FINAL Undergraduate University Prestige Tier List to Clear up Misconceptions

Been seeing a lot of the most contrived BS "tier lists" lately with upwards of 10 tiers, sometimes with IU/BYU-tier schools ranked, so I thought I'd make a final tier list to clear up any misconceptions. For reference I'm an SA in MF PE and go to HYP.


TIER 1: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT

TIER 1.5: Oxford, Cambridge

TIER 2: Penn/Wharton, University of Chicago, Duke, Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown

TIER 3: Literally everything else


And that's all. There's no functional difference in prestige between the prestige of any of these schools in their respective tiers. If you go to any school in Tier 1, you've successfully checked off the "prestige" box. Tier 2, less so. But regardless, it comes down to your interview performance and overall pedigree and history of achievement, of which your undergrad is only a part. No, Cornell is not prestigious; no, NYU Stern is not prestigious. UMich is not "more prestigious" than UVA, or vice versa, whatever it is. You may still get into IB from any of those schools but your school prestige certainly did not help. Prestige isn't a complicated thing to compute--it's a gut perception. If your school isn't in the list above, get over it.

 

Can we please for the love of god stop making the same post 50 times? Where you go to school barely matters anymore for IB. Most of the IB pipeline didn’t go to any of these schools. Matters slightly more for PE but bank and group still matters more.

You even drew an arbitrary line. Why not just say T1 is Harvard and Wharton and then the rest are simply unprestigious? Why is a kid who has like five weeks of work experience opining on this anyway? Coming from someone at an MF…

 
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