Not surprising really, as Ross is often listed as one of the most highly recruited programs by major Wall Street firms, but it is always nice to see confirmation of that.
http://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/2015/02/04/the-top-feeder-schools-to-wall-street/
Given what appears to be a noticeable East Coast “tilt” (as opposed to bias), Michigan seems to do quite well. Good to see.
I found this comment most interesting:
Looking for some surprises?..And Yale, Duke, and Stanford undergrads rank only 28th through 30th respectively.
There is no doubt that Ross is a great program for anybody interested in Investment Banking. Among BBA programs, only Wharton beats it, and only McDonough, McIntire, Sloan and Stern can compare when it comes to IBanking placements.
rjk, I was not surprised by Stanford and Yale’s poor showing. Along with Brown, Chicago, JHU and Northwestern, those are elites that do not have a tradition of placing large numbers of graduates in Wall Street. Admittedly, I was surprised that Dartmouth and Duke were not in the top 10, but I guess every study/poll is going to have outliers. In this case, I think the methodology failed to recognize some important elements.
Regardless of what source you look at, Ross is one of the best options for students seriouslyt thinking of going into IBanking.
I was surprised by Duke not being in the top ten.
They list University of California Berkeley (24th) and UC Berkeley (39th.) Kind of poor data collection if you ask me.
Good point beyphy.
A key point may be overlooked in this analysis. As a student, what’s relevant is how likely YOU are to get an interview, not how likely your school is to get a lot of interviews.
Schools with many good students interested in business are likely to get more interviews for their students than schools with fewer interested students because they have more students applying for interviews. Therefore, this analysis will have a size bias, leading to the potentially faulty conclusion that it is easier to get a Wall Street interview coming from any of these 3 schools than from other schools. That is not necessarily true.
In fact, its possible that getting a Wall Street interview from any or all of Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Williams and Amherst is easier than getting a Wall Street interview from Michigan (or NYU or even Wharton) - at least for any one particular student.
CHD2013, you make a good point, but Michigan does not attract Wall Street types. Very few students who come to Michigan are interested in IBanking…thank goodness! That is what makes Michigan’s lofty position so impressive. Very few Michigan students apply for those jobs, and yet the University still places among the top 3 in terms of interviews.
@Alexandre - I’m not sure how you’ve determined that Michigan does not attract Wall Street types. Your post above almost makes me think that you’re suggesting Wall Street is twisting the arms of Michigan students who would prefer to work elsewhere.
How many of the 1,400+ students at Ross do you think are interested in Wall Street? Do you think students that were interested in Ross and hoping to transfer, but were denied, might be interested in Wall Street? Don’t forget that Ross by itself is almost the same size as Amherst or Williams.
I was not referring to Amherst or Williams (or any LAC). I was also not referring to Carnegie Mellon, JHU, Stanford or Yale. I was referring to Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Penn, UVa etc…
CHD, I think we can all agree that the vast, vast majority of students at Michigan who are interested in IBanking jobs, and qualified to be considered by IBanks, are enrolled at Ross. Nobody can deny that, it is a fact. You may have a few dreamers with 3.0-3.3 GPAs who hope to land a job on Wall Street between their bong hits, but those don’t really qualify. Most Wall Street types who apply to Michigan apply preadmit to Ross, and those who are not preadmitted will likely go to another university on the East Coast where they feel their chances are better.
So while Michigan with its 28,000 undergraduate students may seem imposing, the fact is, Ross makes up 7% of the University of Michigan graduating class. And of those, 40% or so are interested in Wall Street jobs. So Ross seniors interested in IBanking jobs represent 3% of Michigan’s graduating class, or roughly 150 students annually. Now you are going to have a few LSA and CoE students interested in Wall Street jobs too, but they will not outnumber Ross students. altogether, you are not going to have more than 250 Michigan seniors seriously interested in Wall Street jobs. While that is obviously more than Amherst and Williams, I would be very surprised if any Ivy League school (save Brown and perhaps Yale) had fewer than 250 seniors interested in IBanking jobs.
Question for you that might be enlightening to other readers of this thread - do you think the decision by a student to choose Michigan over Harvard and Princeton is a decision that maximizes that students chances of getting a Wall Street interview?
“I’m not sure how you’ve determined that Michigan does not attract Wall Street types. Your post above almost makes me think that you’re suggesting Wall Street is twisting the arms of Michigan students who would prefer to work elsewhere.”
