Chicago economics vs. ________ business

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>Hi! I'm only a junior but I have some questions. I know about UC's top economics program, but what about doing business at another college. Are the two degrees equal in the market? And which one would get me the better job? I know better is a relative term but I can't think of a better word. For example, the data below is for the Notre Dame business school:</p>

<p>Top 10 recruiting firms that hired the most graduates in the past academic year No. hired
Deloitte Touche Tomatsu 20
Ernst & Young 10
General Electric; Goldman Sachs 9
Johnson & Johnson; Morgan Stanley; Target Corporation 8
PricewaterhouseCoopers; Epic Systems; Huron Consulting; Citigroup 7
KPMG; Deutsch Bank; General Mills; McGladrey & Pullen; Starcom Worldwide 6
IBM Corporation 5
Crowe Chizek; FTI Consulting; Protiviti; SMART; Liberty Mutual 4
Accenture; JPMorgan; Nestle USA; PRocter & Gamble; SPX Corporation; Baker Hill; Lockheed Martin 3
ABN AMRO; AC Nielsen BASES; AT &T; BP; Bain & Co.; Countrywide Financial; Credit Suisse Group; GEICO 2 </p>

<p>My question is, do top companies hire UChicago econ majors like they do business majors at other top colleges?THanks a lot!</p>

2

<p>First, I don't think Chicago publishes this information, so I have no way of knowing. However, if you want to go into business, an econ degree from a top school (or really any degree from a top school) is not going to hurt you.</p>

<p>WITH THAT SAID, UChicago does not cater to those whose primary goal is to secure a strong career path, and when prospective students put its economics program next to any other school's business program, they overlook that Chicago is an intensely academic school with a large core curriculum and that the school and its surrounding culture it isn't for everybody.</p>

<p>If you're interested in getting a rigorous foundation in economics, exposing your mind to the likes of Kant and Marx, AND going into business in the long run, Chicago would be a great place for you. However, if you want to spend your undergraduate years in a more focused, pre-professional environment (and also an environment that provides more traditional college fun in the way of beer and football), it sounds like a school like Notre Dame would be better.</p>

3

<p>I'm an incoming first-year who is also set on business. Upon more research, one would find that Chicago can and does cater to business students. First and foremost, the econ. degree at Chicago is highly sought after, which is proven by a handful of investment companies that will only recruit from Chicago and Wharton. Secondly, the Career and Placement Services offer a program called Chicago Careers in Business (CCIB) during the second and subsequent years. It includes weekly lectures and workshops on interviewing, resume building, etc, as well as the previlage to enter classes such as accounting and finance at the Graduate School of Business. Finally, a huge list of companies recruit from Chicago including all the companies that you listed. I'm going to try to find the list, but I am kind of busy at the moment.</p>

4

<p>You're right, JM, there are a lot of opportunities for one looking to pursue business, but once you attend the school, you will see the school's decidedly academic bent and you'll decide if an "I just want to get into business and graduate" attitude falls in place with a school like Chicago.</p>

<p>Some of my econ major friends did score cushy internships this summer as Chicago econ majors. They are tough and resilient go-getters, whether it's about finance or Freud, and I'm sure the Chicago econ label didn't hurt them any.</p>

5

<p>We were recently in Southeast Asia and an international banker spontaneously remarked "Oh, we LOVE to hire from U of Chicago" on hearing that our HS grad was incoming first year.</p>

6

<p>As an economics alumni, there is something more fundamental you have to grasp. The business entities that students really want to go after, top notch finance and consulting firms, care very little about whether you studied business proper as an undergraduate. Certainly, places like big four accounting firms do, but you are not going to meet many Chicago alumni who are jumping to work as a paperwork jockey for 40K a year, 9 AM – 5 PM, in middle market city like Denver (e.g. General Mills, Ernest & Young, D&T, Countrywide). The only business schools that target firms really value at a UG level are those that are affiliated with elite universities, of which there are four: Michigan / Ross, Berkeley / Hass, MIT / Sloan and UPenn / Wharton. Otherwise, they are seeking economics, mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, and engineering majors from top schools broadly, knowing they will have to go through a training program prior to starting work. This largely has to do with the fact that it is less important that you know how to build a leveraged buy out model in Excel than it is that you are able to rapidly and effectively learn the elements of finance and several other fields that are directly applicable to your position. That is why ultimately the placement record for lesser ug business schools like Notre Dame, Wash U or Georgetown, are simply not as good as places like Dartmouth or Stanford (neither of which offer business). Further, once a non-business major gets their MBA or other quantitative graduate degree which levels the playing field with those that studied say accounting in college, the value of the former’s UG degree will go back to being evaluated on the more broader basis of its rigor and selectivity, in which case the more vaunted the school the better. </p>

