<p>Cal Poly SLO Orfalea College of Business (Accounting) vs. Lehigh Integrated Business & Engineering Honors (Accounting Concentration)</p>
<p>We live in the SoCal/LA area and my D is deciding between these two schools. Each seems to be well known on their coast but not so well known on the other.</p>
<p>Distance is not really a factor, we live in LA but have family in NYC. My D understands should she choose Lehigh, Thanksgiving and weekends away from school will be at the grandparents. Frankly, given that she is an outgoing, loves activities person, we probably wouldn't see much of her if she did choose SLO but of course the potential for weekend visits home is always there.</p>
<p>Costs are about equal as she received a generous FA package from Lehigh that makes the price comparable (at least for the first two years while her brother is in school, then probably ~4K more).</p>
<p>Any opinions? Time is getting short for all of us still undecided...:)</p>
<p>In the end it seems to really boil down to whether she’d prefer to go to college in CA or PA. A large number of CA kids never leave the state for any period of time, so I’d lean towards living somewhere new for a few years since she could always come back after college. You have explained the part about winter temperatures and that white stuff on the ground, right ;)</p>
<p>The job market is probably less of an issue than she may think. The big accounting firms will recruit at both schools. If she goes to college in PA but wants to move back to CA after college that would be easy with a larger firm, or would just take a bit of extra work on her part to identify regional firms in CA before she graduates.</p>
<p>^^Thank you, she is leaning towards Lehigh as it seems a little more geared towards Investment Banking which she is interested in right now. Yes, I have explained about winters and she does have some experience since we have family there but that first winter will probably be a shock to a California girl…
We were up at SLO for admitted students weekend and of course, the weather was beautiful, sunny and 80 with flowers blooming everywhere…hard to give up but there’s a lot to be said for living in a different part of the country, especially while you’re young.</p>
<p>Just be sure that i-banks recruit at Lehigh. I was an i-banker and I can tell you the investment banking recruiting is mostly independent of the major of choice and a lot more correlated with the name brand of the university. </p>
<p>One doesn’t really need to study finance or anything business related in order to become an i-bank analyst out of undergraduate. </p>
<p>You are much more likely to land an i-bank job studying ancient Tibetan at Yale/Stanford than finance at your standard vanilla university. This is especially true at the bulge bracket banks.</p>