In reality, however, these firms don't care if they find the very smartest people. They're only looking for people who are smart enough. Let's face it: most finance jobs aren't rocket science. Unless you're a quant -- in which case a PhD in math, physics, or computer science is often necessary -- the hardest math you'll ever see on Wall Street you learned in high school. Beyond that, the ability to understand concepts relatively quickly is all you need, and if you got into a top school then your intellectual aptitude is sufficient for that.

You could even take this a step further by employing some cost-benefit analysis. If outsourcing the search for intellectual adequateness to college admissions offices manages to provide the caliber of candidates that satisfies Wall Street, why would the industry bother spending more time trying to find smarter applicants? From Rivera's paper:

An investment banker (white, female) expressed a sentiment that was common across firms, "The best kid in the country may be at like Bowling Green, right. But to go to Bowling Green, interview 20 kids just to find that one needle in the haystack doesn't make sense, when you can go to Harvard it's like 30 kids that are all super qualified and great."

The cost of spending additional time isn't worth the benefit to Wall Street. As this banker says, there's no point looking for that ideal candidate from a lesser school when it's easy to find an adequate one very easily from a top-tier school. They're not trying to cure cancer; they're mostly just selling stocks and bonds to large institutional investors.

It's 'Fit' That Really Matters

Instead of educational ambition and aptitude, the paper's abstract continues by explaining what's more important after the initial screening process:

However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates' extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits.

That last sentence holds the key. Anyone who has gone through investment banking interviews has probably heard the term "fit." That's essentially jargon for how much the interviewer likes you. And that has nothing to do with your grade in art history or quantum mechanics. It has to do with whether you and the interviewer both played varsity sports in college, were members of the same fraternity or sorority, or love sailing. After you're deemed smart enough to handle the work -- which is a pretty quick determination -- recruiters want to know how well you'll fold into the firm's culture.

This might seem superficial, because it is. But it's also practical. This potential hire will be working on a banking team for somewhere between 60 to 100 hours per week. If the candidate has nothing in common with others at the firm, those hours will be very dull and move very slowly.