H/Y/P/S/M vs Columbia/Chicago/Penn/Duke/Dartmouth/Brown

College Search & Selection
1

<p>Other than instant name recognition to the common joe or blue-collar worker, is there really much benefit in having gone to a school from the former grouping rather than the latter? I've heard that some professions, specifically in the finance industry, hire primarily from the schools listed in both of these two groupings, but even in trying to get a job at banks like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, does the marginal increase in prestige from the former group really make a difference to HR people? </p>

<p>What about in other professions?<br>
Any anecdotes would be nice? </p>

2

<p>First observation: those are both some pretty lofty groupings. I’m not sure that looking at those as distinct groupings even makes that much (or any) sense. The whole list of 11 (if I counted right) have a lot in common in the big picture. They obviously differ from one another in lots of specific ways, but I think - for example - Yale is more similar to Columbia (in specifics) than Yale is similar to MIT. To put it another way, I could imagine lots of students who would say, “I really hope I can go to either Yale or Columbia, which - to me - stand way above the universe of other colleges.” It’s harder to imagine someone saying that about Yale and MIT, unless he’s simply choosing on the basis of how hard it is to be accepted.</p>

<p>A more minor observation: people getting career-track jobs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are generally coming out of business school, not college. Hiring for analyst programs would be out of college, but those jobs are really intermediate steps to business school. That’s not cast in stone, but that’s the general layout.</p>

3

<p>Well if you want to go to finance, nothing beats Wharton undergrad. </p>

<p>Of course some schools are better than others, so just pick a school where you’ll be happy and thrive. </p>

4

<p>Realistically, very little difference.</p>

<p>Let’s talk post-education opportunities:</p>

<p>HYPSM and the other Ivy+ schools are separated primarily by one factor in the market: recruitment volume (there are a few shops that exclusively recruit from Harvard/Wharton/Princeton, and a few that only think Stanford but their volume is tiny). As such, there are going to be more places open at Goldman and McKinsey for HYPS (or, really, HPW–Stanford and Yale don’t do as well with the top consulting/banking shops as one might think), but only by a little. McKinsey takes maybe 20 a year from Harvard; more than they do from a lot of other top schools, yes, but not so much as to really blow the rest of the Ivy+ out of the water. </p>

<p>But what about things other than finance? Sure, lots of HYPSM students are pre-med/pre-law, and HYPSM marginally outperforms their peers at feeding into these schools (though much of that has to do with the fact that HYS law schools are the top; C&C get plenty of students from their undergraduate programs as well–the same is true with med schools).</p>

<p>On the actual metric of what you learn and how well these schools teach you, well, I’m firmly of the belief that these schools are approximately equal (though my own biases make me think that HYS are a little weaker than MIT/CalTech or even Columbia/Chicago/Princeton to a randomly chosen student).</p>

<p>So, to put it simpler:</p>

<p>Does HYPSM offer opportunities not found at the rest of the Ivy+ schools? Yes.</p>

<p>Is the reverse true? Yes.</p>

<p>For the average acceptee to any of these schools, will it make a major difference where they go? No.</p>

<p>Does success matter more based on the individual or based on the school that person went to? The former.</p>

<p>TL;DR: No serious difference.</p>