<p>Of course, more students headed to WashU doesn’t imply that it’s more prestigious than NU or U of C (and I don’t think that was the original intention of the statement, either); it just implies that more students applied and got in. Prestige is more accurately measured by yield, and WashU’s yield remains in the low 30s despite admitting quite a few students ED.</p>
<p>Also, it’s notable that WashU seems to waitlist top students to see if there’s any demonstrated interest at getting off the waitlist. They don’t want to admit students who don’t want to go there, which is reasonable, although I’m not sure I agree with the waitlist tactic.</p>
<p>well, I made the original statement here, reporting on what I had heard from my friend. I would say it’s not about prestige, but for the particular group of kids he was talking about, prestige wasn’t driving their thinking about this. These were top students who wanted to go to a good school but just weren’t terribly interested in Northwestern or Chicago, regardless of what they thought about the prestige of those schools relative to WUSTL. And I think this may be true for a lot of kids in central and southern Illinois; Chicago just isn’t that appealing to them, it’s a little too much “other,” but suburban St. Louis feels like it’s right in their backyard and if there’s a good school there, they’re interested.</p>
<p>Northwestern draws heavily from suburban Chicago for its student body. U Chicago may be a little more diverse and eclectic. But I don’t think either school draws heavily from central and southern Illinois. In contrast, that’s fertile recruiting ground for WUSTL.</p>
<p>“Prestige [among high school grads] is more accurately measured by yield, and WashU’s yield remains in the low 30s despite admitting quite a few students ED.”</p>
<p>Prestige among the general publics, especially among academia and business employers, are measured by entirely different metrics.</p>
<p>Notre Dame, Northwestern, UChicago for privates. Also Duke has good size alumni network in Chicago due to large number of its graduates that go to Booth and Kellogg. For smaller LAC’s Williams, Holy Cross and Colgate. Holy Cross has a long history of attracting top students from the city’s Jesuit prep schools, and over the years Holy Cross grads were CEO’s of some of the larger banks and utility companies. Overall ND dominates.</p>
<p>The top 3 Illinois schools (Chicago, Northwestern and UIUC) will obviously have very strong and active alumni networks in Chicago. Beyond those three, I would say Michigan, Notre Dame and Wisconsin-Madison.</p>
<p>For UNDERGRADUATE business major placements in Chicago corporations and non-profits, DePaul would be the strongest undergraduate program. It has excellent business and accounting programs, and a loyal alumni base. Many senior executives in Chicago track-back to DePaul undergraduate business degrees. Fancy-pants institutions’ degrees have less importance in Chicago.</p>
<p>Spend some time reading back issues of Crains Chicago, our local weekly business newspaper. Chicago is not New York in regards to reverence towards Ivy degrees.</p>
<p>And regarding anecedotal hiring stories, I’ve heard several Chicago executives complain about recent UoC grads’ relatively low success-rate as entry-level corporate employees, noting general unwillingness and/or inability to fulfill the relatively mundane work assignments (such as paralegal work) in a reliable and positive manner.</p>
<p>Chicago’s top 5 employers are all government-related (the federal government, Chicago public schools, the city, the state, and Cook County). Others in the top 25 include Walmart, Walgreens, Chicago Transit Authority, the Archdiocese of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University. Ivies, other T20 universities and top LACs are unlikely to “place” too many of their own with those employers (except for Chicago and NU students at their own universities). BOA and JP Morgan Chase may be getting their share (but probably not to their big Chicago offices).</p>
<p>Within 5 years after graduation, a high percentage of students at these schools enroll in graduate and professional schools, then go into law, medicine, academia, finance, IT, or public service (sometimes after a stint in a program like Teach for America or the Peace Corps). They compete in a national (and to some extent international) market, where Chicago isn’t a very big player.</p>
<p>The schools that will “place” best in Chicago do so because they are big and because they are there. As for the alumni network thing, I find it hard to believe it has that much relevance anymore (for most fields). I doubt managers at BOA are hiring their college golfing buddies to fill entry positions. They have big well-oiled HR machines that put everybody through pretty much the same process.</p>
<p>So go to college for a liberal education, not because you imagine this or that academic brand will get you a job. If you don’t believe in the value of that, then go learn a trade (nursing, plumbing, whatever) or a knowledge-intensive profession like pharmacy. Doors will open for what you know and can do given the prevailing supply and demand.</p>
<p>Chicago isn’t as provincial as you think with regards to corporate hiring. Here are some big proprietary trading firms and a list of what schools they hire from:</p>
<p>There are actually other businesses out there other than trading firms, though. See, you’re under the mistaken impression that “what trading firms do” / where they hire from is any more important than any other industry. </p>
<p>Look, goldenboy, here are the ranges of fields that people can go into:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ What they do and how they hire and where they hire from for fields H and P isn’t any more or less important than any other field.</p>
<p>Yes, trading firms in Chicago hire from national-elite schools. So what? Plenty of other Chicago-area firms hire from more-Chicago area schools (where, say, DePaul, or maybe Marquette to a lesser extent) compete just as well if not better per Higgins’ post above. But, go ahead and think that trading, investment banking, etc. are somehow more bellweathers of something. They’re just jobs. Some of many.</p>