<p>^I’m sorry, but how could a 17-year old possibly have his or her eyes set on a BB firm career while focused on college admissions? I have no point of view on whether Dartmouth or Columbia is better in placement to BB firms (and I suspect no one else has reliable data to support one over the other), but I continue to believe that one will not be hindered career-wise by selecting one elite school over another, regardless of one’s ultimate career goals.</p>
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Apparently you know even less about Princeton than you know about Princeton athletes. Princeton doesn’t offer a business major.</p>
<p>I think this whole article is about connection and contacts, rather than school pedigree. But in reality, personality counts too, along with connections and school name. Included in personality are looks, poise, manners of speaking and confidence. lol</p>
<p>^ The article is entirely about school pedigree. So here at Wharton, you could count on one hand the number of people who are going to a top BB based on contacts and connections. The people with truly amazing connections don’t go here, it’s too much work. If you have sick connections guaranteeing you a job at Goldman(i.e. you dad runs the IB dept) then you can go to trinity or colgate and party for four years with a bunch of your boarding school chums, screw HYPSW.</p>
<p>And what you might not realize is how little “connections” help you get a top BB job. Like one of my friends here has a dad worth 400 million. It obviously helped him get in to college, but it’s doing nothing for him during recruiting. In fact a recruiter made fun of his expensive outfit to his face during an interview.</p>
<p>Schools with strong national alumni networks are a big plus. In addition to HYP, Duke, Dartmouth, Williams, Holy Cross, Colgate do well on Wall Street and in business community.</p>
<p>RML - I do agree with you that Dartmouth places better than Columbia and perhaps Yale. I have no idea on why you thought that I thought Columbia is on par with Dartmouth (splitting hairs here). I have always supported the following tier system for feeders to investment banking and consulting:
tier 1: Harvard, Wharton, Princeton
tier 1.5: Dartmouth, Yale, MIT
tier 2: Columbia, Duke, UPenn CAS
tier 3: Cornell, Brown, Williams, Amherst, Stern, UCB, Ross, Northwestern, UChicago, etc.
…</p>
<p>As I recall, Hank Paulson graduated from Dartmouth as English major…Warren Buffet did not graduate from HYPMS either.</p>
<p>Ivy, where did Stanford go? 
And they say there is an East Coast bias?</p>
<p>My bad. I should have put Stanford on 1 as well (for its unmatched strength on the west coast). Had a feeling that I was missing something when I typed that. Thanks DunninLA.</p>
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<p>Again, the ‘worry’ is that you may have less access to the most desirable jobs. Now, again, if you don’t care about that, then that’s not an issue. But what if you do care about that? </p>
<p>I’ll give you an example. I know one guy who turned down an Ivy for a relatively low-ranked state school, for one simple reason: football. He was a highly rated high school football prospect who felt he had a legitimate shot at the NFL, and the state school in question has a perennially highly ranked, bowl-invited school with a history of sending numerous players to the NFL. {A full-ride football scholarship didn’t hurt either.} There is no doubt that the graduates from that Ivy he turned down enjoyed greater success on average than do those from that state school, but he wasn’t an average student and he knew it. He was a student with an extraordinary talent and he wanted the best opportunity to maximize that talent. His justification was that even if he never did make it to the professional ranks, at least he’ll be able to say that he actively participated in one of the most storied college football programs in history, and (hopefully) will appear in some major bowls where millions of people will watch him on TV, and those are life experiences that are likely more interesting than anything the Ivy could have offered him. </p>
<p>Now, maybe he could have gone to that Ivy and made it to the NFL anyway. Indeed, some players such as Ryan Fitzpatrick and Matt Birk did exactly that. But the odds are clearly low and even those that do tend to be picked only with low draft slots or are not even drafted at all. Given that most NFL players don’t stay in the league for more than a few years anyway, most of the money that you will make will be paid from your rookie contract which will be unimpressive if you’re not drafted highly. As a case in point, JaMarcus Russell signed a contract that guaranteed that he be paid more than triple what Tom Brady in his first 5 years in the NFL - a time when Brady won 3 Superbowls. Russell is laughing all the way to the bank. </p>
