Where I'm from, and this might be universal, those types of firms are either finance or consulting shops.
The actual work practically never warrants the type of people they want to hire, but they pay well enough and they can leverage their prestige. Part of the schpiel is that they can boast to their clients that they hire the best of the best, and thus billing $1000 for a fresh grad is worth it.
There's a lot of focus on signaling. Of course Jane or Joe with a graduate degree in theoretical physics from MIT is going to be able to sift through data and compile spreadsheets and nice powerpoint slides...but it's going to be complete overkill.
I used to work for one of these places that spammed "the best" kind of attitude in their recruitment advertising and the actual work was nowhere near it. Big talk about performance and algorithmics and then the work is 95% sifting through slop to implement more slop. I'd even say it even bred a worse than average culture because now if you complain about any of the slop, you're the dumb one who can't "navigate the business".
The actual work practically never warrants the type of people they want to hire, but they pay well enough and they can leverage their prestige. Part of the schpiel is that they can boast to their clients that they hire the best of the best, and thus billing $1000 for a fresh grad is worth it.
There's a lot of focus on signaling. Of course Jane or Joe with a graduate degree in theoretical physics from MIT is going to be able to sift through data and compile spreadsheets and nice powerpoint slides...but it's going to be complete overkill.