Princeton is strong on the Street, definitely. So is Dartmouth. I hear Yale as well. Likewise, I hear that ND is strong in the Chicago business community.
Northwestern is strong in media and marketing.
Stanford is insanely strong in the Valley. Cal and UIUC CS grads have also pulled their friends in to various startups there but at those big state schools, your network is your friends from school.
BTW, it’s pretty easy to tell when someone is just a high schooler spewing what he’s read from WSO. . . .
I’m not an Aggie, but I have to admit that the Texas A&M network is pretty amazing. Aggies find Aggies all over the world. They see that ring, and that’s it!
“I’m seeing Michigan all over this thread. Is there a reason why Michigan is standing above the rest? Especially above the rest of the publics…”
Michigan, like the elite private schools, has a very national and international student body. Between undergraduate and graduate programs, probably more than half of the school comes from OOS. Furthermore, a significant percentage of IS Michigan graduates leave the state upon graduation. Most of the elite state schools are either made up overwhelmingly with IS students or don’t enroll the huge numbers of OOS students as Michigan goes. This combination, along with a strong devotion to their alma mater, makes for a very strong alumni group. Michigan graduates are everywhere and oftentimes in large numbers, especially in coastal and large cities.
who cares? you make a random decision to go to a college. you favor them with $250000 over the next 4 years. yeah, you should have a great time before becoming an adult with massive problems, responsibilities, worries. then, once you graduate broke, and your parents broke, you have the benefit of weekly phone calls from the alumni office WANTING MORE MONEY. if you give them money the calls double, if you give them no money the calls triple. why? because you share this bizarre attachment for other random people who happened to get into your school instead of someone else’s school? is the sad desire to belong to ANYTHING that powerful? sad
I live in the SF Bay Area. I didn’t graduate from a UC so can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a strong alumni network in the sense that they’ll go out of their way to help other UC alumni, even those from the same campus.
The Stanford alumni network is very strong here in Northern California. USC’s alumni network is very strong in Southern California.
Chiming in here because I am trying to get a feel for the power of alumni networks for my D who is going to be facing the decision of which school to attend. She is only applying to business programs. Right now her top two choices where she has been admitted are BC and Michigan. She loves BC and all we hear about is the strong alumni base in the NE (I am an alum myself so I believe it is true, but maybe I can’t be objective), but when she got into Michigan (don’t know about Ross yet and won’t for a month or so) it made me start thinking which school would be better for her career opportunities.
The answer I received is somewhat consistent with this thread…overall, Michigan is stronger but BC has the edge in the Northeast including NYC. This info came from successful finance people in NYC, one a late twenties Columbia grad who works with hedge funds and the other a middle aged JP Morgan executive. Both women have a pulse on the college admissions process as well.
My daughter is still waiting on some other schools, such as USC. And I have heard about that Trojan pride and agree that on the west coast it probably cannot be beat, but not so sure about NYC. She is also waiting on Wash U which I hear is awesome as well but possibly stronger in the midwest (which is an appealing place to live these days in my opinion!). Last but not least, she also applied to the business school at Georgetown. She may not get into any of these last three (USC, Wash U or Gtown) but if she does we are going to have to think long and hard and career prospects will definitely be a factor. I would love this thread’s input so please let us know what you think!
Posters seem to be all over the map in the schools they mention here, with no evidence to back up their recommendations and not even any clear definitions of what they mean by an “alumni network”.
Maybe I should care about how many scholarships the alumni provide or faculty endowed chairs they fund. In that case, show me the money. If Clemson alumni are consistently tops at fund-raising, why doesn’t Clemson have a bigger endowment? Its endowment is $623M. Williams College, with about 1/10th as many students, has an endowment of $2.25B. So Williams has an endowment per student about 36X bigger than Clemson’s. So the Williams alumni seem to be more effective at fund-raising. Dunno if that also means they’re better at helping fellow alumni get jobs. How would you measure that?
@tk21769 Part of that Williams vs. Clemson comparison may have something to do with the wealth of their alumni also. Williams is one of the most competitive schools in the country…I bet there are some extremely wealthy donors that contribute tons of money for it to have such a huge endowment for a pretty tiny school. Good for them. But this thread is about connections for career prospects, and I bet both Clemson and Williams have fairly strong alumni networks. Not sure it has to do with their endowments.