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P.S. My son is currently applying to colleges--which is why I'm on this site to begin with. And since he wants to major in finance, I've pointed him to NYU, Bentley, Indiana, Purdue, Penn, and MIT over Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and the rest. When his time to go to graduate business school rolls around these are great choices, but not what I'm recommending for him (or anyone else on this site) at the undergrad level.
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<p>If you're talking about "high" finance, I have to disagree with this and agree with Slipper1234 and Alexandre. With the exception of Wharton and MITSloan, degrees in anything from HYPS are probably going to be more valuable than specific business degrees from places like IU if you want to get into high finance. Let's face it. The leading Wall Street Ibanks, private equity firms, hedge funds, and the like hire almost exclusively at the top 15 schools, and with little regard for what you majored in. I've known people with History and English degrees get into bulge-bracket firms. But of course, they got their degrees from Harvard. If this is the path you want to take, then the high-ranked school is the way to go.</p>
<p>I agree that you might have to teach these guys the way to do business. But so what? The fact is, most of what you learn in college, you will never use anyway. This is true even of highly pre-professional degrees. For example, I have known many MIT engineers who are now working as engineers who say that they barely use even 5% of what they learned in school. All of those classes where they're doing huge calculations and derivations, or figuring out fiendishly difficult algorithms - they don't do any of that stuff on their job. </p>
<p>The truth is, most jobs really aren't that hard to learn how to do in terms of the tasks you will be doing. We're not talking about brain surgery here. What is really important is not the specific tasks, but rather the deeper issues like work ethic, intuition, creativity, and the ability to learn. These are things that really make education valuable. </p>
<p>I'll put it to you this way. Think back to all of the classes you took in high school. High school makes students to do many things that they will never use later in their life. Think about it - how many people have jobs where they will deconstruct Mark Twain, write papers on the social impact of the War of 1812, conjugate French verbs, or learn how to bisect angles with ruler and compass? Practically nobody actually does these specific tasks later on in life. In fact, I would say that most people never use any of the specific things that they learned in school past, say, the 6th grade. So does that make junior high and high school worthless? Does that mean that the country is just wasting vast resources in running all of these school years in teaching things to kids that they will never use? I don't think so. The real goal of these tasks is that they are are teaching you how to think logically and creatively. A well educated mind can quickly learn whatever skills need to be picked up later on in life. </p>
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Much later, I worked at a fortune 500 company. This place was much more along the lines that Calcruzer described. We actually preferred top grads from the regional state colleges, and wouldn't recruit at any Ivy League colleges at all. The reasons included: matching specific training to specific jobs, matching expectations to jobs, willingness to actually work for salary and growth opportunities offered, high cost of turnover. I think we got great people from these state colleges, by the way.
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<p>I agree with monydad here, especially in his last 3 points. The fact is, lots of companies, especially the big Fortune 500 companies, aren't really interested in hiring the absolute best and the brightest. They say they are, but they aren't really. What they are really interested in is hiring people who are going to fit well in the company, and that often times does not really mean the best and the brightest. </p>
<p>For example, I have noted that many large engineering firms will not recruit at MIT, and some that have in the past are cutting back on their MIT recruiting and focusing more on less prominent engineering schools. Instead, more and more companies who come to recruit at MIT tend to be smaller, but sexier high-tech companies, as well as consulting firms and banks. When one of the company representatives was asked why they were cutting back on MIT recruiting, the answer was simple - first, it's hard to get them to sign up. MIT engineers tended to ask for a higher salary than we were willing to pay. Secondly, and even more importantly, they frankly tended to get bored with the opportunities we gave them and would quit. For example, MIT engineers wanted to be working on new and exciting high-tech projects all the time, and the company just didn't have that many high-tech projects around. Moreoever, the MIT engineers wanted to get promoted to senior level and to the management ranks very quickly, but that would roil the existing seniority-based progression scale that the company had, so they couldn't do it. Bottom line, as good as the MIT engineers are, they just aren't a good fit for many companies. Simply put, MIT engineers want an exciting and high-powered career, and a lot of companies simply can't or won't give it to them.</p>