. (GPA quizzing wasn’t the rude part, though) However, I applied mostly to mid-tier companies for entry-level positions and not to Accenture or McKinsey type consultant positions. My sister is currently applying for those types of jobs and she has to post her GPA all over the place.
I have to take exception to the grad school thing on the only grad school that I have experience with-lawschool. I know people at my lawschool (I go to a school in the 15-25 range) that had 2.8-2.9 from undergrad BUT managed to compensate with 168+ on their LSATs. There aren’t many-but there are a few here and there.
Concerning graduate school, no decent graduate school would reject applicants based purely on GPA. If you come from a college or university with high standards implemented against grade inflation, you might want to get the professors who are writing your letters of recommendation to mention that fact. Good graduate schools want to attract people who will be complete their degrees successfully and move on to important, high-level positions, and they know that a student who worked hard but ended up with a low GPA is more likely to succeed than one from a diploma mill who got a high GPA.
As far as employers are concerned, it varies from case to case. In particular, I’ve heard that some government agencies have a cutoff of 3.00, no exceptions.
GPA was very important to the recruiters that came to campus my senior year. Many specified a minimum GPA to get an interview. The minimum was usually around 3.2. Students with a high GPA got the best interviews and the best choice of job offers.
I got my 2nd post-college job because it was extremely related to my 1st job and because I had connections in the business. No one asked about my GPA.
I once heard an educator say that students with lower grades were not necessarily less intelligent or less motivated than higher grade students, they just had slower learning curves and potentially could outperform the high grade students in the long run.
I’m in the journalism biz. My GPA in school will not affect me getting a job one bit. I’m deciding between TV and newspaper right now. A TV news director will hire me based on my resume tape. A newspaper editor will hire me based on my portfolio. A couple of people I know had GPAs in the 2s their last few semesters and still found jobs because they knew their stuff.
Since I have a PhD, the degree (and your research, letters, etc.) is more important than grades. No one ever asked my GPA or for a copy of my transcript. Until: almost 20 years later my then employer needed proof that everybody had the claimed degrees and insisted on a transcript, vs. a letter of proof of degree which is easier to get. And then more recently, some places I applied to asked for all college transcripts and GPAs. Some were over 25 years old. Sheesh. Who cares if I got a ‘B’ in just one Math course that long ago? Talk about clueless morons.
A lot also depends on the type of job you’re looking for. If it tends to be something more on the creative aspect of the field, than your GPA tends to mean absolutely shit. I graduated with a degree in Advertising, so when the market picks up and I start looking for that “real job” (fingers crossed), when it comes to filling a position, what’s going to matter is my work versus someone else’s work. If my “opponent” has a higher GPA than I, yet my portfolio is superior to their’s, I’ll get the job. If we seem on par, then it may come down to that, but most likely, that’s the point where personality becomes a factor.
I currently work at a news station. My GPA never came into question when applying here. Shit, they didn’t even ask for a resume. What’s a little disconcerting, though, I just found out that virtually none of the guys in the “Engineering Department” graduated with an Engineering degree. Proof that, when it comes to a job, it’s what you know that pertains to the job, not how well you did in Home Economics 101, especially years later.
I applied for a couple of government jobs when I moved here that require you to have a GPA of at least a 3.5. If you don’t meet those requirements you don’t get hired. So yes, your GPA can effect your chances of getting a job after you graduate.
Surprisingly enough, the guy who drives the subway I take to work each morning also does not have an engineering degree. There is a big diference between an “engineer” who learned how to flip soundboard switches in community college and an actual engineer who learned advanced math, physics, and so on at an acredited 4 year university.
I think that if you have a really good GPA, this will benefit you for many years to come.
Heck, I landed my current job partly because I got my graduate degrees with a 4.0 GPA. I don’t know for sure that this was the deciding factor, but it definitely caught our general manager’s eye.
“Does” - not necessarily. “Can” - as noted above, yes.
1º mitigating factor, along with timing. When I got out of school there was an extreme shortage of what I became (sort of like what was going on with IT in the '90s), so the company who hired me looked more at what I could become and decided to “grow their own.”
I had a totally unrelated to the field bachelor’s degree with enough physics, math and chemistry that they were willing to take a chance on me. Since the degree was in an alien discipline, the GPA, although good (3.57) meant almost nothing to them, outside of possibly indicating that I had at least a modicum of shit together.
I did subsequent undergrad work part-time at night for five years and picked up significant hours in geology and more math and physics. And I gnawed on real world problems in this field every day. Nobody ever asked about my grades. About the time I decided I’d had enough university, the job market became extremely tight in this field, and many people went back to school, or continued their education, and suddenly, a few years later, Masters degrees and PhDs flooded the market, and GPAs became a factor.
But, as noted above, when you’re significantly down the line, nobody asks about college anymore.
If your last two years were stronger, or if your GPA is higher in your major, you can try working that angle (provided you’re applying for a job within your major).
That way, you can put something on your resume like: GPA: 2.8/4.0 overall, 3.4/4.0 in major.
Again, it depends on your field, but if you’re, say, and engineer, doing well in your math and engineering classes is more important that getting an A in sociology.
Don’t forget that having high grades can ALWAYS help. Even if you graduated 30 years ago, if you can claim to have a 3.95 GPA, that can only help you.
Well, unless you encounter one of those job interviewers who think that academic excellence tends to run contrary to industrial achievement. Such people aren’t common, but I did encounter one of them last year.
I had my grades affect me for a few years. I worked as a contractor for the Federal gov for over two years. In that time I saw a few people who had just come out of school, work with us for a few months and get jobs that I had applied for over me. I had been out of school for a few years while a lot of them had been out for under a year. They all had better grades then me and got hired at a GS-7 level. When I got hired after being out of school for five years I only got an offer for a GS-5.
Depends on the company. If it’s a large conglomerate which has hundreds of applications to consider each month, you basically have two ways of getting in the door: 1) stellar grades at a top-notch university; or 2) you know someone.