Fine. Let’s talk about Trinity.
Agree 100% that “it depends”, even to level of who is the person doing the first screen of resumes, which may be an incredibly important variable. For OP, some very general observations as someone involved with hiring for a bulge bracket IB in my prior life and who has a son (Econ) that just started at a bulge bracket IB.
An econ degree from a well regarded LAC is fine. But so is an English, History, Pysch, Math, Physics … major as long as the grades are good and there are classes (and good grades) in quant driven courses.
A 3.3 will not cut it for top IB jobs. The hurdle for my S’s HYPS if you wanted a job at a top IB or consulting was 3.65. There are of course exceptions, and absolutely no guarantee that you would even get past a first screen with a 3.65+.
As to comparisons between a finance student from a good undergrad bschool or a “liberal arts” major from a LAC, that really gets down to grades, courses taken, internship experience and how the kid interviews. Personally for me, all things being equal, I liked the math, engineering, physics, econ kids with good communication skills over the finance grind. I tended to think they were better thinkers/problem solvers, but that was me.
Another driving factor is the job placement resources of that particular school. What are the types of companies that do on campus visits? How easy is it to get invited to networking events and screening interviews relative to other students? How strong is the alumni network where the placement office has a list of alumni ready to help students in their fields?
As to jobs outside of the top IB’s, I think it might be easier to get regional/local jobs (whether financial institutions or corporate) coming out of a bschool. Those businesses are more likely to want someone who can hit the ground running and who has practical education in those areas. They probably also actively recruit at their regional schools vs going to a small school in New England. However, I am sure they would not toss a resume of a qualified kid from a good LAC if the kid showed genuine interest.
Because there is so much “it depends”, your best choice is to choose where you think your kid will thrive. Some kids are better suited to a large research university and they are focused on the bschool. Others will more likely do well in the more intimate environment of a LAC. That decision is more important than the name at the top of the degree.
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My understanding of the question is that it excludes IB when discussing Finance jobs.
In other words, this is the question I understood: can you get a business/management job or a position related to finance with an Economics degree from a NESCAC and similar (Patriot league, Claremonts) outside of top students and those aiming for IB?
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The answer might also depend on geography. The NECSAC schools are much better known in the east. The farther west you travel, maybe with the exception of SF and Chicago, the less pull those schools have. Hiring directors will respect them but those hiring also respect the U of Arizona business degrees, finance degrees from all the big college universities and some from small schools known in their areas like U of Denver or SMU. IMO, the farther from NE you get, the less like those hiring will be swooning just because of the undergrad school name. Impressed? Sure. Consider the resume carefully? You bet. But the name won’t be enough if the experience isn’t also reflected on the resume.
I worked in the midwest with a guy who went to Yale. He was very impressed with himself. Everyone else thought it was fine he went to Yale, but no one thought he walked on water. One of our bosses had gone to MIT and Harvard Law. You’d never have known it if you didn’t ask. Sometimes it was almost a bad mark as many of the officers of this company were not college grads, and if they didn’t have to hire lawyers they wouldn’t. They were intimidated by Mr. MIT/Harvard (nicest guy ever). Going to an NESCAC might have been a benefit because those bosses had never heard of those schools and it would be like “Oh, just a small school in Maine, he’s probably okay. Not like he went to Penn State or Notre Dame.”
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I attended a NESCAC school back in the day and got a phenomenal education. Although things have changed a lot, and there is much, much more in the way of career services, these schools don’t have the same pre-professional focus you will get at schools that have traditional undergraduate business programs. In terms of career outcomes, you aren’t going to get the boost you’d get at Harvard, for example, but alumni networks are very strong (particularly in the Northeast) and these schools have access to some great internships. Certainly, students are able to get jobs in finance and other fields. However, any student’s eventual success is not just predicated on what school they attend but what personal qualities they bring to the table - people skills, persistence, ambition, grit etc.
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That. Same reason I’ve never been bashful about saying I went to Wesleyan (when the subject comes up.) People have either heard of it and have positive reactions to it or they assume it’s one of a hundred other Wesleyans. Either way, it’s never been a source of drama.
Why is it that no one ever includes Tufts when there’s a discussion about NESCAC schools? It’s like a step-sister that everyone in the family ignores. Anyway–my D and son-in-law are both Tufts grads. D was a quantitative economics major and after working for a consulting firm for a number of years had no trouble getting into a good MBA program (Georgetown). Most HR professionals who recruit/hire employees are generally knowledgeable about NESCAC schools and know the academic reputation of them.
