What's up with people ranking target schools?

Never understood why people would make the effort to rank target schools. Most rankings I've read on this forum are basically re-creations of U.S. Newsweek...and they are certainly not accurate based on last year's or this year's numbers. Most people seem to just make up a random ranking to justify their own bias (or to support their own school). Personally I think this whole Tier 1 and Tier 2 thing is a joke.

Thoughts?

13 Comments
 

I think your argument makes sense to an extent. However there are some disconnects like WashU, Vanderbilt, JHU. To the tier one/two, I think there's some merits. Banks pick more kids from tier one targets than tier two, even if they recruit from both.

 
FormerHornetDriverAre you talking MBA or just undergrad?

As for MBAs, there's a pretty well agreed upon list of target schools. However, petty arguments about who outranks who within that group is pretty much a waste of time. Once you're in the door, who cares?

Talking about undergrad only. Ivies, Duke, Stanford, MIT...blah blah blah. I saw this one thread where people were arguing about recruiting at Columbia/Cornell/Dartmouth. Honestly, who gives a shit???? Any target school is great.

 
Best Response
Beretta
FormerHornetDriverAre you talking MBA or just undergrad?

As for MBAs, there's a pretty well agreed upon list of target schools. However, petty arguments about who outranks who within that group is pretty much a waste of time. Once you're in the door, who cares?

Talking about undergrad only. Ivies, Duke, Stanford, MIT...blah blah blah. I saw this one thread where people were arguing about recruiting at Columbia/Cornell/Dartmouth. Honestly, who gives a shit???? Any target school is great.

Offer allocations are not even close to being evenly distributed among targets (i.e. a BB might set aside 10-12 spots for Wharton and 2-3 spots for Cornell) Granted, its still a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Also "ranking" often has a lot to do with the interests of the students. A BB might allocate fewer spots to Brown, for instance, because they expect fewer applications from there..

 
D1 financeJPM's current IB summer analyst class (as an example) has 8 each from HPW, 6 or so from Cornell, and then there's a big drop off after that in terms of analysts per school (Yale might be up there too)
Cornell has more than 6. The current IB class's second largest feeder school is Cornell, atleast according to people I know at the bank.
 
D1 financeJPM's current IB summer analyst class (as an example) has 8 each from HPW, 6 or so from Cornell, and then there's a big drop off after that in terms of analysts per school (Yale might be up there too)

Do you have stats for other targets, other than Harvard & Cornell?

 

All depends. Harvard is really the only school that outperforms relative to the number of students interested in finance. High numbers for Wharton shouldn't count as much given the sheer number of interested students.

It is true that targets vary. Dartmouth, for example, crushes at GS and MS, but fares relatively poorly at JPM. It sends kids every year to Bain PE (has had 1 out of 3 per class for the past 5 years or so) and is one of the largest feeders into Bridgewater, but CS doesn't even recruit on campus.

It's not as clear cut as it all seems. In my experience, the only school that is targeted by basically every firm is Wharton. That said, the competition is stiff, so don't mistake increased on-campus recruiting for better chances.

What is consistent across all targets is that if you are looking to go to a place that isn't actively recruiting on campus, the alumni network and brand name are invaluable.

 

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