<p>Okay; here’s my top 25:</p>
<ol>
<li>Harvard, Yale Princeton, Stanford, MIT</li>
</ol>
<p>-Caltech-</p>
<ol>
<li><p>UC Berkeley, Columbia, UPenn, Northwestern, Chicago, Duke, Johns Hopkins, UMich, Cornell</p></li>
<li><p>Rice, Dartmouth, Brown</p></li>
<li><p>WUSL, Emory, UVa, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, UCLA, Georgetown</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Also, slipper, a quick other queston - MIT seems to be completely absent from many of these lists. With a superb economics program and a prominent business school, how is MIT not on here somewhere? I would think that firms would want students with the strong quant. background that almost all MIT kids possess, and these firms would recruit these students in a strong way.</p>
<p>(I have a hunch as to why Chicago and MIT kids don’t place as well as say Dartmouth and Brown, but I would very much like to hear your informed thoughts on the matter.)</p>
<p>One final point - slipper, maybe this is just me, but I don’t see a big difference between Columbia, Dartmouth, Chicago, Penn, and Brown for professional grad school placement. According to your WSJ study, Dartmouth is at 8.5%, Columbia at 7.14%, Brown at 6.51%, Chicago at 6.22%, and Penn at 5.5%. All these schools seem to be generally in the same ballpark. The gap between say, Harvard and Penn is quite significant (almost 22% for H to 5.5% for Penn), but I think all the rest of the schools I’ve mentioned here could easily pass as Tier 2 schools. </p>
<p>If you take Chicago’s stronger academic rep and it’s considerably stronger financial resources than Brown, I really think you could make the argument that, at the very least, Chicago and Brown are on the same plane OVERALL.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Cue7 is trying to get slipper1234 to say it but he won’t, so I will:** it’s the old-boys networking and institutional inertia!**</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>These things always skew against Penn’s favor. Penn has a relatively large contingent of specialized students who are not in the market for these grad schools. How many SEAS engineers go to Law school? How many Whartonites are interested in med school? How many nursing students are interested in anything besides the guaranteed well-paying job in nursing?</p>
<p>Penn’s denominator is unfairly large here. I call foul and I’m telling mommy.</p>
<p>The old boys network is part of that perhaps, but what I was really meaning to say with slipper is, from what I know, financial firms don’t really look for pure academic success to fill their classes. If they just wanted kids with extremely high levels of quantitative abilities or extreme smarts, they would recruit much harder at a place like MIT.</p>
<p>From my experience, financial firms covet the ivy league athletes. They want reasonably smart individuals who have the competitiveness and and sense of team that translate well to the monkey work a lot of recent top college grads do in the financial world. From what I know, lower level financial positions aren’t exactly rocket science - they just are very hours intensive (100 hr weeks) and require certain sorts of people. </p>
<p>So while Slipper says these firms look for “critical thinkers,” I assert this is a very clouded statement to make. The reason Dartmouth especially, and schools like Williams, Princeton, etc. do so well is because they have loads of people with the very specific personality type that these financial firms love. </p>
<p>This doesn’t indicate that Chicago, Swarthmore, or MIT have less academic talent at their schools, just that these schools don’t produce the same type of students. In short, you just have fewer people at a Chicago or Swarthmore or MIT that are competing hard for the financial firm positions - and fewer students that fit that kinda athlete mold. I think that’s fine, but slipper seems to think that placement in these entry level financial positions are a strong indicator of a school’s reputation. I frame the idea of reputation much more broadly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A vast majority of students from Hopkins would probably go preprofessional in like medical school. The ranking doesn’t even consider graduate schools outside of business, law, and medicine. 83% of Hopkins students graduate and pursue a graduate level degree, the highest percentage in the nation… Not many people I know are prelaw or business MBA here at Hopkins… even then we have a 92% acceptance rate into law school and 93% acceptance rate into medicine.</p>
<p>Having also attended a top 5 MBA school and having had four Wall St jobs working with predominantly Ivy grads, I don’t really think it’s that UChicago produces less qualified grads than Dartmouth or Brown. It’s more the personalities of the people at these schools that drew them there in the first place and the fact that there are more alums from Dartmouth and Brown at some of these firms, which keeps them incentuous. To some extent, the UChicago grad who has the “Dartmouth persona” and has the firm recruit on campus or is able to connect to an alum may have a better chance because they will stand out and be more unique. While UChicago may still lose out to Dartmouth and Brown, if you included enrollment in top 5 PhD prgrams in say ten disciplines in that WSJ survey, the spread between UChicago and the others would surely shrink. </p>
<p>In my experience, those at UChicago may have the same stats as someone from Dartmouth but aren’t able to get in because they aren’t able to prove themselves as engaging and interesting as the ones who successfully gain admittance to Dartmouth. These types will in turn, on average, be less inclined to pursue business-type positions where a higher percentage of success is determined by personality than in other professions.</p>
<p>Your ranking is quite similar to mine. </p>
<p>Tier #1</p>
<p>Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
CalTech</p>
<p>Tier #2</p>
<p>UPenn
Duke
MIT
Columbia </p>
<p>Tier #3</p>
<p>Darmouth
Brown
Chicago
Northwestern
Cornell
Rice
Johns Hopkins
Wash U (as you said, towards the bottom)</p>
<p>Tier #4</p>
<p>Georgetown (except for its IR!)
Carnegie Mellon
Vanderbilt
Emory
Notre Dame</p>
<p>Here’s what I think:</p>
<p>Stanford = HYP
Duke = Columbia, Penn
Rice = Darmouth, Brown, and Cornell</p>
<p>(of course, there are other schools such as MIT or Chicago that should be included above)</p>
<p>But I don’t necessarily see Darmouth and Chicago as Tier #2 schools.
MIT, from what I know, is just same as UPenn and Columbia.</p>
<p>H - deserves it’s own tier. Nuff said
Y/S
p
MIT/Colum
Dart/Brwn
Penn/Duk
Cornell/Chi/
NW/Cal/
Mich/UVA/jhu
Gtown</p>
<p>RML,</p>
<p>I honestly don’t understand how you can put state schools here. Yes, UC Berkeley and UCLA, those are all great schools but not to compete with those top private schools. Can’t believe there are some people here who keep saying that UCs and Michigan are better than some top private schools. I really think there’s a big difference between good private schools and state schools. (but I don’t mean any private schools here, I think UC Berkeley is on par with NYU) Those top 20 private schools I mentioned above are just steady. (can’t be moved from the top list whatsoever)</p>
<p>Maybe, it’s just having graduated college before this decade, but I don’t remotely see Penn on the same plane as MIT and above Dartmouth. Maybe, people have become more slaves to USNWR than previously.</p>