Harvard vs. UPenn

@Much2learn - I have no issue with Penn public safety. Indeed, I think they do a very good job.

Rather, I had issue with your meritless claims in post #29. I’m not sure why you’ve conflated my opposition and confusion with these unfounded remarks as demonstration of anything but that.

This has nothing to do with my “beloved maroons” or any ignorance about Penn public safety. Heck, I linked to a report that does a much better job of explaining security measures on campus than anything you present.

So, again, my posts are not a critique in any way of public safety measures on campus, which are good. My posts take issue with what you present in post #29. Your more recent posts do more productive work, but it took considerable probing to get there.

@Cue7 What i am arguing is that business students naturally flock to finance/consulting, this is not just a wharton phenomenon, it is a phenomenon with business student around the country and the world. Also keep in mind that finance/consulting are career starters. as you say business is a very large industry. most people start out at finance/consulting for the first 2-4 years and then branch out to the area of business they are interested in.

The possibility of a large number of non-wharton kids trying but not getting finance/consulting jobs is highly far-fetched. First of all Penn students do not have any trouble getting these jobs, and also there are various different jobs in finance and consulting ranging widely in selectivity. if a person interested in consulting/finance is not able to get the tippy top jobs, they will most likely go for the slightly less selective ones, they will not just completely change industries.

regarding wharton increasing the allure of finance/consulting in the rest of the penn population, the data shows that thidoes not seem to be significant. non-wharton Penn grads seem to go into finance/consulting in the comparable numbers as other ivies.

@Penn95

I first present my opposition to your view, and, second, present scholarship/literature that flies in the face of your contentions.

I.) Useless Comparisons:

You’ve encouraged me not to compare Penn to other schools, and, in this case, I encourage you to do the same.

How many other top 10-12 colleges have an elite undergrad business school attached? None. Can you study the impact of having an elite undergrad b-school at any other top college? No.

In this case, it’s actually best NOT to compare, and instead look at the impact of a top ugrad b-school at the ONE school where this exists: Penn.

The career outcome reports alone don’t present enough data. Just because Penn has numbers similar to “other ivies,” might not in fact capture the sentiment/impact on the ground. Further, we have no way of knowing that if, say, Wharton didn’t exist, what impact that would have on the % of CAS students going into finance. If Wharton did NOT exist, would the CAS % to fin/con be lower? Similarly, does the existence of CAS actually depress the # of Whartonites going into fin/con?

These are interesting questions, but we have no way of knowing! Further, as no other top school has a top ugrad b-school, comparisons between such schools are ill-founded. It’s not a difference in degree - it’s a difference in kind.

On a related note, your posts imply this: If you want a liberal arts experience similar to the “other ivies” Penn CAS has it! If you want an elite u-grad bschool experience embedded in a “one university” school, Wharton has it! Further, any interactions between these two schools just enhance the experience!

Such a theme again ignores some of the deeply complicated interactions that take place when you have schools with very different missions and educational approaches sitting right next to one another. This analysis also doesn’t go into the possibly pernicious consequences of this setup.

II.) Scholarship/literature that contradicts you:

There are some good ethnographic studies/investigative literature that flies in the face of the portrayal you present. For interested parties, I encourage a reading of Karen Ho’s “Liquidated: An Ethnographic Study of Wall Street.” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EHNU5R4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

(You can also google it and find the full text in PDF form.)

(Interestingly, in opposition to your statement about Penn CAS recruiting strength, Ho argues: “investment banks do not recruit as heavily from the general [UPenn] undergraduate population as a whole, although ugrads and grads from Penn’s renowned Wharton School are among the most highly sought-after recruits. Some college seniors said it was difficult to find investment banking and consulting opportunities without a Wharton pedigree.” Ho p. 63)

Kevin Roose’s “Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street Post-Crash Recruits” is good too.

(To investigate wall street recruiting practices, Roose states: “When looking at schools to visit, I singled out Penn for a reason… ‘Penn, and especially Wharton, is in a league of its own,’ one hiring manager at a top Wall Street firm told me. 'It’s the only place where you go to campus and it’s already done and dusted - it’s a matter of WHICH financial services firm students want to go to, not WHETHER you want to go into finance.” Roose p. 16-17)

(Roose even quotes Penn’s head of career services, Patricia Rose, as saying: “To come to Penn is to, at some point in your undergrad years, ask yourself ‘Should I think about investment banking?’” Roose p. 17)

I also refer back to the excellent Brandeis study on Penn undergrad culture, that had 1000+ survey participants. That study can be found here: https://www.brandeis.edu/ssri/noteworthy/upenn.html

Penn student response to the study can be found here: http://www.thedp.com/article/2016/12/brandeis-story-responses

Here are a couple quotes that the Brandeis researchers thought were representative and salient of the 1000+ survey respondents:

“The climate is best suited for people from urban, relatively apolitical, affluent backgrounds who are career-
oriented and very self-motivated toward particular careers. It is alienating for most people who do not fit that model, including students who would prefer to experiment with diverse interests and those who value learning over success. (Junior, White Jewish Male)” (p. 44 of the Brandeis study)

“Biggest note about campus climate is that it is a diverse array of cliques. Frat vs. non-frat, Wharton vs. college, on-campus vs. off-campus, Asian vs. White and perhaps most importantly rich vs. poor. These are all factors that very quickly encourage students to self-select in to homogeneous groups with almost no interaction amongst each other. (Senior, South Asian male)” (p. 44 of the Brandeis study)

Yes, as @Penn95 will say, these are just the views of two students, but the quotes provided further illustration of the results the researchers found. For instance, Wharton ugrads felt the highest sense of “belonging” at Penn (81%, compared to 73% of CAS, and 73% of the nursing school).

