Ive been looking at a mixture or liberal arts colleges and mid-sized undergrad business schools. I wanted to know if job placement would be better at the research universities. Specifically for an Econ major say Davidson and Hamilton vs a Finance major at Wake Forest and Lehigh.
Your academic advisor and the career center at a college like Davidson or Hamilton will keep you informed as to the steps you can take to remain immediately competitive for your first job. The advice may simply be to take accounting I and II at a community college one summer so you are not at a disadvantage when it comes to those skills. Beyond that, Hamilton’s econ is among the strongest in the country, and they have a relationship with an HBS certificate program which could further enhance your employment prospects. Nevertheless, besides econ, you should be interested in subjects like philosophy, government, literature, classics, religious studies, history and geology if you intend to make the choice of a liberal arts college truly worthwhile.
bump
Charlotte, NYC, DC, the Research Triangle, and Atlanta are the most popular destinations for Davidson students, in roughly that order. Unsurprisingly Bank of America (headquarters in Charlotte) hires a number of Davidson grads. It’s not an extremely heavily recruited school like Dartmouth or Wharton, but its econ majors do all right.
You might want to take a look at W&L, which places a lot of students in DC and NYC. It has a heavy emphasis on business, econ, and the social sciences. Consider U Richmond as well.
Many colleges, including Davidson, have career/senior surveys that provide info about where students work after graduation. Check them out if you’re worried about job placement.
Hamilton grads do extremely well for themselves and I don’t think their Econ majors placement is any lower than Wake or Lehigh (it’d be difficult to do better/more than what Hamilton does).
If you are interested in the scholarly aspects of economics, faculty publishing has been analyzed: “Economics Departments at Liberal Arts Colleges,” MyIdeas (available online).
Not necessarily. All four of those places are excellent schools with recognition amongst employers, particularly in certain metropolitan business centers. You’d probably do fine coming from any of them.
Before you decide on a school, I would suggest that you spend some time thinking about if you’d prefer to be an econ major or a finance major. One is not better or worse than the other but there are big differences. Economics is a liberal arts course of study. In contrast finance is offered as part of a business school and would have a business core curriculum to include introductory courses in fields such as accounting, IT, management etc. I suggest that if you haven’t do so already that you spend time and understand what classes you would need to take at the different schools you are considering to see if one path is more appealing to you than the other.
I posted (#1) on this thread as if Hamilton and Davidson do not offer accounting. Both do.
An undergrad degree in finance is unlikely to get you a top finance job, more likely to land you in the back office at some bank. Finance as a major is seriously thought of at business school or from undergrad at Wharton or NYU Stern. Apart from those two programs I don’t think any top tier wall street place would hire you with a degree in finance from Lehigh or Wake Forest absent a connection. However I would wager that with an Econ major from Hamilton you’d have a shot. Davidson I don’t know maybe in Charlotte it pulls… But in Manhattan it has less alumni than Hamilton. Again i think you do Econ in LAC and finance in B school.
Not just Stern and Wharton btw are good at finance - other undergrad business schools are also great
Some that have great placement apart from the obvious Wharton and Stern are Ross, UVA, Haas, Notre Dame, etc