<p>What's better for a future in business (finance/investment banking)? Studying economics/math in UChicago? Or undergraduate business program in Emory, Notre Dame or NYU?</p>
<p>Whatever you want. Most people don’t get a job in the exact field they major in anyways.</p>
<p>If you gain admittance to the University of Chicago and can study math and economics there, go.</p>
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<p>For working in finance, your best bet here is Notre Dame (midwest) / NYU (nyc).</p>
<p>IMO at that level it doesn’t really matter just excel at whichever school you go to.</p>
<p>Skyhigh - If you want to do finance/investment banking (presumably in nyc), from what I know, general prestige and reputation of the school matters much more than your specific form of undergraduate business training. So, put another way, getting a degree in math or economics from Princeton will serve much better than having an undergrad business degree from ND or Emory.</p>
<p>With this in mind, studying economics at Chicago is probably a cut above an undergrad business degree from ND or Emory. Stern I’m not sure about - it’s been improving very quickly of late. </p>
<p>Generally, if you really want to do investment banking, the general tiers seem to be HYPS + Wharton, then maybe Dartmouth and Columbia & the top LACS (Amherst and Williams), then Duke/Chicago/Rest of Penn/Cornell, then maybe the other good schools: Emory/ND/WashU etc.</p>
<p>^^^ This is a misleading post. </p>
<p>Your most important consideration should be which campuses are recruited most heavily. While it is true that higher recruiting tends to occur at more selective schools, this is not always the case, and some obviously strong academic programs (such as Chicago, WUSTL) are not visited extensively by companies looking to hire. For midwest recruiting, Northwestern / Mendoza (Notre Dame) / Ross (Michigan) are recruited much more extensively than the University of Chicago for finance positions.</p>
<p>I have also heard (though never experienced personally) that Stern is recruited heavily for NYC finance positions and boasts very strong placement figures there.</p>
<p>is there a way to find out which schools are recruited more heavily?</p>
<p>elsijfdl - do you mean recruiting for finance positions in the midwest, or to do investment banking on Wall Street? </p>
<p>For investment banking in nyc, I always sorta assumed recruitment related to general status of the schools, starting with HYPS + Wharton, and then working its way down. With this in mind, I thought Chicago would be on par with Cornell/Rest of Penn/NU/Duke etc., and that all these schools were a step up on the food chain from ND/Emory/Wash U/Vanderbilt etc.</p>
<p>Stern, as I said above, I just don’t know much about. They’ve improved quite quickly of late, and given their location and everything, they may be a very good bet now.</p>
<p>Is there something else at work here? From what I knew, finance firms seemed most concerned with a school’s status, rather than the pedagogical strengths of a certain business program. So having NU and Chicago on par seems right, but traditionally I believed that schools like ND, Michigan (Ross), Emory, etc. were not seen on the same plane as Chicago/NU/Cornell/Rest of Penn/Duke etc. Has something changed on this front?</p>
<p>elsijfdl: Interesting. I always think UChicago is more prestigious so there would be more recruiting. Where do you get all those data?</p>
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<p>Both. Companies will come recruit on campus and while obviously there are geographical and regional influences involved, candidates have some room to request location. The most important part is being on a campus that draws significant amounts of recruiters looking to fill a wide range of positions.</p>
<p>It’s funny you mention HYPS + Wharton because, just humorously (don’t construe this as any kind of position I’m taking), i see Wharton kids everywhere coast to coast, but have rarely seen/heard of HYP students. Michigan - Ross is another school that seems to get very powerful penetration coast-to-coast.</p>
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<p>Experience in recruiting - UChicago’s emphasis is highly concentrated in the academic realm - represented by their “sky high” graduate program placement so to speak. Many employers tend to avoid using resources to extensively recruit on the campus because of this low emphasis on preprofessionalism.</p>
<p>Elsijfdl - this is interesting. So what would be your hierarchy of schools for those interested in investment banking? Would you have Wharton on its on level, followed by HYPS, and ND and Ross on par with a Dartmouth and Columbia? What would be your general take on the food chain? </p>
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<li>Also, I can see how Chicago’s generally anti-preprofessional slant could turn off potential employers. Still, I didn’t know it led to that much of a change in the recruiting landscape from a ND to a Chicago.</li>
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<p>I just asked my brother this (I am visiting him right now actually) on my way to Brown. He worked at Goldman, in Private Equity, and is now at Harvard business school. In his experience ND isn’t close to Dartmouth and Columbia (both are very strong). He said Northwestern also does well, as does Duke (both below Dartmouth and Columbia though).</p>
