

As federal aid piles up, MBA programs like the experience soldiers bring to the study of corporate leadership.
Bay Area tech companies, already in a fierce fight for full-time hires, are now also battling to woo summer interns. Technology giants like Google Inc. have been expanding their summer-intern programs, while smaller tech companies are ramping up theirs in response—sometimes even luring candidates away from college.
Does it pay to recruit from -- or even go to -- a prestigious university? There have been a number of studies that follow the careers of students who attended elite universities and those who just missed the criteria for admission.
College hiring is about to ramp up again — and the very best college recruiting organizations would argue it ramped up several months back — so now is an opportune time to conduct an ROI analysis to determine when and where you should hire college grads instead of experienced hires. Understanding the unique competencies and skills that college students bring to a business is important not just in determining the number needed, but where to place them.
Ask hedge fund manager Daniel Ades about the future for recent college graduates and he likes to draw a picture, a very ugly picture. He sketches out a bell curve mapping the historical default rate on student loans. Then he draws another curve much higher to show the likely default rate for the Class of 2011.