Best Midwest MBA for Value

I can't see myself going to or affording an MBA from a target in the northeast, so I was wondering which school in the midwest is the best value choice?

Currently, I'm at a boutique sell-side firm in NE Ohio (below average pay obviously), but I'm considering trying to get into IB, PE, or AM.

Thanks folks.

 

I would echo looking at Kellogg or Booth, then Ross. Many people going to all these schools don't have very much money and will take out serious loans. If you plan to do IB or AM after, you will make good money and be able to repay them quickly unless you live a very lavish lifestyle. I would argue that shooting for brand is worth it in the end when it comes to b school.

 

IBD has been less popular in recent years among MBAs because of the surge in MBA placements to other industries like tech. Additionally, the total cost of tuition+cost of living can vary greatly among different business schools.

http://poetsandquants.com/2011/01/08/how-much-does-a-top-mba-degree-cos…

Numbers are a little old, but you get the idea.

 

What you need is U Wisconsin. There placements are almost 100% into buyside AM. They also run about 60MM. I've spoken with their admissions - it's somewhat more competitive relative to the overall mba program.

You're looking for a 700 GMAT to be taken seriously. Honestly, the program is solid and doll hair for doll hair the ROI is great (100k all in for the 2 years). I've done a lot of due diligence on this, so if you have further q's let me know.

Please refrain from the MS for this being outside top 15/20, I'm well aware.

I'm on the pursuit of happiness and I know everything that shine ain't always gonna be gold. I'll be fine once I get it
 
pktkid10:

What you need is U Wisconsin. There placements are almost 100% into buyside AM. They also run about 60MM. I've spoken with their admissions - it's somewhat more competitive relative to the overall mba program.

You're looking for a 700 GMAT to be taken seriously. Honestly, the program is solid and doll hair for doll hair the ROI is great (100k all in for the 2 years). I've done a lot of due diligence on this, so if you have further q's let me know.

Please refrain from the MS for this being outside top 15/20, I'm well aware.

Church

 

Have you considered WUSTL? Typically ranked in the top 25 with solid placement/salary stats. It would be a lot easier to get into then say Chicago or Kellogg.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

Honestly, I haven't, but I'm open to any and all options out there that provide buy-side opportunities.

I understand everyone harping on the top schools given their status and alumni networks, but I'm less of a climb the ladder to the best, most prestigious fund guy, so I may not necessarily need a Booth or Kellogg IMO (could be completely wrong on this though).

 

Aside from climbing the ladder, many of us need a high-ranked MBA to get our FIRST job in an industry. If you are well connected and have been told you can do a top 50 program and get into the job you want directly after, good for you. If you are like I was, and don't know anyone in the industry, you should research extensively on which industries/companies recruit where. You might find that Fisher, for example, doesn't attract any employers to campus that you are interested in working for.

Contact career services at all the universities you can and ask to see Post MBA employment statistics by industry, as well as whatever lists they have of companies that recruit there.

Absent this research that I've outlined, I echo the comments above about go to the best school you can, and that if midwest is a must: Booth, Kellogg, Ross (In my industry, management consulting, those three could be in any order).

 

Thanks for the advice, and truthfully, I am just like you just looking into a different industry. I'm looking to go buy-side without any meaningful contacts in the industry, so you're advice to make calls to career services to look into the possibilities that exist outside of Booth & Kellogg is going to be very useful. Best of luck to you.

 
WilliamBrasky:

Contact career services at all the universities you can and ask to see Post MBA employment statistics by industry, as well as whatever lists they have of companies that recruit there.

This is solid advice. Before you call though, Google. Many schools' employment reports are online.

WilliamBrasky:

Booth, Kellogg, Ross (In my industry, management consulting, those three could be in any order).

All 3 of those schools produce a bunch of consultants, but there are some pretty clear differences in which firms get the lion's share of those hires.

 
Best Response

Kellogg should also be under as serious consideration as Booth, especially if tuition is a factor. Kellogg often gives students credit for courses already taken- it's the only M7 I know of that does this.

They are both excellent schools. Booth is a little bit better, but not so much that if you're frugal and get a 40% tuition break from Kellogg it's no big deal. (Recall that OP is shopping on cost.). If cost is a factor, and I understand how it can be, Kellogg is surprisingly flexible.