Per all of the above, it very much looks like fin/con holds disproportionate impact at Penn, and the influence of the Wharton school makes Penn differently situated than it’s peers, and therefore NOT a good subject of comparison.

To quote again the Wall Street hiring manager, who says Penn, especially with Wharton, is “in a league of its own,” cuts against @Penn95 attempt to compare Penn to “other ivies.” The hiring manager, in fact, does not find it useful to compare Penn to other schools - it’s a difference in kind.

@Cue7 I dont think anything you provided flies in the face of anything i have said.

I am precisely saying that we should not compare Penn to other ivies, because of the presence of Wharton. But surely you agree that if CAS had a similar percentage of people going to finance/consulting instead of % comparable to other ivies, then something would be really wrong here. Also many people who start out at CAS/SEAS and are interested in business, med up naturally transferring to Wharton, which leaves CAS and seas with a general population less interested in these careers.

A look at the career services report shows that CAS students are doing quite well for top business recruiting, as are SEAS students. I feel Karen Ho reflects and older opinion, from a few decades ago, before Penn rose up in the rankings, and was revamped. Recruiting opportunities are open to all Penn undergrads and employers look to hire a diverse group. Kevin Roose presents a more up-to-date portrayal of Penn with regards to business recruiting.

Regarding the quotes you provided, I somewhat agree with the first quote but i completely disagree with the second one. Yes Penn as a whole is not very political, and students are career-oriented, and people tend to be very practical about their studies and their future. At Penn you are forced to think ahead from early on, and create a plan for yourself no matter what you are studying. so in that sense i agree with him.

The second one I totally disagree, what he is describing is not the Penn I experienced. What I experienced was a very diverse immunity with people from different backgrounds working together in clubs and organizations and socializing. Yes there were also organizations where groups of a particular background flocked together, but there were at least equally as many that this was not the case.

i am not surprised about the sense of belonging data. But the difference between Wharton and CAS/Nursing is not big at all.

Huh? You get into two Ivies and you care about partying?

@Penn95 - from what I understand, you’re comparing Penn CAS’ outcome numbers to “other ivies,” and noting similarities therein (your post #41). I’m saying, you can’t even do that, because none of the “other ivies,” have an undergrad business school, thereby rendering an attempted comparison ill-founded.

Also, if you agree with Kevin Roose’s view on UPenn business recruiting, you’re agreeing, then, that, per Wall Street recruiting managers and multiple other insiders, Penn - generally - is singularly situated as a hotbed for fin/con recruiting. If you agree with this, you should not cite Penn CAS outcome reports in comparison to “other ivies.” Rather, you should disclose that Penn seems to be in a singular position, and has a climate that’s distinct from anywhere else. (This is, at least, according to the hiring managers cited in Roose’s work - at multiple points in the book, hiring recruiters talk about the climate being different at UPenn in comparison to anywhere else.)

Finally, re disagreeing with the statement about Penn “cliques” - your staunch disagreement actually undergirds a point I try to raise continually - Penn’s large size makes it increasingly possible for people to have experiences that are completely disparate. You disagree completely with the view another Penn student made regarding the culture, and that’s probative - it demonstrates just how different experiences can be.

Now, I am NOT going to compare UPenn to other schools, but I will assert that, the larger an organization you have, the greater the likelihood that people’s experiences can look very different. The fact that the Penn “clique” student, @humanbean12 and others have experiences that totally do NOT resonate with you is telling, and follows, again, from the logical assertion that larger organizations tend to have a broader array of experiential offerings to its community members.

It’s also why it’s important, especially when talking about larger orgs, to present as many diverse viewpoints as possible, to stress the complicated nature of these organizations. And I mean this both ways - investigative journalist Kevin Roose, anthropologist Karen Ho, the sociologist Lauren Rivera, the NY Times and New Republic articles, the sociologists behind the Brandeis-UPenn Study, and these other reports all present accounts that contradict your view of Penn as a “diverse community with people from different backgrounds working together,” so it’s important that you raise this view. It’s just as important, then, to present the dominant studies on this subject.

On that note, could you point me in the direction of broader studies/reports that conclude UPenn is a “diverse community with people from different backgrounds working together”? I have interest in student culture, and I just haven’t come across literature (not produced by the University itself) that reaches this conclusion. The main literature I can see, and cite to, concludes the opposite. But I may be looking too narrowly.

Well this thread certainly got a bit off topic…

First things first, a confession: I wasn’t actually into Harvard when I made this post. I was just deciding whether I wanted to pursue the waitlist or not. I recently got off the waitlist, but for the class of '22.

Second, a conclusion: I decided to go to Duke instead! I loved my visit (hadn’t visited when I started this thread), even more than I loved Penn (which I did). My heart was never set on Harvard, and a gap year does not interest me, so I’ve decided to go to Duke. I still have the option of going to Harvard, so if anyone has a case they’d like to make for it, feel free, but I’m pretty much set on Duke.

Thanks for all the analysis in this thread!

Edit: I realize this is the Penn forum, so this discussion may be out of the forum’s purview–mods, feel free to lock.

Closing thread based upon the above post.