<p>The Forbes, FT and Economist rankings are a joke. Only the USNWR and BW are reliable. </p>
<p>Generally, the top 5 MBA programs are HBS, Wharton, Kellogg, Stanford and Booth (in no particular order)</p>
<p>Next up are Columbia, Haas, Ross, Sloan and Tuck (in no particular order) </p>
<p>Next come Anderson, Darden, Fuqua, Johnson, Stern and Yale SOM (in no particular order)</p>
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<p>Actually, seems to me that Ivy students seem to be more interested in careers in teaching than do students at the top public schools…as long as we’re talking about an elite teaching experience.</p>
<p>A few months ago, Teach for America (TFA) received an applicant pool that Morgan Stanley recruiters would drool over. Their 46,000 applicants included 12% of all Ivy League seniors, 7% of the graduating class of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and 6% from U.C. Berkeley. A quarter of all black seniors at Ivy League schools and a fifth of Latinos applied to be teachers in the 2010 corps. It is, I’m told by some recent grads, one of the coolest things you can do after college…</p>
<p>[TFA</a> Sees Growth In Applicant Pool | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2010/4/23/tfa-harvard-baichorova-year/]TFA”>http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2010/4/23/tfa-harvard-baichorova-year/)</p>
<p>TFA is a stepping stone to graduate school Sakky, nothing more. I would expect a large percentage of students at schools with a large number of humanities and social science majors to go for TFA before embarking on their legal studies or launching their political careers.</p>
<p>You say that like it’s a bad thing. Let’s be perfectly honest: the bulk of teachers in our public schools do not come from higher-tier undergrad colleges such as the Ivies, Michigan, or Berkeley, but rather from low-to-average tier colleges. {I know that’s blunt, but come on guys, you know it’s true.} I think it’s desirable to bring in a higher level of talent to teach our children, even if only for a few years.</p>
<p>And let’s face it, nowadays, many (probably most) college graduates will only work for their first post-college employer for only a few years before moving onto something else, whether that be graduate school or another career entirely. The notion of guaranteed lifetime employment at one company, or even within a greater industry, has been dead for decades. I know some former Berkeley engineering graduates who graduated in the late 90’s during the tech boom during which they naturally worked as engineers, but after that boom turned to bust, became real estate salesmen. {Now that real estate has turned bust, I don’t know what they do now.} I know plenty of others from that same graduating year who are in non-engineering careers. Heck, it’s actually rather hard to think of any from that cohort who are still working as engineers. {There are some, but I had to strain to recall them.} </p>
<p>So I don’t why it’s necessarily an indictment on any school that they send graduates to their first job for only a few years. Heck, the banking and consulting industries are modeled around this structure. You told Ivybear that you hoped Ivy graduates would not be so materialistic to want to join consulting and banking firms right after graduation, but let’s face it, you’re not really going to make that much money as a banking or (especially) a consulting analyst after just 2-3 years, which is the typical duration for that position. It seems to me that people are joining those industries in order to add a high-prestige employer brand to their resume rather than just for the money.</p>
<p>sakky, I did not say that it is an indictment. At the same time, I find it disturbing that on CC, many posters insist that students who do not pursue prestigious and high-earning careers are somehow intellectually challenged. I am also sick and tired of the exaggerated extent to which posters on CC claim that students at elite private schools have an edge over students at elite public schools. The edge is non-existant.</p>
<p>At any rate, I love the fact that the structure of schools like Cal, Cornell, Michigan and Northwestern is to attract students who are passionate about a particular intellectual and professional career path other than the generic prelaw, premed, Management Consulting or Investment Banking option. There is an incredible difference in the college environment and intellectual diversity of a university when 30%-40% of your students seek such careers as opposed to 75%-80%.</p>
<p>“And even if many Chicago students intensely wish to get jobs in IBanking, far more wish to pursue different career paths.”</p>
<p>Do you have proof of this? Someone I know who transferred from UChicago to Duke said UChicago is as pre-professional as Duke. Though it’s possible that the people he hung out with at UChicago (fellow pre-professionals) are distorting his view of the school a little, but I highly doubt that it far from the truth.</p>
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<p>There are other schools which place similar numbers to Ross.</p>
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<p>I’m equally upset and disturbed that you consider all Dartmouth and Duke students to be “materialistic sellouts” when a sizable chunk of my peers at Duke are pursuing careers in policy making, academia, nonprofits, foreign service/intelligence agencies (FBI/CIA/PeaceCorps), teaching (Inner City Corps, TFA, etc.), social enterprise, entrepreneurship, restaurant management (Hillstone), international travel/brand management (Conde Nast, Smart Travel Asia, etc.), journalism (The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, national/international broadcasting (CNBC, NBC, ABC, CSPAN, Al Jazeera, France 24, BBC News, etc.), proprietary trading (Jane Street Capital, DRW Trading, First New York Securities, etc.) and marketing/advertising (Ogilvy & Mather, Digitas, Porter Novelli, etc.). And the list goes on and on and on…</p>