I just want to be clear here that people pursue an M7 MBA with the intention of working harder or taking more career risks, and sell their rights to work less hard anytime soon. If you get an M7 MBA and take out loans to do so, you do not have the option of burning out and spending a year in Colorado as a ski bum (or hang gliding bum). This should scare people IMHO.

The calculus for most people who want an MBA tips in favor of "screw the cost, I want prestige", but a $170K MBA closes off a lot of options that most other people have in exchange for creating options that others don't It's one thing to have the opportunity to work in finance- or as a top tier consultant. It's quite another thing to need to work in consulting- to not have the option of leaving.

Look, if you have a high paying consulting job, you are also going to need a car and a condo for a high-paid consultant. You will need to go play at golf courses for high paid consultants and spend other money like a high paid consultant. Your expenses go up along with your salary, and now as a member of the ~40% (or higher) tax bracket in NYC or CA, less money than you really think is available to repay those loans.

Cost matters here. $160K is going to take most people at least three years (probably more like four) to pay back. If you can save $80K on tuition, that cuts the amount of time you spend needing to work in a high-paying job in half. That's not to say you should turn down HBS for a free ride at Arizona State, but OP is right to have a keen focus on cost.

I don't plan on burning out anytime soon, but I always try to preserve for myself the ability to go all Thoreau if I have some crazy philosophical epiphany. The only thing worse than wanting money and a great career and not being able to get it, is wanting a low-key lifestyle, and not being able to get it because you need a great career to pay your bills.

Let me frame it another way. 10% of HBS's graduating class does not have jobs at graduation. How would it feel to be $170K in debt, owe $1,000/mo in interest (let alone principal repayment), and not have a job? What kind of odds at making $300K your first year ($180K after tax, $70K saved after a typical NYC lifestyle) do you need to make up for that?

In any case, if OP is looking to save money, Kellogg is (I believe) the only M7 to give you credit for prior courses, which can significantly reduce the sticker price. Kellogg isn't HBS, but it's not at the low end of the M7 either, and they are still run by practical Midwesterners. OP may want to go through his ugrad transcript and see if he can match courses he took with available courses at Kellogg.

 

I thoroughly enjoyed your thorough breakdown of how the cost can truly affect life after the MBA. That is precisely what I'm a bit worried about. However, if Kellogg has this course credit option, then I'll definitely look into it because the (almost) overwhelming response has been to go an M7. Hopefully this knocks the price tag down a bit.

However, given my current work experience at a boutique ER firm, what are the chances that that holds me back from gaining admission to a top-tier program?

 

Eh, 10% of HBS is unemployed at graduation because these are super picky people waiting for the right opportunity in say buyside finance, startup, etc. It's certainly not because they can't find a job.

Cost is important sure, but for MBA the prestige matters so much that I think it should be a non-factor within reason.

 
mbavsmfin:

Eh, 10% of HBS is unemployed at graduation because these are super picky people waiting for the right opportunity in say buyside finance, startup, etc. It's certainly not because they can't find a job.

Cost is important sure, but for MBA the prestige matters so much that I think it should be a non-factor within reason.

If you graduate without a job, most employers' priors are that you're in the bottom of your graduating class.

Talk to most employers and they'd rather take the top 50% at Tuck or Cornell over the bottom 10% at HBS. My take is that a lot of those people will be taking $80K/yr jobs and might not be any better off than they were two years ago career-wise.

Either way it sucks to graduate without a job if you owe $1000/mo in interest, regardless of how picky you are being.

 

For the Midwest M7s it would hinge on references first, then test scores or some other measure (ideally very recent) that would help validate those references, and then finally the interview to confirm everything.

My take (and I'm not an MBA so I could be wrong) has always been that UChicago and Northwestern are a little less concerned with pedigree and a little more concerned with what you've done lately and how you've played the cards you've been dealt.

They are also a little more concerned with test scores and quantitative measures- UChicago in particular. People on the coasts make certain assumptions about anything from flyover country, so it's nice for everyone in Chicago (not just schools) to have a set of comparable numbers. For the two MBA programs, test scores are part of that. (For UChicago there is also # of Nobel laureates and their share of full professors at east coast schools taught at U of C, US News Rank, etc.)

If you can pull off a 740 on the GMAT, have outstanding recs, and a series of promotions on your résumé, you are in the running for Kellogg. Booth will require more.

In any case this is where the admissions consultants step in.