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<p>Making specific statements is difficult and a matter of perspective. I come from a midwestern university so most of my work/recruiting experience was in the midwest. My statements about wharton were purely whimsical, though I did have a conversation with a co-worker (from wharton) the other day where he was joking about where everyone from Princeton goes to work, because he had never seen them while interviewing in NYC. </p>
<p>I personally find it very difficult to believe that HYP students aren’t intensely represented in investment banking, though my anecdotal (read: unreliable) evidence has been otherwise, however I have never known anyone who worked at either GS or MS in nyc, so it is possible they all go to those two!</p>
<p>My biggest intention posting here was to emphasize that someone considering work in finance consider not only perceived prestige of a school, but also consider the “preprofessional environment” at those schools, because those two qualities are not always in sync. There is a reason certain schools (Chicago) are known to be academic-intense, while others are known to be social and preprofessional. These qualities do not always go unrecognized by recruiters, and some schools with less “prestige” can often have very high placements of their graduates (Ross being the most compelling example of this - though with Ross we have not moved very far down the ‘prestige food chain’ in my opinion).</p>
<p>Ah so elsifjdl, are there other examples along with Chicago that demonstrate how preprofessionalism may be out of sync with the prestige of a school? For example, would MIT perhaps be more of an “academic-intense” place, as would maybe Swarthmore, whereas Williams, Dartmouth, Brown etc are seen as more social/pre-professional schools? </p>
<p>Also, what would these firms be looking for in general? All the top schools seem to have a strong vein of pre-professionalism, so I’d imagine a firm would want the best talent, and you’d find (slightly) more promising talent at a place like Chicago or Swarthmore in comparison to an ND or Emory.</p>
<p>Again, I’m just curious about this - I had no interest in finance as an undergrad, but I always assumed the Chicago Econ degree for undergrads was one of the more coveted and “bankable” degrees out there.</p>
<p>Speaking for the midwest, I can say WUSTL is grossly underrepresented in finance. As is Carleton. I don’t know enough about the nuance of east coast recruiting to talk about the LACs out there, though I have heard recruiting is sparse, particularly outside of Williams/Amherst, but I really can’t comment on that.</p>
<p>The biggest issue here is one of “fit.” If you are pre-professional in mind, it is best, not only in terms of your own happiness but also likely in terms of the possibility for success, to go to a school where students have a similar mindset. Chicago/Swarthmore/Carnegie Mellon/Johns Hopkins/etc. are not schools full of wannabe finance types. Penn/Michigan/ND/Northwestern/Berkeley/Duke are.</p>
<p>Stern would be the best choice with Chicago in a close second. Although competition is very fierce within Stern, competition at Chicago for elite finance positions is fiercer.
Elite finance firms like those who work insanely hard and play like animals to deal with high stress nature of finance jobs. Recruiters are less enthusiastic, in terms of numbers, to recruit at Chicago because Chicago’s students, many of whom decided to attend Chicago to pursue a career in academia but then decided to pursue a career in finance due to high paying jobs, doesn’t play as hard as students at HYPSM, Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke, etc.</p>
<p>elsijfdl - Why do you think Wash U is so underrepresented? From what I know, WashU seems like a very pre-professional school, with a strong work hard/play hard mentality.</p>
<p>While all of the schools the OP inquired of are very strong, the University of Chicago stands apart as the only truly world-class academy on a comprehensive, graduate and undergraduate basis. If he (she?) attends the U. of Chicago, majors in economics and math, does well academically, and has anything remotely engaging and becoming about his personality, he should stand in good stead for finance positions, top graduate and professional schools, think tanks, and just about whatever else he might wish to entertain. As one example, hedge funds like really, really smart people, and are less inclined to follow an i-bank formula for recruiting. </p>
<p>The U. of Chicago also seems intent on losing its quirky reputation and “where fun goes to die” mantle. Several years hence, its graduates likely will continue to benefit from the University’s intellectual renown, finished off with a bit more polish and practicality. That would be a very powerful combination, indeed. </p>
<p>Stern may afford solid initial opportunities in many traditional finance fields (such as may exist after we emerge from the current economic straits), but I would not suggest turning down an offer from Chicago in its favor.</p>
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