Wake Forest, Lehigh, Bucknell or Fordham for Business Undergrad?

From what I understand Wake Forest is a bit better than the others in terms of reputation/prestige. Can anyone back this up or refute it? Also, does anyone have insight to the alumni network and chances of landing a finance job (i.e. Investment Banking, Real Estate, Trading) in New York City for all of these schools. I was offered a decent scholarship at Fordham, but I live really close and am not too eager about that.

Couple other random questions:

How much are the annual fraternity dues at these schools?

Is getting into the Wake Forest Business school difficult? And do people frequently not make the cut with the intention of pursuing a business degree?

Pitting Lehigh and Bucknell against each other, which would rank higher for business?

Lehigh would be the best. Huge network in NYC, great career placement, innovative school.

Congrats on your acceptances!

Fordham would allow you to intern during the school year which you won’t be able to do at the other schools. Also a huge alumni base in NYC. Average Gabelli grads made $65,000 a year in the class of 2018.

Wake has a great b school and fierce alumni ( like Lehigh). They actually place quite well at several major banks in NYC. Lot of kids from the northeast. Lots of kids go into consulting too.

You can go to Linkedin and look at each school. Go to Alumni and see where they live, what companies they work for, what they studied, what they do, etc. Very useful tool. They’re all very good schools. My guess would be that Lehigh has more high end NYC jobs because of the combination of quality school, location / proximity to NYC, and alumni.

I only directly know of Wake. They do have a lot of NYC alum. Started a program called Wake on Wall Street where they take kids to learn about and network with companies across multiple industries each yr. They also do this in DC, Austin, SF, and Charlotte. NYC is a popular destination for Wake grads in all forms of financial services and accounting.

You can also look at each schools First Destination report. Some are more detailed than others. Haven’t seen the other schools mentioned but Wake’s details major, company, job, location for every graduated student (they have a 95ish% knowledge rate - 95% of the grads have responded to the employment survey so essentially accounts for 9.5 out of 10 kids.

Bucknell is placing better than Lehigh for investment banking recently and wake forest mainly sends people down in the south. Fordham i’ve heard mix things. I would choose Bucknell, they have great alumni in the east coast and even in other cities around the country.

1 Like