Don’t forget that if your family income is less than $60,000 and you attend an elite, private UG then your finaid will cover tuition. Use the net price calculators. Our state U does not give good finaid. My sons’ elite UG tuitions are free. We can not afford the deal offered by the state U.
Sorry to sound snotty, but ten years ago I figured that my three would attend state U. I figured wrong. Lucky to have a wife who kicked their academic butts.
If you are from CA, MI or VA then consider your state U. I’m sure others will want to add their state U to this short list but…
D1 went to Cornell and got her IB job through on campus recruiting. She has done well and still loves her job. She is already a VP doing full client coverage. She is not going to need MBA to further advance her career, whether she stays at her firm or go to another firm. In her case, she has just saved 250K even though we were full pay for her UG. Our total spend for her education was 200K (back then it was 50K/yr). If she had gone to a school that was not a target school for IB, she may had to get a lower paying job for 2 years then try to get an elite MBA degree before she could be an associate at an IB. Her total educational spend would have been 120K (UG) + 240K for MBA = 360K, and 2 years of making less money, and 2 years of making no money at all while getting her MBA. In her case, the ROI was better by going to an elite UG rather than an elite MBA.
BTW - she has a lot of friends from NU, Cornell, Princeton, JHU all working at top tier IBs who are already associates and VP with no advance degrees.
@oldfort: Lots of variables there. For instance, someone who got in to Cornell is likely able to get scholarships for undergrad and even elite MBA programs give merit scholarships these days.
And counterfactuals, by definition, can’t be determined. It’s possible, for instance, for her to have gone to a non-target school tuition-free and then hustled her way in to IB, ending up where she is now but with $150K more.
Yes, she could have gone to non-target school and had much lower probability of getting a job at IB. Every option has its cost, risk and reward. I am someone who is good at taking calculated risk and additional 150K was money well spent to mitigate the risk of her resume may not have seen the light of day.
She is responsible for her firm’s analyst and associate programs now. I don’t believe they have that many graduates from the publics mentioned on this thread, if any, in their analyst program.
I think most people get an MBA when they want to do a career change. D1’s old roommate was also in IB, but she hated the job, so she went to Harvard to get her MBA to make a career change. I think her job at a top tier IB helped with her admission to Harvard.
I have to agree with @oldfort . You can always find exceptions to any rule but you increase the probability of obtaining one of those jobs greatly by going to a target school. The target schools allow for a door to open and for your resume to get seen. Yes, the interview is on you but you get that opportunity to be seen.
Okay, if I assume full pay, then I side with oldfort.
When S1 asked to transfer to an elite UG I called guys I hadn’t seen in 40 years because they had been on Wall Street. They all agreed. Skip the merit aid school (Tough pill to swallow). Graduate from from an elite UG to improve you iB prospects. S1 and all his buddies had top jobs before the Christmas holiday. I need to send those old guys thank you notes!
Zinhead - Yes it is possible to hustle your way in. S1 sat in a waiting room with candidates from Princeton and Allegheny, but 90% of his encounters were elite UGs.
The problem with this discussion is that the answer requires an appreciation for the future, and all of the answers are based on individual historical sample sizes.
Finance and banking, the parental gold standard above for “my kid didn’t need it”, are on the verge of experiencing monumental employment shifts through automation. Many of the VP’s with good 6 figure incomes will find themselves looking for jobs in 10 years.
An advanced degree has become a decision point for recruitment across nearly all fields. It’s a gate that someone with an undergrad degree can’t pass through. All things being equal in the end (as far as educational investment), I’d take 2 good degrees over 1 very good one. I don’t know what you’ll do with them…but neither does anyone else.
Agree that a traditional 2-year MBA makes most sense for career changers. Lots of other options available for those who don’t.
Honestly, there are a lot of options available for people who can afford it or get scholarships.
BTW, as an MBA is dependent on work experience and may not be wanted by those who stay in a career, the better comparable is 4 years full-pay at an elite private vs. 4-years at in-state prices at a good but not elite school (a public or private where you picked up scholarships)+ a 1 year management masters (offered by Northwestern’s Kellogg, Duke, and a bunch of European unis) or some other masters.
