Rank best 15 "Wall Street" schools (overall)

<p>Lets create another mega-thread! Now I'm not looking for the "best" schools, I'm looking for a ranking that combines the number of I-Banks and Fortune 500's recruiting on campus, the number of kids of Wall Street, internships, and prestige of school on Wall Street. Let the debate begin!</p>

<p>UPenn - Wharton, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, UPenn, Stanford, UC Berkeley - Haas, NYU - Stern, Columbia, UChicago, Dartmouth - Tuck, Cornell AEM, MIT - Sloan, Oxford, Duke, Cambridge, LSE</p>

<p>No real order</p>

<p>undergrad, tuck's not undergrad, but yeah Dartmouth econ is probably what you were getting at</p>

<p>every ivy except brown, NYU, MIT, Uchicago, some Berkeley for the most part. I also know for a fact that a lot of SUNY schools get recruited by i banks because apparently they have a relatively strong alumni network. Not sure they get the best positions in the i banks initially though.</p>

<p>These days, the lower a school is on this list, the better off it probably was (i.e. "regular" Penn-CAS Penn-SEAS seniors are a lot less unhappy than Penn-Wharton seniors)</p>

<p>The question is whether this is a blip or a long-term trend.</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-confidential-cafe/569450-2008-investment-banking-rip.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-confidential-cafe/569450-2008-investment-banking-rip.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Stanford
MIT
UPenn</p>

<ol>
<li>Columbia</li>
<li>Dartmouth</li>
<li>Duke</li>
<li>Cornell</li>
<li>NYU-Stern</li>
<li>UC Berkeley</li>
<li>UMich</li>
<li>UVa</li>
<li>Chicago</li>
</ol>

<p>
[quote]
every ivy except brown, NYU, MIT, Uchicago, some Berkeley for the most part. I also know for a fact that a lot of SUNY schools get recruited by i banks because apparently they have a relatively strong alumni network. Not sure they get the best positions in the i banks initially though.

[/quote]
Not true.</p>

<p>ten chars</p>

<p>bump.......</p>

<p>
[quote]
Not true.</p>

<p>ten chars

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Not that I disagree with you (all 8 Ivies are excellent at this sort of thing), but for the masses out there it would be nice to provide some evidence to support your assertion :)</p>

<p>The only two schools that I can think of that are truly head and shoulders over the rest are Harvard and Wharton. After those two, I would confidently say that there are 30-35 strategic campuses where Consulting Firms and Investment Banks recruit. Those are:</p>

<p>Amherst College
Boston College
Brown University
Claremont McKenna College
Colgate University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Davidson College
Duke University
Georgetown University
Haverford College
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Middlebury College
New York University
Northwestern University
Pomona College
Princeton University
Stanford University
Swarthmore College
University of California-Berkeley
University of Chicago
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania (other than Wharton)
University of Southern California
University of Texas-Austin
University of Virginia
Wesleyan University
Williams College
Yale University</p>

<p>I am probably missing a couple.</p>

<p>Also, keep in mind that Investment Banking is going to restructure entirely over the next 5 years and you can be sure that the IBanking industry of the 1984-2008 era is now dead.</p>

<p>^ Right as to the last point. Wall Street has shed tens of thousands of jobs over the past few months. Many of those jobs are never coming back, and competition for the remaining jobs will be fierce with dozens of skilled, talented, experienced, and currently unemployed or underemployed people in the hunt for every opening. The days when the Ivies and other elite colleges represented a fast ticket to big money on Wall Street are behind us for the foreseeable future, and Wall Street as we've known it over the past couple of decades may never return. Of course, there will always be a financial services sector, and always some entry-level hiring in that sector. But I think a lot of current and prospective students have their heads in the sand if they think it's going to be like it was.</p>

<p>amen bclinton! </p>

<p>and for that matter the OP and other responders were overly focused on the wheeler and dealer jobs of IB, and forgot about the trenches and backroom jobs that go to some very fine schools in the area like St. Johns, Fordham, Rutgers, Lehigh, Lafayette....and BC, Tufts, Northeastern in the Boston area. </p>

<p>Its just another thread to start an argument between those who value prestige over everything else. </p>

<p>Its the same for law schools and law firms. Just this morning an article came out about how New York law firms...the really big prestigious firms are asking newly hired associates to defer reporting for duty after they take the bar examination this summer...for a YEAR or more. And go do some pro-bono work somewhere. Some firms will pay 50% of their offered salaries to students to do just that. Its that or lose their job. Its daunting. Nobody knows what the landscape will look like in a year. Nobody. And not just in New York and Boston but also London and Dubai.</p>

<p>I was talking to my father the other day. He reminded that it took the World close to 50 years to forget the Great Depression. In his 50 years of experience, he has never seen anything like the current meltdown. He estimates this depression will destroy the general confidence and faith the masses placed in Financial institutions for a long time and that the restrictions that will be imposed on Finanical institutions going forward is going to change the way IBankers function and severly curtail their earning power. The totally unacceptable, unethical, greedy, contemptable behavior of IBankers and Financial institutions in the recent months (lavish parties, huge bonuses), after they were so generously bailed out by the already-struggling taxpayer, makes me sick. I am disgusted beyond words.</p>

