<p>We all know that Wharton is the best undergrad business school in the world. My question is just whether it's still worth the extra $25k per year, compared to a business degree from a place like Indiana Univeristy or UW Madison, if you don't want to go to Wall Street?</p>
<p>well, where do you want to go?</p>
<p>A Wharton degree will serve you well anywhere and, very importantly, will give you the flexibility to go anywhere.</p>
<p>remember you’re attending penn..not just wharton. wharton definitely sets you up for business of all sorts (and more, certinaly), but you definitely have the resources of penn at your hands. remember, you can always transfer into the college if you dont want anything to do with business</p>
<p>hxgbert, nice answer but it ignores the question.</p>
<p>Wharton’s strength is finance. In today’s world, that means Wall St. Does Wharton have other great programs? Definitely - marketing and management are (off the top of my head) also highly ranked and considered without peers as far as research goes. It’s definitely a great place to go for non-finance majors (I count myself among those).</p>
<p>The truth is that you can go wherever you want after graduation - you could study any subject in Wharton and still go or not go to Wall st. Will you be happy at Wharton studying something other than finance? Something crazy like 75% of wharton students concentrate in finance with the aim to go to wall st. If you don’t have strong motivation, you’ll likely feel swept up to go with the crowd and concentrate in finanace (jco). It’s a great program, but you might not find it interesting.</p>
<p>Here’s the real meat of the question. Wharton’s definitely worth the 200k+ for finance. Is it worth it for the other fields? Starting salaries in marketing and consulting fields aren’t as high, so it might not seem like it, but the Wharton grads are on the top of those fields. Going to IU or UW (if you’re not going to go to Wharton because it’s too expensive, you should be looking at haas or michigan. period.) would be cheaper, but you’re not coming out with anywhere near the same preparation and you may find it much harder to get into those fields. In summary - Wharton’s great for finance, and if you think you might want to do finance, it’s #1. If you’re into other fields, you should definitely still consider Wharton - it will open doors in those other non-finance fields you would never see coming out of one of the state schools. Is it fair? No, but then again if there ever was a place/area where “brand name” mattered for education, it’s with b-schools. (Don’t even get me started on MBAs)</p>