It is absolutely true that there are folks who want to work for a Wall Street house. However, that ethos is not core to the b-school identity at Michigan. Year over year Michigan graduates cluster in: marketing, consulting, general management (with many of the last category going into high-tech or some part of entrepreneurial space). If you look at the students, the curriculum, the faculty research the courses taken you will see that students simply do not cluster in the I-banking queue. Yes, I don’t doubt that there are Michigan students that aim for an I-bank and miss. But this is largely/mostly an East Coast construct that isn’t woven into the fiber of either the matriculants or the program. The I-banks, the feeder schools and the folks that want to be in that queue self-select for East Coast schools.
Forgot to mention: when you look at Michigan graduates, a number of them (both from inside and outside the b-school) end up with dual concentrations which somehow interface with some aspect of public service…some students morph into law students who become judges or become involved in environmental issues.
“Therefore, this analysis will have a size bias, leading to the potentially faulty conclusion that it is easier to get a Wall Street interview coming from any of these 3 schools than from other schools. That is not necessarily true.”
You have a point about the size bias, but I look at it slightly differently. I assume a solid to stellar grade point from Michigan will put you in the hunt. Elite graduate schools (law, medicine, business) based on year over year over year distributions have a quota for 3 schools: Cal, Michigan, UVA (they matriculate roughly 25 to 30 from each school). If you went to those schools, you have a solid shot of being part of the quota for those elite schools.
But there is another factor: conditional expectations. If I look at the output (number of interviews), what are my conditional expectations of the kid being from Michigan? It is not clear to me that you have to take the second conditional prior: how many kids went to Michigan.
My reasoning: Michigan is a large school and most kids that go for engineering (7,000 or so) don’t apply to either law school or med school. Half the kids in the largest school, LS&A (9,000 out of 18,000 or so), don’t apply to PhD programs or engineering programs or med school, they apply to law schools. You can do combinatorics of this sort all day long. The point is that despite UM’s size, the simple matter is that for any given track, most Michigan kids aren’t applying.
So, if you go back one conditional step, you will find a number of interest: if you got an interview, what is the prior probability that you went to Michigan. By that measure, Michigan is a top 5 school as an elite feeder. If I take the second backward conditional step, without adjusting for all the kids who don’t apply to a traditional track, I’ll get analytic salad. How many kids in the pharmacy track apply to law school…or engineering…close to zero. How many kids in the school of social work apply to med school? Probably zero with those who go to the graduate level applying to law school for the public interest angle. I think you get my point. You may not accept the logic, but I think it is sound.
“Question for you that might be enlightening to other readers of this thread - do you think the decision by a student to choose Michigan over Harvard and Princeton is a decision that maximizes that students chances of getting a Wall Street interview?”
No, I do not think so. I believe Harvard and Princeton are more potent than Stern and Ross at placing students in Wall Street. Only Wharton can compete with those two in this regard. I would say the odds of getting placed in Wall Street from Ross are almost as good as getting placed in Wall Street from Harvard or Princeton, but not quite as good, and at the end of the day, Harvard and Princeton are two of the five universities in the US that are better than Michigan. I have always said that Wharton, Harvard and Princeton are the only three entities that are more effective at placing students in Wall Street jobs than Ross. That being said, I would recommend students who are interested in Wall Street jobs to choose Michigan over any other university in the Midwest, or over other peer universities that are not as effective as Michigan in placing graduates in Wall Street firms, like Brown, Cal, CMU, JHU, Rice, UCLA etc… Among its peers, only a handful of universities can match Michigan (Ross) in this regard, and those are Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown (McDonough), NYU (Stern) and UVa (McIntire).
CHD, as Blue85 points out, Michigan is very compartmentalized. It is not like an East Coast elite, where the majority of the students, regardless of major, aspire to become doctors, lawyers, consultants or IBankers. Funny enough, the vast majority of Michigan Engineering students actually want to become Enggineers. In LSA, you have a lot of prelaw and premed students, but you also have plenty who just want a good undergraduate education as an end unto itself. Nursing students want to become nurses, Art and Music students want to practice their craft etc…
The Poets and Quants article says:
The article clarifies which schools are top feeders to which finances houses. Michigan was eportedly # 3, in the top 10 for interviews at 14 firms, and the top feeder to 3 institutions. Of the non-ivys, NYU was the top feeder.
UMich is the most popular choice for Stuy/BXSci kids, more kids end up there than at any other University (Cornell and NYU may be close).
These kids often do very well at UMich and come back to NY. Wall Street loves this combo.
This was an interesting article last fall from Poets and Quants re: the observed drop in finance placements for the Columbia Business grads (grad school) http://poetsandquants.com/2014/11/22/wall-streets-stunning-collapse-at-columbia/
This whole thread went wildly off topic when it got into a discussion of boosters and bias. If someone wants to start a thread about that topic, feel free (although God help us). But for this topic, let’s stick to what was originally posted by the OP. Lots and lots of posts are about to disappear.