Consulting Core MBA Programs

It's Alex Chu's Sweet 16 plus LBS and INSEAD

Other specialty regional schools like UT Austin, Emory, IESE etc also get consulting recruitment but it's very local.

Agreed. Most people I've met are M7 + 1 or 2 of the sweet 16 schools. The schools I see most are probably due to my location. Usually we'll take one or two people as a company from places like Georgia Tech, UNC, Georgetown, and UT-Austin.

The ones outside M7 are somewhat regional in terms of where people end up, but places like UVA and Duke have pull in both the South and Northeast (at least where I am). It also doesn't seem like all schools 8-16 are created equally...UVA and Duke seem like better bets than Stern or Cornell (probably because UVA and Duke are the best in their region, Cornell and Stern are not).

Consulting companies are global and operate under "one firm" policy. If a company recruits at your school you can pretty much pick which office you want. Of course, you are not guaranteed to get the office you want but you can try. Know a couple of Canadians who went to Ross/Duke/UVA range school who came back to Montreal/Toronto/Calgary office of MBB.

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I think in the M7 all schools send a big contingent to MBB. Kellogg and even finance focused Booth gets mad recruiting for the big 3. Someone on gmatclub mentioned that apparently 80% of MBB recruits come from M7+Tuck. The rest are hired as per regional needs.

i'm not sure how fair of an assessment this is, but it seems from my own experiences at interviews and sell weekends that it's more of a self-selection thing for different offices.

for example, new york and boston are highly sought after post-graduation landing pads, esp for the top schools in the northeast, so those 15 or so open analyst or associate positions per office tend to go to the top ivies or top b schools. i would venture to say that way way fewer harvard or wharton grads (esp for undergrad) want to spend their early 20s in atlanta or dallas and so they just dont get the same caliber students, which opens up the field for the ut's and vanderbilts. conversely, the southern offices know that they need to recruit aggressively at strong southern schools for those offices since not many students from northeastern school are likely to come down for interviews and stuff.

Along with Duke and UVa, Michigan is pretty strong outside of M7.

It's been said already, but at my firm 80% of the recruits come from the M7+Tuck. After that we get a handful from the local top 20 schools (thinking down to about CMU/UT/UNC level). Of that group UVA, Duke, and Michigan having the largest reach in terms of number of offices with at least 1 hire. Finally, company wide we hire maybe 1 or 2 a year from all of the Vanderbuilt/Georgetown/WUSTL level schools.

Really it's M7 + Tuck or bust if you want a good shot. The rest of the top 20 keep the door open, but you better be a real star.

FWIW - the hires we do make from the non-M7 top 20 normally kick ass, probably because they have a substantially higher bar to clear.

I'm at Duke MBA now, and while we are a "core" school for MB but not Bain, pretty much our only option is Atlanta. Moving is possible, apparently, but unlikely. Many people return to their native country, as the Canadian mentioned above, but in the states, you better like Atlanta or work REALLY hard on the networking side. I'll let you speculate on the reasons for that.

The chart on this link pretty much sums up the answer to your question: http://poetsandquants.com/2011/11/16/mckinsey-doubles-mba-hires-at-duke…

Note that H/S are not on the list and be sure to put those numbers in perspective given the class size at each school.