 

Booth and Kellogg are pretty similar in overall selectivity. They just draw different types of students due to the big differences in culture and strengths. With any M7 school, the most important thing is career trajectory and professional accomplishment. Booth/Kellogg do care less about pedigree than HBS/Stanford in that there are tons of non-ivy/MBB/bb/HF/PE people who get in. They also have lower median GPAs than HBS/Stanford.

 

Grades have no impact, but who wants to take one of the last lumpy oranges in any bin- even the bin of expensive imported organic Italian oranges?

The question everyone is wondering in recruiting at top schools is (1) how did your internship go? (2) did you get an offer? (3) why didn't you take it? Or why didn't they make one? Employers get very nervous about hiring candidates whom other employers appear to have passed on.

And the last 10% of the class has been pretty darned picked over.

 

Please stop arguing this, you are completely wrong and it's irresponsible to be so persistent and mislead clueless people seeking advice. mbavsmfin is correct, there is no "bottom" of the class. There are plenty of people at HBS and other top schools looking for nontraditional or particular buyside roles who accept jobs close to or after graduation. More and more people are doing internships with firms who have no intention of giving full time offers, this is understood by students and employers. Plenty of people also seek corporate jobs that do just-in-time hiring and may be waiting things out during the spring or summer as well, this is totally normal. If you are in extreme debt obviously you may manage things differently, and if you go to HBS you won't be one of those unemployed people unless you choose to be.

Frankly the rest of your MBA-related advice here is questionable as well but not quite as toxic so I'll just say to the OP to take it all with a grain of salt.

 

Two thoughts:

I like IP's take on how shooting for a high-cost MBA pretty much commits you to a high paying job for a longer period to pay it off, and that not all of us are right for that. However, when compared to scholarships which will vary person to person, I don't think Kellogg's program is significant enough to really sweat over. Just apply to every program that might fit your need (The $100/ea app fee is such a small drop in the bucket) and each will respond with acceptance info as well as cost, including any scholarships you may qualify for.

At a lot of these schools "Graduating in the X%" is entirely meaningless. Booth's non-disclosure obligates them NOT to tell their employer their grades. At my school, we use a meaningless check plus, smiley face, gold star type grading system and no one gives a shit because everyone is in on the joke. Grades aren't on anyones resume, and I've never been asked by an employer.

 

Pointing out that 10% of HBS grads don't have a job is fine. But you are doing way more than that here. You are basically distorting this fact to do your typical anti-HBS pro-midwestern tirade. As a current MBA student, you are saying 2 things here that are wildly inaccurate and harmful.

  1. Your argument that the 10% at HBS cannot get jobs because they are in the "bottom" of their class is dangerous because it gives the impression that grades are critical to getting a post-MBA job. This cannot be further from the truth. Never once during my internship interviews was I asked about my grades. Yes, if you are a baker scholar at HBS, Arjay Miller Scholar at Stanford, Joseph Palmer Scholar at Wharton, that's impressive and may help with jobs. But by and large, grades are irrelevant. Moreover, although it's obviously better to have a job at graduation than to not have one, super qualified people at HBS tend to be extremely picky. They are in a financial and professional situation whereby they can afford to be unemployed for a bit after graduation. In general, this will look bad on your resume, but when we are talking about strong HBS students, this is not the case. Again, context here is important, and it is extremely disingenuous for you to lump in the HBSers with the general unemployed MBA population.

  2. Cost is important for sure, but your constant shrilling for midwestern frugality is a bit annoying and at times dangerous. The reason is that for MBA, prestige and recruiting opportunities trump all, and money should not come into play unless you are talking about schools of roughly equal caliber. And no, before you jump in, Booth/Kellogg are not of equal caliber as HBS/Stanford. They are great schools, but please don't argue about this.

  3. Although you have the right to express your opinion, I highly recommend WSO to take Illini's MBA posts with a huge grain of salt. He did not do an MBA and knows very little about MBA recruiting, value of different programs, etc. When it comes to mfin/mfe or quant jobs, he's your guy. But in this topic he is woefully misguided.

 
Although you have the right to express your opinion, I highly recommend WSO to take Illini's MBA posts with a huge grain of salt. He did not do an MBA and knows very little about MBA recruiting, value of different programs, etc. When it comes to mfin/mfe or quant jobs, he's your guy. But in this topic he is woefully misguided.
I spent two years in grad school at a program that effectively competes with M7 MBA programs for students with finance backgrounds who are interested in returning to finance.

