<p>jobs on wall street still pay 6 figures (or close) one year out of college. In investment banking you’ll work 100 hours a week and earn 90-120K your first year out of college. In sales and trading the salaries + bonus are similar. In consulting it’s usually 65-70 + 10-15 bonus. Getting into these positions is doable from any top university. The worse the university the less positions available on campus. Harvard, Wharton and Princeton place best overall across all divisions at top banks / hedge funds/ consulting firms. MIT does well with quant roles. The next set of schools that do extremely well are Stanford, UPenn general, Columbia, Dart, Duke, Yale, obviously some of these schools place better in certain divisions than others, but this is the overall “I want to land a 6-figure salary within a couple of years” distinction. The next set of schools are Cornell, Brown, Northwestern, WUSTL, Chicago, Amherst, Williams, Berkeley, Georgetown, stern at NYU. I might be missing a few, but many others are good semi-target schools and you’ll land a high paying job if you are close to the top of your class (like top 10%).</p>
<p>At a top target school you can be top 30-50% in the class and land a very high paying job in finance. At Columbia (for example) trading and banking divisions at a top 10 bank even interview kids with like a 3.3 GPA, with otherwise good credentials.</p>