<p>However, certainly within their band of competition ug business majors do well. A NYU / Stern alumni is on average going to win over entry level jobs from the Emory math major, other things equal. The same goes with Wharton / Sloan alumni, who are going to beat out the average Columbia graduate. </p>

<p>The moral of the story: never go to a lower ranked school to study business, since in the long run it will not be that beneficial. However, if you have a choice between a truly solid UG business school and an equally esteemed art and sciences type program, then you have real decision to make on a whole host of personal factors.</p>

7

<p>Good post, uchicagoalum. As a current student, I don't have much working knowledge of postgrad opportunities, especially with regards to business and finance.</p>

<p>Here's the next question: would you put UChicago on part with the other elite schools you've mentioned, such as Dartmouth and Stanford? There are a lot of debates in other places in this forum as to whether Chicago belongs among the top of the top in its eliteness with regards to the business world.</p>

8

<p>Basically for finance and consulting you have two brackets of elite schools, each with roughly identical placement for the people who throw their hat in the interview ring:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Wharton.</p></li>
<li><p>Chicago, Dartmouth, Columbia, Berkeley, Northwestern, etcetera. </p></li>
</ol>

<p>The only really insane competition is to get a spot at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, JP Morgan or the like. Yet, if you are fine making 55K + 10-20 K bonus depending on the market conditions at somewhere along the lines of Citigroup or Accenture right out of college, then you are really are not going to have a difficulty finding a job as a quant major at Chicago. The process is time consuming and hellish, but it pans out in the end. </p>

<p>There are a few tips though:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Intern every summer, even if it’s only part time (e.g. 20 hrs. a week). This will still allow you to work a full time job at the GAP or something if your financial scenario necessitates that, since 60-70 hrs. doing basic activities will feel like a cakewalk compared to the school year. Don’t stress out about not getting a business position. A gig with your local congressmen or newspaper is just fine. </p></li>
<li><p>Take ‘Financial Accounting’ at the GSB no matter what you major in. It will end up counting as a general elective, but it gives you a huge leg up on the competition. Get it done before you senior year if you are not going to graduate school, since full time interviews and decisions regarding employment are made in the fall and you will want to be able to discuss the content at that time. Skip the remainder of the GSB courses, since they are intellectual weak in comparison to college courses and will hurt your GPA as there are no intermediate grades (just A, B and C). You will most likely end up taking them anyways if you go to business school, so let them go for the moment. </p></li>
<li><p>You do not need to major in economics to go to finance / consulting. If you love math, do math, same goes with anything that pushes you with numbers. The joke goes that there are enough astrophysics majors at Wall Street trading desks to send a man to Mars. </p></li>
<li><p>If you major in economics, do not fall into the mantra of choosing your courses based on their relevance to business. Grace Tsiang, the undergraduate director in economics, will tell you to take courses like ‘Time Series’ and ‘Introduction to Industrial Organization.’ While these are fine courses if they appeal to you, employers simply will not care about them. They are too theoretical in their orientation to really mater for most jobs. The converse of this is that you will do perfectly well taking courses like ‘Economics of Crime,’ ‘Population Economics,’ or the ‘Economics of Ancient Rome.’ It is the underlying ability to think like an economist, e.g. separating income versus substitution effects, that matters more. The only single course that really might help you out is undergraduate ‘Introduction to Finance.’ Once again, it is far more wonkish and mathematically demanding than what you will see in an MBA program, but you can kind of distill from all the fancy hand waving what is going on in major dailies. If you cannot take this course, at least pick up Hal Varian’s graduate text ‘Microeconomics’ from the Regenstein, and read the one chapter summary of efficient market theory and the capital asset pricing model. </p></li>
<li><p>No major at Chicago is going to tech you about different types of bonds or how the Federal Reserve operates. What the hell is private equity anyways? In this vein, you should really try to pick up some free reading on business in general. Books like ‘Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,’ ‘Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success,’ and ‘Liar’s Poker,’ are really fun reads and give you a good idea of what you are getting yourself into.</p></li>
</ol>

9

<p>That is one great post.</p>

<p>The only other thing that it's important to emphasize is that graduate degrees -- MBAs or sometimes Econ or Math PhDs, or even JDs -- are nearly universal in the world of high-powered finance for people who are not doing scut-work. The point of getting a job with Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, Accenture, or Uncle Frank's Mortgage-Mart right out of college is to get some experience, make some money, get some focus, and then go get more education. Not one in 100 of the college grads Goldman Sachs hires is still with the firm four years later. What Goldman Sachs gets out of it is a bunch of grunts who have high IQs and are easy to train, and who are thrilled to work 18 hours a day for what everyone else considers peanuts, who can be kicked out the door in a few years with no hard feelings, and who will be good ambassadors for the firm at their business schools.</p>

