Target Schools ; biz or humanities
Do you feel as if business schools prepare bankers to be better than humanities schools (only considering targets here)? For example, one could argue that the accounting you learn at a NYU Stern, Wharton, WUSTL Olin or Cornell AEM puts you at a significant advantage in terms of recruiting, interviewing and getting a full time IB offer. At the same time, schools like HYP, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, etc instill you with stronger critical thinking abilities (econometrics, differential equations, analysis, etc) which might give you a leg up in the long run, especially when it comes to starting your own business.
Personally, I've seen no relationship between success at IB in terms of people I know getting offers, and the types of schools they went to/majors they had. Guys who bust their humps get offers, and there are both business and humanities majors who just don't have what it takes to work 100 hour work weeks.
SO, with this being said, if you could back to high school during college applications season with new found knowledge and early understanding that you DO want to be an investment banker, would you apply to target business schools (ranked a bit lower than HYPMS and Duke) in order to prepare yourself or would you go to a slightly second tier humanities school in order to enjoy your college experience and to learn to think critically? (Schools like Duke, Swarthmore, pomona, etc obviously anyone would kill for the ivy league)
I never really understood this whole "critical thinking" thing people love about humanities majors. I'm pretty sure business/STEM majors also require lots of "critical" thinking...
Unrelated to your question, but you cast such a wide net with your grouping of schools (Duke + Swarthmore + Pomona? You went from sizable presence on wall street to minimal presence in the same breath)...
Related to your question, the classes I took at my expensive liberal arts education did not prepare at all for banking. All the classes you list (metrics, diffeq, analysis) are not only completely unused in banking (I think i might have run a regression... once?) but also are not typical "humanities" courses, which are typically what most people refer to when they talk about instilling critical thinking skills. Also, at least at the junior level, I don't think going to a liberal arts school gives you any advantage over a similarly ranked business school. If you go to a liberal arts school, you have to learn all the corporate finance stuff on top of your class load, whereas at a business school, it IS your class load, which gives you an automatic advantage when it comes to (some recruiting processes). Yes, sometimes it is the case that the interviewer will adjust to your level and not ask some liberal arts sociology major about deferred tax liabilities, but for many firms, what they will say is the bar is this high, we only want to hand out offers to those who can meet it, regardless of where you're coming from. Additionally, it's not like business schools only make you take dry, rote accounting courses; on the contrary, many schools make you take gen ed classes like philosophy, which in my opinion are the kinds of classes where critical thinking really matters
That said, I am not saying that there aren't smart kids at liberal arts schools; what I'm saying is that all else being equal, it'd be much easier to already be familiar with technical interview material than not.
If i could go back and start over, and assuming my goal was to end up in IBD, and assuming that I could have gotten into a comparable school as the liberal arts school that I went to, then yeah, I'd probably pick a business school. That being said, ending up in IBD definitely was not my goal when I applied to college, and I had a good time and made a lot of good friends and wound up in a good place, so it's not like I'm going to complain (too much) about my choice.
As an ending point, consider this document: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/undergrad/reports/Class2011Car…
Goldman Sachs hired 33 kids in one year from Wharton. Yes, Wharton's the top business school, but I don't think my school or any other top liberal arts school put 33 kids in BB's or even in total into IBD in any single year. (Yeah I'm using bad statistics here, mixing sample sizes, blah blah blah... whatever. Take from it what you will.)
humanities is a joke
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