As an article (from a few years ago) to consider, Forbes recognized several NESCACs, including Tufts, as being “worth every penny”:
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That depends on whether the school’s economics department offers such courses to accommodate economics majors who chose it as a proxy business major. This may be true at some schools like CMC and Chicago, but not all.
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At some schools, some of those courses don’t count toward the economics degree but are helpful to students (in and out of that major) who want to complement their coursework with some more skills based classes.
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There is no such thing as a person doing the first pass…it’s a computer.
As someone who has hired staff for over 20 years in 2 of the Big 4 and one of the 5 largest financial firms (hiring for myself/my teams…not part of HR), everything you will ever read about schools and associated opportunities won’t much matter. Past results have zero association to future performance. 5 years from now is an eternity in finance. Go where you feel you get the best education. A smart, engaging, high-performing grad will find a job regardless of school.
LAC’s are interesting in that they are stuck between the perceived elites such as HYPS and the state flagships with hundreds of qualified candidates. The IB’s will target the elites because they can, and the larger consultancies will target larger schools to find critical mass. The big 4 hire thousands of kids each year…who in their right mind is going to Colby, Bowdoin and Bates to find Econ grads when they can find 10X that many at an NYU recruiting day? Big 4 recruiting is a numbers game. Think Big 10…not little Ivies.
Does that mean the prospects for a LAC econ grad are low…hell no. There is a devoted and successful LAC graduate workforce who target their own, and who cherish their experiences and relationships from college. The networking and support at top LAC’s are (IMO) better than larger schools.
Before leaving the NYC finance sector, I did a lot of hiring that was trending heavily toward analytics and data. I stopped hiring econ, accounting, and business majors in favor of engineers and math majors. My final three hires, working on my teams in historically finance roles, were a Cornell Math major, a Financial Engineering Masters Grad from Columbia, and an engineering PhD from Columbia. They were fantastic…doing things that “normal” business majors would struggle to do because of the data management requirements. Most MBA’s couldn’t do that work without a STEM background either. My advice to your son would be to develop quant skills if he wants to be in finance. It’s less and less about relationships and people, and more and more about one’s ability to work with large data sets and extract insights.
If I were playing the odds based on what I perceive to be your son’s academic performance potential, I would suggest a good business school at a larger university might deliver more options. Investment banks aren’t likely to be on the table regardless of the school (again…my assessment based on your hedging the answers with a 3.3 GPA and the statement he couldn’t get into Williams…the other NESCAC schools aren’t that much easier to get into). If he does well in a larger school, a Big 4 or other consulting opportunity would open the door to an array of longer-term career options.
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I am sure you know far more about this than I do, but my own kid was contacted by a Big 4 firm out of the blue. She attended one of the schools you mentioned. It does happens. Maybe it was an alumnus, I have no clue.
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To be clear…my personal preference would be to hire kids from the Maine schools over a large state U…but recruiting at the numbers involved at large firms requires a focus on larger target environments.
I used those schools solely for their location.
I can’t help but believe he is conflating recruiting or being a “target” school with networking. Do a search on LinkedIn. There are Little Ivy grads everywhere you can think of. The vast majority didn’t get there because they were recruited; they got there because someone alerted them that there was something about to open up and they’ll make sure your cover letter and resume “get to the right person.” Even a recruiter can’t do much more than that.
Your naiveté is charming.
The big 4 and large finance companies are factories, not think-tanks looking for the best and brightest.
You suggest “they got there because they were alerted…”, My response was to the OP, who said “For a kid without Wall Street connections”. From a pure numbers perspective…LAC’s will have fewer alerts than larger schools.
That’s not to say there aren’t any alerts to family and friends. I had an opening that was “filled” for me by our COO. His son-in-law needed a job, and politics from C-Level overrode my initial decision. It sounds like your assumption is that finance industry folks have unlimited slots to fill with people they know, but in reality you run out of people you’d support for a job pretty quickly. This isn’t government work, it’s customer facing, high value projects that require both smarts and people skills. You end up making excuses to your friends about why you don’t have a spot for their kid more than you end up handing out entry level jobs at the 4th of July block party. Your own reputation is at risk.
As I said earlier…I love the NE LAC’s, and i personally prioritize hiring from them, but I know for a fact I’m in the strict minority. Once you leave the Northeast it gets even harder to get in. Try taking a Williams degree to Texas and competing with a UT, TCU, T-Tech, Houston, TA&M, or Baylor candidate. The best chance you have is to suggest it’s like Rice, only smaller and in Massachusetts.