<p>This is just a small sample of career paths that current Duke students/recent grads have pursued according to our alumni database. You are completely off base if you think that 75-80% of grads at Dartmouth/Duke/Penn go to law school/med school/banking/consulting. The number is much closer to 55-60% at Duke.</p>
<p>Full Disclosure: I went to a top 5 public high school in Michigan (Cranbrook, Troy, Detroit Country Day, Novi, Grosse Pointe North) and lived in Chicago beforehand so I know over 300 current students at the University of Michigan, close to a 1,000 students at Duke, about 10-20 a piece at each Ivy, 10 at Stanford, 15 at MIT, etc. etc.</p>
<p>Despite the fact that you are 20 years older than me and have more experience than me in the real world, I know ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more people at the top schools than you now and I frequently compare notes with them about their undergraduate education with regards to professor quality, class sizes, overall experience, career placement, recruitment, etc.</p>
<p>My research has shown that Michigan falls well short of Dartmouth, Penn and Duke in most regards and slightly short of Brown and Cornell when it comes to employer relations/postgrad career placement.</p>
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Many more than 300 Duke seniors will be working in finance this year in FRONT OFFICE positions (Investment Banking, Global Capital Markets, Sales and Trading, Research, Asset Management, etc.). This is another to another 150 seniors who will be consultants for the top firms(MBB, Accenture, Deloitte, LEK, Parthenon, Advisory Board, etc.) BCG and Bain take 10+ Duke kids every while BCG for instance only picks up 1or 2 students at Ross. You can’t compare a specialized program like Ross to an entire university like Duke but even if you do, Duke destroys Ross even in ABSOLUTE terms.</p>
<p>wow my university is bigger than yours fight. My money is on Alexandre though. </p>
<p>Are there really 300 students in Duke heading to IB? Well it would make sense though. However I agree with Alexandre- TFA is primarily for humanities/social science people who plan to go to law school/graduate school or mckinsey. The majority of them dont end up teaching in the public school system in the US. This is very unfortunate, and I would probably hold my views on this.</p>
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<p>LDS, both Cranbrook-Kingswood and Detroit Country Day are private schools. Grosse Pointe South is considered more elite than Grosse Pointe North. </p>
<p>The elite school districts in Michigan are Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe, Northville, and maybe Novi. </p>
<p>You claim you know Michigan but can’t even label the schools accurately. You lost all credibility with me.</p>
<p>sefago, TFA is nothing but a resume-padding, two-year stint for most college graduates. The majority of TFA corps members do not go into teaching as a career.</p>
<p>^ Thats what I said- and I agree with this- thats why its common in so called “elite” schools. Its a shame though- I initially thought it was a brilliant idea that could be reciprocated in other parts of the world including developing countries until I found out more about the process</p>
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<p>Well, I don’t know about that. It certainly seemed to me that there were plenty of Berkeley students who, frankly, weren’t really passionate about college, and in many cases, weren’t even entirely sure why they were in college at all, other than parental expectations or some general notion that they needed a degree to have a decent job, but with little cognizance of what specific ‘decent’ job they actually wanted. {Or, even if they were passionate, they weren’t highly talented: let’s face it, if you’re earning less than a 3.0 GPA, you’re probably not going to get a great job or head to a graduate program of any repute.} I don’t know that much valuable diversity is really added via students who just want a degree without even really knowing exactly why they want one.</p>
<p>But even putting that issue aside, I think IvyPBear is exactly right in denoting the forces in the modern college environment that shapes students’ desires. Take MIT as a prime example. I think we can all agree that the overwhelming majority of incoming MIT students are passionate about science and technology - indeed, it would be rather foolish to attend MIT if you didn’t have such passion, because you may not even graduate because you won’t pass the GIR’s. Yet the provocative yet undeniable truth is that, before the recession, nearly half of all MIT graduates who entered the workforce took jobs not in science or tech, but rather in consulting or finance. To some extent, I can understand why that might happen with Sloan or economics majors - yet even so, one might expect more Sloan students to take jobs in tech management/marketing, or econ students to take jobs with quant think-tanks or government agencies. Yet Sloan and econ majors represent only a small minority of MIT undergrads: the vast majority of them are engineering and hard science majors, yet many of them end up in consulting or banking. </p>
<p>So think about what that means. At even MIT - arguably the premier engineering school in the world - a social environment exists that convinces many engineering students to not actually pursue careers in engineering, a substantial loss of prime human capital to the US tech industry. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t really care if some 4th tier engineering program produced many graduates who didn’t actually want to be engineers - as, frankly, they probably weren’t going to be top-flight engineers anyway. But we’re talking about MIT. These students clearly had tremendous passion for engineering to get into and then survive an MIT engineering program. {Let’s face it: if you don’t care about engineering, you’re not going to make it through an MIT engineering major.} Yet, somewhere along the way, probably during senior-year recruiting season, many of them are convinced to not actually work as engineers. </p>
