Williams College's Career Placement - Wall Street and top graduate schools

While researching Williams College, I came across the following websites (links below) that contain information about Williams career placement information for its mathematics and economics graduates. It maybe useful for prospective students and parents.

Williams Math:

https://math.williams.edu/majors/post-graduate-mathematics-major-plans/

From what is listed, Williams has a very strong record into placing students into almost every top investment bank on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch), world class management consulting firms (McKinsey, Boston Consulting, Booz Allen, Analysis Group, Cornerstone, Accenture), and big tech firms such as Apple and Google.

Graduates of Williams’ last year’s math students have gone on to Harvard, University of Cambridge (several), Yale, Brown, UCLA, Northwestern, UT Austin (top 10 in computer science) for either Ph.D or master level studies.

Williams Economics

https://econ.williams.edu/people/grad-student-list/

Again, Williams seems to have a very strong record in getting its students into the world’s best economics Ph.D. programs, notably Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton.

More very detailed placement information about Williams physics and astrophysics graduates:

https://physics.williams.edu/people/graduates/

Williams graduates about 10-15 students with majors in physics/astrophysics.The college is doing an excellent job in placing its students into world’s top PhD programs, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, University of Cambridge, CalTech, UChicago, Yale, Columbia etc. According to its website (https://physics.williams.edu/articles/congratulations-to-the-class-of-2017/) , Williams educates more undergraduate physics majors than many PhD-granting departments.

I’d appreciate if readers can add more information about Williams career placement.

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In regards to finance, I’ve heard both Williams’s math and econ depts. referred to as, “The West Point of Wall Street.” Recruitment at WC is vigorous.

In other depts., don’t forget the Williams Art Mafia (google it). Still alive and well, filling art history positions all over the country, with powerful museum directors and curators at some of the finest institutions around. Having attended an equally influential “mafia” program for a different industry at a another Little Three school, I know how important these kinds of connections can be, generation after generation. When my DS was considering classes beyond his STEM/econ interests, his advisor (chair of the physics dept.) said, “You’re at Williams. For goodness sake, take art history!” Our dubious DS did and loved it, changing his view on the fine arts in general. THIS is why a liberal arts education is so important.

Here is the college ranking compiled by the Wall Street Journal several years ago. The ranking was based on per capital placement into some of the top 10 medical schools (Harvard, Hopkins etc). top 10 law schools (Yale, UChicago etc.) and top 10 business schools (Harvard, Wharton etc.). The following is the ranking graph compiled by the Wall Street Journal (unfortunately not able to have a direct link to the Wall Street Journal’s website):

http://collegematchus.com/ranking-the-colleges-top-colleges-that-feed-alumni-into-grad-school-programs/

The top 10 colleges were:

  1. Harvard
  2. Yale
  3. Princeton
  4. Stanford
  5. Williams
    6 Duke
  6. Dartmouth
  7. MIT
  8. Amherst
  9. Swarthmore

Williams does a super job sending its students to the country’s most selective, elite law school: Yale Law School (law school class size is about 200 each year)

Per capital wise, among big name research universities (Ivies, Stanford, UChicago, MIT, Duke etc.), only Harvard, Yale, Princeton do better jobs in placing students into Yale Law School for the past 3 years (about 600 students in its J.D. program).

http://bulletin.printer.yale.edu/htmlfiles/law/law-school-students.html

Please keep in mind, the number varies from year to year. This is just another data point to confirm Wall Street Journal’s college ranking based on placement into elite law, medicine, and business schools. As one can see, Yale and Harvard dominate the list both in terms of total number of graduates and per capital placement. Liberal arts colleges such as Amherst and Williams are doing better than most of the Ivy League colleges on the per capital basis.

Below is the total number of Law students from the most selective colleges as of the fall 2016 (It is not adjusted by the size of undergraduate enrollment at different colleges).

Yale Law School Students Institutions Represented, Fall 2016

Amherst College (14)

Bowdoin College (4)

Brown University (21)

Carleton College [Minnesota] (2)

Claremont McKenna College (3)

Colgate University (2)

Columbia University (34)

Cornell University (14)

Dartmouth College (28)

Davidson College (4)

Duke University (11)

Emory University (4)

Georgetown University (8)

Harvard University (70)

Haverford College (3)

Johns Hopkins University (5)

Kenyon College (4)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Middlebury College (4)

New York University (10)

Northwestern University (7)

Oberlin College (2)

Pomona College (4)

Princeton University (34)

Queen’s University [Canada] (2)

Reed College (2)

Rice University (4)

Stanford University (10)

Swarthmore College (8)

Tufts University

United States Air Force Academy

United States Military Academy (4)

United States Naval Academy (2)

University of California at Berkeley (18)

University of California at Los Angeles (3)

University of Chicago (13)

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (6)

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (5)

University of Notre Dame [Indiana] (3)

University of Oxford [United Kingdom] (2)

University of Pennsylvania (16)

University of Southern California (8)

University of Texas at Austin (3)

University of Toronto [Canada] (5)

University of Virginia (5)

Vanderbilt University (7)

Vassar College (3)

Washington University [Missouri] (7)

Wellesley College

Wesleyan University (7)

Williams College (14)

Yale University (78)

Total institutions, 169

I would appreciate if readers can add more information to this list, especially data that are verifiable. Thanks.

You would find similar results for the top MBA programs, Williams/Amherst are disproportionately represented. Williams is a recruiting machine for many of the Wall Street firms and more recently the private equity and venture capital firms. The more recent trend is that many of the grads are headed to Silicon Valley where the Williams alumni network is strong.

Williams College does a fantastic job in placing its computer science students into almost all major tech firms (quite a few at Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Ebay), Wall Street (quite a few at the world’s most prestigious and best known investment banks Goldman Sachs, plus JP Morgan), the world’s best known management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte etc.) and some of the world’s best universities (Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, etc.)

https://csci.williams.edu/people/alumni-directory/

Williams seems to do very well in placing its graduates into the world’s most elite Wall Street and Silicon Valley firms. Just like Williams outperforms most of the Ivy League colleges in placing students into the top professional (medicine, law, and business) and graduate schools, it probably does equally well in placing students into the corporate world.

@Harvale09, regarding posting #4, you missed Hamilton College (2) and Washington and Lee