Regardless of where I went to school I don't think it is very controversial to claim that graduating without a job is a negative outcome, that graduating without a job conveys some sort of signal to potential employers, and that it's probably harder to get a job if you're an unemployed MBA than if you're an MBA student.

 

Princeton MFin students are not competing for the same finance jobs as M7 MBA alums. MBAs are not being recruited for trading/research/structuring jobs at banks (at least not anymore), research jobs at funds such as DE Shaw/two sigma/aqr or prop firms such as Getco/jump/tower research/hudson river. So it's not accurate for you to say that Princeton MFin is somehow very similar to a M7 MBA and therefore that it gives you credibility on MBA topics.

Yes, all else being equal, it's always better to be employed than to not be. We are talking specifically about HBS people who choose to wait a bit longer to find the right opportunity, and yes, these people do eventually get those jobs due to their credentials. HBS is not admitting people who are unemployable, and with the HBS brand, getting a regular white-collar job is a foregone conclusion.

 

Do you have any stats on these unemployed HBS students or is this analysis being driven by your prior view on MBAs (which seem to have a positive skew to them that might be bigger than my conservative bias). I can obviously cite a lot of stats on unemployed people.

Maybe we are both sticking our thumbs up to the wind without more stats on this, but my prior is that H/Y/P/S students have a lot of great stuff going for them and are pretty darned employable, but that nobody is made of success- at least not this early in their careers. If you graduate without a job, that probably hurts your career prospects significantly. Many of these people have other options, but they probably still had them before taking out a $170K loan. So they have the same options they had before, less $1000/mo after tax in interest.

I don't think anyone is saying that you should turn down HBS, Booth, or Kellogg over just $170K, but you might want to think long and hard if a school 1/2 tier lower offers you a full scholarship.

 

The best answer is to apply to as many schools as you can, look at who accepts you, ponder your options then, and then choose. One buddy of mine preferred (in this order): Tuck, Kellogg, Stanford, Columbia, Booth, HBS. He applied to 15 schools, only adding HBS cause his wife made him take a shot. Of his preferred, top 6 schools, HBS is the only one that accepted him.

 

Ha. You can call whatever you want. Maybe when you do, you can answer the question: "What the hell would this guy have to gain from making up some crap like that?".

I can't think of anything I'd gain. I simply shared an interesting and instructive lesson from my life that may help the OP and others decide to apply to as many schools as they can, given whatever their constraints are. My buddy, had very few when he applied: he was recently laid off from a BBB, had a generous severance, plenty of recommendation writers, and a supportive wife who proofread all his applications.

 

Yeah we did get sidetracked by the M7 talk. Maybe the new Godwin's Law for WSO is that eventually someone mentions HBS.

OP doesn't seem interested in HBS and it may not even be possible for him. He may be too old or a boutique research firm may not be quite enough to get an admit. To help refocus the discussion, does anyone want to weigh in on OP's odds at Kellogg, specifically?

 

My comment was meant to illustrate that guessing odds for B-school admissions can be a total waste of time. The point wasn't that my friend was admitted to HBS, the point was that he wasn't admitted to Kellogg, so trying to predict odds is fairly useless unless he can only apply to three or four schools.

He should apply to Kellogg, Ross, and Booth, along with all the other schools people have recommended, like Kelley and Wisconsin. Then, see who lets him in and see what types of aid packages they offer. If he excludes the pricier, lower admit rate schools, he may be missing a golden opportunity.

 

I started Kellogg this year and its awesome. I had partners from 2 out of the 3 MBB's call me and have conversations with me, before classes even started. 150 people from the class last year got a MBB job. They even have pre-MBA PE internships the summer before classes start if you want. Their average GMAT is increasing to above 720 this year, so they very well could be ranked above Booth and Sloan again next year.

 
EthanT:

I don't know, if you can go to Wisconsin for 13k instead of booth for 60k, why not? All (future) bankers believe that they are the best and that they can be the top of their class and get the top job if they work hard right?

This is a perfectly good point. We need to remember that folks are coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds and have different risk tolerances. $160K doesn't sound like a lot of money to an IBD associate giving advice on WSO, but it's a hell of a lot of money to a 3rd year CPA.

The IBD guy is saying that choosing UW Madison over Booth stunts your growth. The CPAs are saying that $160K for a two year degree is an insane amount of money, that UW is the sensible choice, and that you can graduate from there and become a CFO somewhere and earn a nice living with your accounting background.

 

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