BS/MS or BS/MBA?

I can't speak to the details of being an undergrad at Stern or recruiting out of Stern, but in general it's not a good idea to do an MBA straight out of undergrad or even combined with undergrad.

Why?

You can only get an MBA once.

Stern has a great MBA program, to be sure. But so does Harvard or Stanford or Chicago. And if you want to jump to the buyside, the ability to get an MBA later on gives you options.

I know, an MBA now saves you $160K over an MBA later.

But, unless you plan on landing as an Associate (which is fairly rare for people without prior work experience), your current MBA doesn't actually get you anything. (This is where I hope the current and former NYU Stern students speak up.) It's merely a paper to hang on the wall. And it prevents you from getting an MBA later on, and that optionality has a lot of value to it.

If I'm not hearing stories about Stern undergrad MBAs getting placed as associates or having a much easier time getting hired, I'd rather see you retain the MBA option for a few years into your career. If you land at GS or JPM and are killing it, a Harvard MBA may mean a $100K/year salary bump later on. Furthermore, you can take a tax deduction on the tuition if you establish yourself in an industry (IE IBD or PE) and go back to it after an MBA, which you are not allowed to do right now. Not to mention the fact that Kellogg will let you shorten the degree by a semester or two if you get credit from undergrad courses. So just bear in mind that the true after-tax cost may be cheaper than you think.

An MBA is not a commodity like a barrel of oil. It's not a stock. It's not even like real estate or even paintings, let alone an engineering degree or a CPA license. You want to get an excellent value on it, you want to save every penny you reasonably can on it, but you don't want to get it cheap, either. And the right way to get an excellent value out of it is to come in with prior experience that you can leverage into a better job-- such as jumping from IBD to PE, and to come out of there with a network of other experienced professionals like you. Unlike account balances, careers are path dependent. And you're not there just yet. You will be, soon.

Look, I've been on both sides of the coin. I studied CS and started at Lehman in Analytics-- somewhere between IT and Research. Today, I have a really awesome job on the buyside-- I leveraged an MFE (an MBA for quants) to get here. A CPA or a double-major in CS takes care of your tails-- on the downside, you can always go work for KPMG or IBM. On the upside tail case, you are still free to pay $160K for an MBA that is now worth $100K/year in additional salary, rather than whatever boost you got out of undergrad ($10-20K?) And in a Trump economy, protecting yourself from vol and also taking advantage of it-- having options-- is going to be important.