Commenting to follow thread. I fear that I’m going to have a similar dilemna. I’ve already been accepted to Drexel which will result in 40k in loans (less if I use co op income to pay them off faster) and perhaps I can negotiate a bit more aid. They also gave me credit for ALL the courses I took which is awesome. Alternatively, I’m sure that out of Fordham, Bentley, Boston College, Baruch, and Northeastern I will get into at least one, and they’re all semi-targets/targets but I doubt any of them will give me much aid. Baruch is cheap obvs, but for the others would the network be worth having closer to 100k in loans. I just don’t know. A bit too early to worry about it but this conversation is interesting.
I wanted this to be a separate comment, but from reading articles, threads on WSO, CC, and other places; it seems like Top 1-30MBA>MSF/MFE>Regular MBA. The reason being that in a MBA program a lot of what you’re paying for is the network. You’re not really becoming much more specialized in anything. At least when compared with a MSF or MFE. I’m not super experienced obvs but that’s what I get from my lurking.
Well Baruch/Fordham both have decent OCR don’t they? And the proximity to WS is always a plus. Bentley I think is more reputable, and I’m sure Northeastern says they got 100 students into FO co-op positions. Anyways, I didn’t want to thread-jack, just saying that this is a very relatable struggle for me.
I’ll add my own experience to the discussion, though I realIze it is a work in progress. My high stat children (a senior and a sophomore) chose the good undergraduate in-state route, UIUC Business. We are very happy with their experience there and have no regrets at this time.
We are a full pay family regardless of where they would have chosen to go to school. And although people tend to assume people in our position feel cavalier about money, we don’t. Both my husband and I had very modest childhoods. Being frugal was how our families paid for our education. In some ways we have changed our spending habits with our new financial freedom. In many ways we are still very frugal.
Anyway, my children have never shown any interest in IB. Wall Street was not something they aspired to…perhaps because my husband and I have always talked about work/life balance and choices/consequences. They both are double majoring with finance as one of their majors. They started college without set expectations. Their father started in consulting, who openly talked about the pros and cons of a career in that field. We told them to keep an open mind as they explored various careers and career paths.
Fast forward…both of them have worked diligently and excelled, both academically and in their roles in their extra-curricular activities. Our son is only a sophomore so it is too soon to say much about job prospects. Our daughter, on the other hand, decided she was interested in consulting and started pursuing a position with a top firm. Her interest in consulting had evolved over the years. She hadn’t interned with a consulting firm. Yet she was fortunate to secure a position with one of the Big 3. Unusual? Absolutely. But from our current perspective, attending a less elite undergrad has not disadvantaged her. Is UIUC a target school? A lot of people would reply, no. But they do interview on campus and that proved to be enough. (The strong engineering reputation doesn’t hurt attracting companies to campus, either.)
Here’s my response to those who say, if she had attended an elite/prestigious/target school, it would have been easier. I might be wrong, speaking for her, but I don’t think she would’ve wanted ‘easier’ if it meant possibly having to craft her 4 year experience around the pursuit of a high end consulting job from day one. She chose her activities based on how much she enjoyed the people and the work.
As parents we often told her that her various experiences would serve her well, regardless of what she chose to do in the future. The prestige of her future employer is exciting, but that isn’t what she was seeking when choosing a college. $120k saved!
Research conclusions are all over the map regarding the financial ROI of attending a prestigious college *.
My own intuition is that someone who lands a good IB job straight out of college is likely to come out ahead of someone who spends the same total amount for college plus a graduate degree, but who delays full-time IB employment by 2-3 years. I’m inclined to think the critical factor isn’t the prestige difference between, say, Northwestern v. UIUC; instead it’s the 2-3 year delay. However, the many different combinations of schools, degree types and career paths defy generalizations.
The question addressed in this study isn’t exactly the same as what the @Zinhead is asking.
The author isn’t concluding that a prestigious undergraduate degree alone has a better financial ROI than a less prestigious undergraduate degree plus a graduate degree. She’s concluding that even among students with elite grad school degrees, those who entered grad school with prestigious undergraduate degrees tend to earn more. Some CC posters have questioned her methodology. I’m not aware of any other studies that reach similar conclusions. Nevertheless you might find it interesting.
The Vanderbilt study is useful, but one of its flaws is that while the Tier One schools are all rigorous institutions, the definitions for Tier Two and Three schools are probably too broad and include a great many schools that are not rigorous. When you are comparing the top 40 private research universities with a much larger number of private LAC’s and public universities with much lower admission standards and locations in rural, low pay states, of course one is going to find large discrepancies in future earnings.