Stern>Harvard for college?
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I go to a target that doesn't have an undergraduate business program. In terms of relative placement in finance, we place better than every undergraduate business school minus Wharton (and Georgetown, which has really great placement).
The general consensus here is that attending an undergraduate business program is a waste of four years that you could spend studying the liberal arts. This belief is rooted in history: the wealthiest students could study whatever they liked, while less fortunate students needed to major in something related to their pursuit of a job. As more schools began to offer technical majors due to their higher starting salaries, only the very best (and wealthy) schools have been able to continue to offer only the traditional liberal arts education, which is why most of the top 10 schools don't offer undergraduate business programs.
Wharton is not only part of Penn, an Ivy, but also has been the top-ranked undergraduate business school for ages and has fantastic placement. It is the only school in the top 10 (according to USNWR) besides MIT to have an undergraduate business program. Of course, these schools are also powerhouses in their own right, though Penn relies more on Wharton to buoy it than MIT does on its business program.
In any case, much of what you learn in business school can be learned very quickly on the job - whereas the broader "critical thinking" skills you gain in a liberal arts curriculum can't be as easily taught. So while business students initially have a technical advantage vs. liberal arts students, this gap equalizes fairly quickly. Also, you don't need to attend an uber-selective MBA program unless you are looking to switch career paths, or your firm requires it for promotion.
Unless you are in engineering or some other hard science, you don't learn much of anything of substance, regardless of your major. This is especially applicable to the "critical thinking" skills supposedly learned in bullshit liberal arts majors. This is the biggest lie that liberal arts majors state repeatedly. Are you saying physics majors do not use critical thinking skills while art history majors do? Come on man. Nobody on the planet who is honest believes that.
The truth is, companies recruit at places like Harvard and Yale because the percentage of highly talented and smart people is higher than at other schools. The people who go to the best schools would likely be successful no matter where they went. The school did not make them successful, getting accepted merely demonstrated their success.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some people get accepted who shouldn't have and vice versa. But, the general rule holds.
The only reason you (and most people) say this is because engineering majors are in high demand right now. Just because a major isn't in demand doesn't mean you don't learn any critical thinking skills in a "bullshit liberal arts major". Of course, the bar is much higher for technical majors in the first place. But if we're talking "critical thinking skills", a physics major and art history major specialize in different facets of it, e.g. analytical vs. conceptual.
If you count Economics as a liberal arts major, then at top schools without business programs, it basically functions as a less technical finance major. If your school offers a finance major, then study that; if not, study whatever feeds into finance (e.g. economics, accounting, etc.).
What I took offense to was not that liberal arts requires critical thinking, but rather, that critical thinking was implied as something learned by those who earn liberal arts degrees and not by those who earn other degrees. That is what is bullshit.
I'm sure you will say that is not what you meant because that is not exactly what you said. However, the fact that you said that liberal arts majors learn 'critical thinking' skills and failed to mention that other majors do as well, implies that you were implying that students with other majors don't learn critical thinking skills.
Of course, what would I know? I'm just a business degree holder.
And a former BB CEO.
.
"Why is the effect of college admissions (or where you go) so long lasting and severe enough to negate substantial effort made in terms of coursework?"
This is a misconception. Many people have this misunderstanding that where you go to college determines how your life will play out for the next 40 years. Where you got your undergrad degree means little past your first job.
Many people have this misconception that a target school guarantees them a ticket to the "good life" (be it IB, consulting, law, entrepreneurship, etc.) In reality, all it does is give you access to OCR, an excellent brand name, a great alumni network, and many future connections from your classmates. It will help you get your first job (because you won't have to move mountains to get in front of top employers), but after that, you are on the same level with the people who got a similar job to you coming from semi-target or non-target schools.
Also that. People should also keep in mind that the strength of each one can outshine other "consensus" factors the kids on this site have like going to a "prestigious target" school. One aggressive advocate with some pull at his firm can do a lot more to help your efforts than being able to sit in on a company presentation via OCR. Also keep in mind that it does vary widely by industry. Some schools are dramatically better at placement into certain industries than others and those schools aren't necessarily who you would think: the best consumer/retail and healthcare schools aren't the usual suspects.
As a target student (that I'm betting it's the same school as yours), DickFuld is exactly right. Liberal arts 'skills' are just general intelligence and aptitude, and are not gained from taking 12 gen-ed courses and then studying art history. The only skills you actually use on the job in finance would be from math/stat/CS classes (even then not that many classes are relevant unless you're trading derivatives) and most of the rest of it is baseline intelligence and desire to learn and pick up skills.
Perhaps I'm a tad naive, but I don't think having a broader base of knowledge and intelligence has ever hurt anyone. If you go to a liberal arts Ivy and take idiotic classes or the basic economics major and do nothing outside of that, you'll get what you put in. If you legitimately take serious courses that are interesting with professors willing to push you, you'll get something out of it. Majoring in finance is pretty overrated in my opinion. The fact that art history kids make just as good analysts after analyst training and some on the job experience as Stern finance monkeys says a lot.
Then again, WSO isn't the place to come for advice on these matters. A majority of this website hasn't read a non-finance book since before SparkNotes came out.
Think of it as vetting. They know that you've passed a baseline minimum level of intelligence that your grad from bumblefuck community college might not have.
That doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter. It's just a lower risk option to hire only from elite schools.
That's hard to believe. Firms recruit heavily at top publics (UNC, UVA, UMich). While those schools might be hard to get into OOS, for in-state students, it doesn't require much brains to get into. Granted they each have their respective business schools that have separate admissions processes, but aside from UMich, KF and McIntire aren't that difficult to get into.
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