10

<p>I ran into a friend today whose father is a bigwig at JP Morgan. My friend told me that his father wanted him to attend UChicago because his father felt that the best employees came from there-- I'm guessing that a combination of intelligence, a solid background in economics, and a passion for work that is characteristic of UChicago undergrads made us, in his dad's opinion, great employees.</p>

<p>The UChicago undergraduate label does carry with it an "I love to do work" connotation, which can be frustrating at times when you try to explain to friends that YES, you do really love UChicago, and you really are having a GOOD TIME and FUN, but I guess it gives you an extra boost in the job market.</p>

11

<p>You will get a top financial job if you come out of Chicago and want one, and you don't even need to be an economics major. While uChicago does not publish stats, they do tell their tour guides the top five employers. For the class of 2006, they were, in order, Teach for America, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, The Peace Corps, and UBS. In the Class of 2007, off the top of my head, I know 14 people going to Bank of America in London and NYC, and that doesn't include people that turned down offers for other banks. Bank of America gives out jobs at uChicago like candy, and so does JPMorgan. I interviewed for about a dozen finance jobs, got callbacks for eight, and that turned into five offers, and it was pretty similar among my friends (2007, though, was an extremely big hiring year, it seems). And while I was an econ major, my GPA was not spectacular (below 3.3), and many of my non-econ friends got finance jobs, including two working with me at the bank I chose (a bulge bracket firm in NYC). Bank of America and JP Morgan seem to like the non-Econ majors the most, which makes sense considering they are the two top hires from Wall Street. Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, Infosys Technologies, and Nationwide Insurance also love Chicago grads.</p>

<p>Getting consulting jobs out of Chicago, from what I have seen, is much tougher.</p>

12

<p>...exactly how tough is it to get a job in consulting?</p>

13

<p>Well, 11% of students do it, so it can't be impossible. </p>

<p><a href="http://caps.uchicago.edu/recruiters/university_profile_outcomes.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://caps.uchicago.edu/recruiters/university_profile_outcomes.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

14

<p>First of all, I'd like to say that I have a tremendous respect for UC. Second, I'd like to clear up a couple misconceptions about Notre Dame. It was implied that we lack a broad core curriculum. This is not the case--<a href="http://www.nd.edu/%7Ecorecrlm/index.htm"&gt;http://www.nd.edu/~corecrlm/index.htm&lt;/a>. Also, Mendoza is among the most elite business schools in the country. We were #3 in 2006 and #7 this past year. I don't know the rank for 2008 (someone w/ the mag want to fill me in?). However, our business students are very heavily recruited.</p>

15

<p>"2. Chicago, Dartmouth, Columbia, Berkeley, Northwestern, etcetera..."a very foolish statement. Columbia is in NYC and its students intern druing their sophmore academic year, which allows them to secure junior year Financial Services positions better than the other schools you listed on this tier....CU is only behand HPW in terms of recruiting on the street.</p>

16

<p>I have know several people who went into consulting / banking from Columbia, and none had internships during the schoolyear. Summers are the time to shine. There is certainly a little bit stronger regional pull to NYC for Columbia insofar as you will get more alumni support in the interview process. But no more so than Northwestern / Chicago graduates get in Chicago or Stanford / Berkeley alumni do in Silicon Valley.</p>

17

<p>Somehow I ended up with a half-post above...</p>

<p>I have known several people who went into consulting / banking from after Columbia, and none had internships during the school year. The same goes for other big schools in many major cities. Summers are more than sufficient to shine, and I would personally not risk fouling up my GPA when I could get a superior, full time internship come June. Not to mention landing a part time finance gig is quite difficult, as most companies of repute do not want to be bothered with 15-20 hours a week. Especially problematic is that human resource divisions in a desire to look more objective have come down hard on individually negotiated hiring outside of standard recruitment pathways, which traditionally has been a big source of term time employment. </p>

<p>There is certainly a little bit stronger regional pull to NYC for Columbia insofar as you will get more alumni support in the interview process, and more students will want to stay in Manhattan due to an inherent selection bias. But no more so than Northwestern / UChicago graduates have stronger than average ties to Chicago or Stanford / Berkeley alumni to Silicon Valley. It total, you are going to see more Columbia alumni on Wall Street, but in finance in aggregate, no more so on a numbers adjusted basis than its peer schools. The only pseudo elite school at UG level you can make a serious case for based on internship opportunities is Georgetown, since two days a week over the majority of your degree in a congressional office definitely positions you well to garner a full time job on the hill after graduation.</p>