<p>Bedhead, I agree with one major exception. Going to a worse school will not hurt you for grad school, if anything it will help since you’ll probably have a higher gpa. However, if you want to go into finance, turning down HYPSM or Wharton is a MAJOR mistake. I’m a senior at P and sometimes I wonder if it was the right move to turn down what would have been a full scholarship at a place like NYU but when you look at your finance job opportunitiee from HYPSM or Wharton, it definitely is worth it. There are tons of firms that ONLY recruit from a handful of schools and its virtually impossible to get into them from non-target schools. It doesn’t hold true for grad school but the 3.7 from Harvard will always get the McKinsey interview over the 4.0 from Rutgers. It doesn’t even matter that the Rutgers kid might be 100x smarter than the kid from Harvard, he won’t even get a chance to show that w/o an interview. In the more competitive fields like Private Equity and Hedge funds, just try to get into a place like Bain Capital or D.E.Shaw from even a good school like UWisconsin. And just so you know I’m not making random **** up, I summered at a top firm and every single intern was either from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth or Penn/Wharton (~20 summers).</p>
<p>And the entire alumni network thing is really way more important than you could imagine, I have friends who have gotten jobs just from sending out a few emails to the alum network. </p>
<p>This isn’t to say that you should always pick Yale over a full ride at UMich (since I would seriously consider the latter) but just take the whole “it doesnt matter where you go” with a grain of salt because if you want to do finance or some other things, it DOES matter…alot.</p>