<p>I also think back to the example of Ankur Luthra, one of the handful of Rhodes Scholars who majored in engineering at Berkeley, and who came close to setting the record for most A+ grades of any engineering student in Berkeley history. Not counting summer internships, he never worked a day in his life as an actual engineer. Instead, after completing his master’s at Oxford through the Rhodes Scholarship, he went directly to Harvard Business School and now works in private equity. In other words, arguably the best student the Berkeley undergrad engineering program has ever produced sadly decided never to work as an actual engineer.</p>
<p>Interms of the OPs question- funny enough, I was actually discussing with a professor today about the importance of your undergrad to graduate admissions. I voiced the popular statement on CC, that your undergrad does not really matter- as long as you work hard.</p>
<p>He first gave me the- are you kidding look- then told me that in his experience both he and his collegagues place significant importance on ones undergraduate. A 3.5 GPA can distinguish you for most top prorgams he said. He specifically made the “state school” vs “top private” comment. However this was talking of graduate school and the professor went to school during teh era of USNEWs so school rank might be important.</p>
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I misspoke. Sorry, I meant to say the top 5 high schools in Michigan period in my view (I know that DCDS and Cranbrook are private, just made a mistake)…I don’t think Northville, Groves or Seaholm (the last two are Birmingham’s high schools) are quite as good as Troy High, West Bloomfield High, Novi High, DCDS, Cranbrook, possibly IA, possibly Ann Arbor Pioneer, etc. etc.</p>
<p>DCDS is hands down the best high school (public or private) in the state though by a wide margin.</p>
<p>Michigan has many good-great high schools. Below are just a few:</p>
<p>Andover High School (Bloomfield Hills)
Cranbrook Kingswood School (Bloomfield Hills)
Detroit Country Day School (Beverly Hills)
Grosse Point North (Grosse Point)
Grosse Point South (Grosse Point)
Huron High School (Ann Arbor)
International Academy (Bloomfield Hills)
North Farmington High School (Farmington Hills)
Northville High School (Northville)
Novi High School (Novi)
Okemos High School (Okemos)
Pioneer High School (Ann Arbor)
Rochest Adams High School (Rochester Hills)
Troy High School (Troy)
West Bloomfield High School (West Bloomfield)
Wylie E. Groves High School (Beverly Hills)</p>
<p>“Yet the provocative yet undeniable truth is that, before the recession, nearly half of all MIT graduates who entered the workforce took jobs not in science or tech, but rather in consulting or finance.”</p>
<p>Agree. It goes to show that smart people often one passion: thinking, which can be accomplished in many disciplines. They eventually go into the fields (finance, consulting, etc.) that let them think and pay them the highest salaries. That’s why I don’t believe that there is a single top ranked school that’s significantly more intellectual or pre-professional than another. Student interested in business/medicine/law is no where near 70%; 40-50% sounds about right, and I believe this applies to all the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, UChicago, Northwestern, etc.</p>
<p>IvyPBear, by agreeing with Sakky, you are both validating my point. At some elite universities (and I would include MIT to that list), a huge chunk (70%-80%) of the students have very similar career objectives. At others, there is far greater variety in the career objectives of the overall student body. I am not saying that one is better than the other, although I personally prefer the latter to the former. Note that when I say that 70%-80% of the students seek such careers, I do not mean that all of them succeed. Many never get their foot in the door and of those that do, many either fail or chose to change.</p>
<p>I also do not believe that having a huge percentage of premed, prelaw, IB and MC students is an indication of student quality. Caltech, Cal, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and several other elite universities have extremely gifted student bodies that seek careers in other domains such as technology, research, education etc…</p>
<p>“IvyPBear, by agreeing with Sakky, you are both validating my point. At some elite universities (and I would include MIT to that list), a huge chunk (70%-80%) of the students have very similar career objectives.”</p>
<p>Alexandre, I agree that neither model is better than the other. However, I do think that students at most of the top ranked small private liberal arts oriented schools have very similar career objectives. There schools include the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, UChicago, Duke, Northwestern, WashU, and JHU. The only exceptions seem to be Caltech and Swarthmore (if you include the LACs). However, even at those pre-professional oriented schools, the students interested in business related careers, medicine, and law are no where near 70%, since quite a lot are actually interested in pursuing studio arts, PhD, politics, social work, etc. Huge proportion goes on to earn PhD’s in both the sciences and the humanities.</p>
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finance and thinking? come on?!?!? analyst jobs = sleep deprived and excel.
consulting = sleep deprived + travel + powerpoint.</p>
<p>the pay isn’t that good for undergrad (even if you include bonus), especially if you factor in the per hour pay. there are jobs with way less stress and hours that pay similar (~100K), such as petroleum engineering.</p>