<p>{Now, one might reply why he didn’t just play for Stanford or maybe Cal. Well, what can he say - he didn’t get in. Besides, at that time, both Stanford and Cal didn’t exactly have the best football teams.} </p>
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<p>That’s obviously impossible, and had even been stated to be so explicitly in the article: nobody has ever once argued that hiring decisions are made deterministically. Clearly there are some people from non-targeted schools who still obtain top jobs, and indeed, the research paper even explicitly identifies some strategies for such a person to do exactly that. </p>
<p>The issue at hand is what are the probabilistic chances of being hired.</p>
<p>“That’s obviously impossible, and had even been stated to be so explicitly in the article: nobody has ever once argued that hiring decisions are made deterministically. Clearly there are some people from non-targeted schools who still obtain top jobs, and indeed, the research paper even explicitly identifies some strategies for such a person to do exactly that.”</p>
<p>Are you claiming that Dartmouth, Columbia, and MIT are non-targets?</p>
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<p>I am not the one making that claim: the research paper and the accompanying Chron article are making that claim. I’m just telling you what they said. If you don’t like it, take it up with them. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.docstoc.com/docs/69081703/Rivera-forthcoming[/url]”>http://www.docstoc.com/docs/69081703/Rivera-forthcoming</a></p>
<p>“I am not the one making that claim: the research paper and the accompanying Chron article are making that claim. I’m just telling you what they said. If you don’t like it, take it up with them.”</p>
<p>Great! Good to know that you aren’t the idiot. The researchers are.</p>
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<p>Yet the ‘idiot’ researcher has data to back her up.</p>
<p>For example, consider the following quotes:</p>
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</p>
<p>Now, unless you’re prepared to accuse the researcher of committing academic fraud, we have to accept that she indeed found people who actually said (and presumably believe) those things at her research sites. </p>
<p>You might now argue that it is then those people who are the idiots. Perhaps so. Yet these are idiots with hiring influence. If they believe that Columbia or Brown or MIT are less desirable schools - however unjustifiable such a notion may be - then students from those schools will be at a disadvantage, fairly or not.</p>
<p>** this is bullcrap! My bro went to columbia and works for gs! **</p>
<p>^ 10/10 ^ </p>
<p>■■■■■■■■ at its finest.</p>
<p>Thanks .</p>
<p>Again, don’t misunderstand the message. Nobody has ever said that you can’t get one of the jobs in question if you didn’t attend one of the targeted schools - indeed, the paper explicitly states that some people do. The issue is regarding probabilities - which schools provide you with the *best chance<a href=“but%20no%20guarantee”>/i</a> of landing one of those jobs.</p>
<p>Hence, to say that the paper is “bullcrap” is to assert that the opposite hypothesis is true: that attending Columbia, Brown, or MIT actually provides you with a higher, not lower, chance of landing on of those jobs rather than attending HYPSW. Is anybody prepared to argue that stance, preferably with data?</p>
<p>Rivera’s study has been discussed on at least three different threads on this forum. On each of those threads, a number of posters emphatically dismissed her findings or asserted that the findings are BS or worthless. In many such instances, it is evident that some of these posters either did even read or understand the study. And what is their basis for dismissing these findings? Well, sometimes their dismissal is based on their personal experience or an anecdote about a family member or friend from a “non-super-elite” school who got hired at am “elite” firm. Nonetheless, these posters should note that Rivera researched this topic in a systematic manner with a fairly decent sample over an extended period of time. She received her PhD at Harvard, doing her dissertation on this same topic. I can only conclude that these findings really struck a nerve with some posters. My guess it that they have a really hard time even considering findings that contradict their most cherished beliefs about the status of their preferred schools.</p>
<p>“Yet the ‘idiot’ researcher has data to back her up.”</p>
<p>It’s anecdotal evidence against anecdotal evidence; very compelling.</p>
<p>zapfino - We aren’t talking about HYP vs. state school or little known LAC’s. We are talking about Yale vs. “potentially Wharton.” What the study is suggesting is that Wharton is potential on the second tier in finance and consulting, behind Yale. I’m not a big fan of Wharton, but this study sound like ******** to me.</p>