For a good student who wants to work in finance, attending a large school (with a good reputation) will open (by volume) more doors. That’s my advice based on the OP’s comments.
The one bit of advice I left out before…kill if you have to, but get an internship no later than sophomore/junior summer. There are several firms that no longer hire recent grads who haven’t interned with them. The math major I mentioned above…she was from a pile of 25 or so resumes I was given when I wanted to post an entry level job. She had interned with us in the prior year, and was offered a job without knowing where she would land. We had dozens of hires “on the bench” waiting for a role. Of note…she was only available to me because she had a lower than average GPA, and was the only math major in the bunch. She also happened to be an athlete, so I put math…athlete…Ivy…low GPA together and took a shot. She was a fantastic hire, and within a year I had her helping to run our operation in India.
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So what is your advice for a student already in a NESCAC if they want to work at one of these firms? Just fill out the application? Try to get an internship with the firm via an app for summer before senior year? Are you saying a math major at at NESCAC with a high GPA and experience won’t land a position because they weren’t being recruited at an event?
My advice…
- Start now
- Use whatever resources you have at school to network (find alums at the schools)
- Apply to for a lot of internships
- Be creative. My (LAC graduate) daughter’s college had a program that would pay her to intern for an alum. She met the alum through a 2 week “externship” program, and literally said “if you don’t have to pay me, will you hire me to work this summer?” He did.
So here is some advice to differentiate a finance kid from almost everyone else at his/her school.
Learn Alteryx
It’s a $6k/year bit of data cleansing / analytical software that IMO should be used everywhere. I am a user…and have no financial benefit from this suggestion. Students get it for free. If they are using a Mac, set up a virtual machine to run it (ie parallels). It’s a very high demand skillset, and a lot of firms have consulting arms focused on it. They can’t find talent.
I used to tell kids to learn VBA. Then it was Python and R. Alteryx is a great resume skill.
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The question that has to be asked is, if you want to go to college to study Finance, why would you choose a NESCAC college in the first place?
But if you are intent on that, as someone mentioned above, Tufts is in NESCAC. And Tufts offers a minor in Finance. And Tufts offers enough Finance courses that you can take as many courses in Finance as you would if you were majoring in it?
And Colby has a major in Economics/Financial markets. If it’s not a Finance major, it’s pretty close.
But if you really want to study Finance at a small, highly selective, liberal arts college in New England, why wouldn’t you just go to Babson and pick Finance as your major (concentration)? Because that’s pretty much what Babson is, a small, selective college steeped in the liberal arts with a business focus.
And why NESCAC? Why not just go to a selective liberal arts college in the Northeast where they offer a Finance major? Like Bucknell?
There really are ways to get this done.
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Of course an LAC is going to have fewer alerts than a UT-Austin or a Cal-Berkeley. The beauty is that they don’t need as many.
Thanks, but that wasn’t really what I was thinking about and I should have made myself clearer. The neighbor in the front office is one example, I suppose. But, that wouldn’t account for all the NESCAC grads at Google. More likely, someone carved out some time to make a presentation at Wesleyan’s Gordon Career Center or at Amherst’s Loeb Center. Now, is that recruiting or is it networking? It’s probably a little of both.
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Because you want to learn to think. It’s not trade school.
I’m not suggesting you can’t learn to think at any of the other schools you named, but when you start talking about Babson…or my experience with Colgate…or some other schools that are liberal arts focused, they feel a bit more focused on the end than the means.
I appreciate I am jumping over the fence now…defending LAC’s when I told the OP that I think his situation might be better served by a large flagship…but the process of learning and the value of breadth have merit, especially in the future.
Anyone who thinks they’re going to go to college and be able to select their career focus is either a doctor, and engineer, or fooling themselves. Even the engineers might be foolish. The world is changing so fast, that today’s assumed “safe” careers will be tomorrow’s AI targets. Nobody knows what’s coming.
In that world, creatively solving problems wins. I think the LACs can help kids become better problem solvers. The exposure, relationships, and challenges they get from being more hands on with professors equips them for early career interactions with their bosses. Everything here is confirmation bias and small sample sizes, but my experience in large meetings is that LAC kids are better on their feet and deliver clearer responses than larger school kids. It’s the practice…not necessarily intelligence or ability.
If you’ve ever been to Bucknell…it doesn’t feel like the NESCACs. Sometimes its just fit.
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