<p>^ I second that!!</p>

<p>ibankers truly disgust me...</p>

<p>I have a different take on this. Even after shedding tens of thousands of jobs in recent months, Wall Street's overall employment levels are still far above where they were a decade ago. Parts of the Street will be hugely different in the future, but large parts also will not. The good news is those departments that will see the greatest cutbacks and changes contain many of the Wall Streeters that were most in need of a reality and humility check. The bad news is that these were also important centers of hiring for students coming from elite colleges. </p>

<p>When many people on CC refer to I-banking, they mean the jobs related to areas of corporate finance/M&A which carried high prestige to go along with their high compensation. More than any other part of Wall Street, these areas created and perpetuated the elitism of Wall Street and stocked their departments almost exclusively with grads from Ivy and Ivy-like colleges. However, their elitism and value-added was increasingly a myth as the revenues generated even by the powers of the Corp Fin/M&A world (GS and MS) were less than 15% of the firm's business. This area won't disappear from Wall Street, but it will be smaller and hopefully populated with a more widely sourced group of individuals with a much lower level of arrogance. </p>

<p>The outlook is more bleak for the principal trading sides of these firms. Over the last decade, many of the Wall Street I-banks evolved into big hedge funds and those on the proprietary trading desks were the largest generators by far of revenue and profit. While more quantitative and not as pedigreed as the traditional investment bankers, this group generated obscene amounts of profit and were sometimes paid ridiculous sums of money. Those days are over and this is the area of Wall Street investment banks that will see the most significant changes/permanent cutbacks. </p>

<p>But I-banks are much more than Corp Fin and prop trading and hiring will still go on in many other parts of these firms. IMO, the question is whether the elite college grad will be attracted to these less prestigious posts. Students who attended top boarding schools and then used various Ivy League outposts as their staging ground for launching their bids for an investment banking corp fin/m&a or prop trading analyst job may not have the same interest if the analyst job is for bond/equity sales support or asset management. But those are more stable areas, even if less profitable and a lot less prestigious to those on Manhattan's Upper East Side.</p>

<p>Hawkette, I'm curious, why will M & A et al start hiring from different schools in your opinion and what's likely to make that happen?</p>

<p>Alexandre, it's a mildly depressing thought, but I take an historic view of the position of the US in the world economy, Wall St., and the US "standard of living" of the past 50 years.</p>

<p>The US before WWII was not an economic powerhouse globally. Then WWII. Europe, the US primary competitor at the time, was in shambles. Germany in particular, which house the most advanced technologies and technologists. The UK of course despite its small size was a major player. And Italy. There wasn't much hay being made in Japan or China, or India at that time.</p>

<p>The US therefore had a monopoly of sorts starting in 1946, filling the vacuum created by the devastation in Europe. The US took the lead in everything from automobiles, to computers, to wheat and grains, to computing machines, to chemicals and raw materials for manufacturing, and so on.</p>

<p>Then Edwards Demming started his lectures on statistical quality control in Japan. Then Europe began its rebuild. Molopoly is starting to erode. But these were practiacally unnoticed devolopments as the US enjoying the greatest economic boom since the early Roman Empire. The US citizenry becomes accostomed to women, of all things, STAYING AT HOME AND BEING THIS NEW THING CALLED HOUSEWIFE, or later "STAY AT HOME MOM". Time are good when half of the married couple does not much for most of the day while the children are away at government funded schools, and in the case of the US, at school funded sports programs after the instruction day is over. It was a time of such monopolistic excess that companies were able to sell just about everything they could produce using a model called "cost-plus" pricing.</p>

<p>Well, to cut to the chase, each year since about 1960, the rest of the world has gotten stronger, while the US remained static. GIs coming back from WWII or the Korean Conflict could land nice jobs, with nice benefits, purchase nice single family homes (think now of the TV series like Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, etc.). Families talked to their children about studying hard in school (which meant maybe an hour of homework per day), while in Europe, India, east Asia, children were in school longer, and doing much more school work at home. Suddenly, the best and brightest college students weren't being produced by US high schools, but by those in Japan, China, Germany and UK (as before, now that they'd recovered).</p>

<p>All that to say -- the US economic boom between WWII and the present was artificially sustained by the jump start provided by the near monopoly position the US enjoyed in the years after WWII. That jump start and advantage being now long gone, I think americans would be well advised to begin thinking morerealistically about the value of work and compensation... and about a more modest consumptive style.</p>

<p>hmom,
It is my hope that they will. In reality, I'm doubtful that they will. What could make it happen is an institutional conclusion that they would benefit from broadening themselves (call it "diversity" and it might work :) ). </p>

<p>Historically, it's been easy for Wall Street Corp Fin/M&A to recruit from the usual suspects and there are undeniably plenty of smart kids coming out of those places. But I do think that this has created a blind spot on Wall Street and we're seeing some backlash today from all across America. </p>

<p>Personally, I'd love to see Wall Street taking a broader approach and adding more from the public university ranks and more from the top private colleges (Nat'l Uni and LAC) located outside of the Northeast. But I'm enough of a realist to know that the geographic and alumni pipeline advantages are very strong on the Street and this is unlikely to be greatly changed when the pendulum begins to swing in a more positive direction.</p>