Since many people from lower ranked schools are as qualified or more qualified than those from higher ranked schools, why do bulge brackets hire disproportionately from higher ranked schools?
| +178 | Americas M&A League Table Q2 Updated | 73 | 6h |
| +132 | New Article: Dramatic Slide as UBS #22 (US) & New Leadership Desperately Needed | 25 | 2d |
| +107 | Restructuring: Anti-climactic Experience | 26 | 5h |
| +74 | A COMPLETE GUIDE TO SUMMER INTERNSHIP RECRUITING | 12 | 1d |
| +69 | IB Net Worth / Savings Check | 28 | 7h |
| +51 | Boutique firm wants access to my LinkedIn? | 41 | 22h |
| +39 | Investment Banking is Hard | 17 | 17h |
| +29 | PWP vs BofA | 23 | 3m |
| +23 | Who pays the highest right now? | 14 | 4m |
| +21 | Excel macros for QOL formatting | 0 | 6d |
Career Resources
Get instant access to lessons taught by experienced private equity pros and bulge bracket investment bankers including financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel Modeling.
Because it isn’t always true that HYP student > non-target student. Too many factors enter into college decisions and talent is as a result scattered across a greater variety of schools, hence why firms don’t only recruit at HYP.
This isn’t as true in other countries however. Europeans have a much more elitist system where target schools hold more weight than in the US, which results in London classes being essentially Oxbridge/LSE + few others (HEC, Bocconi...)
you are right
Who would you rather be around 100 hours a week: A pimply nerd from Harvard who grew up playing the violin and chess in his free time with next to no social skills or a bright kid from that grew up playing sports and has excellent teamwork skills from state university that busted his/her balls to get an offer.
Note: banking at a senior level is a sales job. However even at junior levels social skills are extremely important. There are VERY few people who have analytical skills AND excellent sales/social skills. Hence, in many cases the non-target social kid may be the better all around option as in banking your math brain really only needs to be “OK”
This is so pretentious. I went to a non-target and have worked with dozens of target school students in multiple capacities. I actually prefer kids who didn't go to targets. Why? Because I don't have to explain basic finance and accounting to them.
Sure the ivy league kids are smart...no argument there, but the job isn't so difficult that a college student who does well in accounting or finance undergrad can't be proficient at the job.
The non-target kids who get into FO roles know exactly what they are signing up for relative to the targets who majored in Ancient Greek literature, but decided to go into banking because it paid well.
Because ppl who ask these types of questions exist in Ivies
Is this the dumbest question on wso?
If you can’t answer that question in the time it took you to type it out good luck in life bud
Because for one, OP, non-targets don't ask questions like you did in this post...
“Why would a bank hire smart hardworking individuals from all walks of life, when they could hire ivy league clones whose SAT scores and GPA’s aren’t merely a reflection of their intelligence or hard work, but partially a reflection of the privileged lifestyles that afforded them that position in the first place?”
Cool that you think that but privilege is a major player as to how people access ivy league education. Not withstanding the financial barrier of affording elite private education, people in this country don’t have the same access to secondary education and SAT preparation. Someone who payed $60/hr for an SAT tutor after their boarding school is going to do better than an equally smart and driven kid without those resources. This isn’t to shit on people from more or less privileged backgrounds; they didn’t chose the family they were born into. This is just to say that judging kids off of two metrics that aren’t purely reflective of hard work and intelligence is flawed.
You should probably delete your account after this one. It shows such a shocking lack of understanding of how the real world works that you wouldn’t want it ever traced back to you.
This forums obsession with targets and ivies is unhealthy. Get out of your bubble children
I usually don't post on this site, but I thought the original poster could use a wake-up call.
I graduated from a HYP undergrad a few years ago and I now work in VC. When I started FT at a top-tier BB, I cared a lot about prestige and what university my co-workers had attended. After a few months as an analyst, it was pretty clear which analysts were top-bucket and which analysts were struggling to adapt to the analyst lifestyle. Some of the top-performing analysts came from HYP and other target schools, but there were also other analysts who had attended non-target state schools. At the 6 months mark, I slowly realized that one's undergrad education had little to do with the quality of their work. After getting to know the 'non-target' analysts, I realized they had probably worked just as hard as me during their undergrad years. Just as an example, this one analyst had attended a state school on full-scholarship, 4.0 GPA, PE internship, VC internship, and a boutique IB internship.
I come from a relatively privileged background, so prior to my analyst stint, I was completely clueless about the reality of the costs associated with America's college education system. The system is fucked up. One of my close friends from my years at the BB grew up in the lower middle class. He attended a state school on full-scholarship because his family wasn't poor enough to receive any need-based aid at top-tier schools, but they did not have the funds to be able to pay for his college tuition. For him, it was either attend a top-tier school and take on 100K+ in debt, or attend a state-school with no-debt.
So why do BBs hire non-target kids? From my brief experience in banking and VC, after you've proved you can produce quality materials and keep up with your peers, very few people care if you attended Harvard or the University of Utah. Picking a college in the US involves a lot more factors than simply: "Do I have the grades to attend University X?"
If this post is a troll, you got me. If not, the original poster and others who share the mentality that "target kids are superior to non-target kids in terms of performance" need to change their way of thinking. If not, it will only reflect negatively in your own performance and close many networking opportunities later in life.
Great post, and I will give my flip side perspective.
I grew up on a farm in downstate IL. Over half my high school didn’t go to college, and of those who did, another half only went to community college...fewer han 25% of the kids from my high school of 3,000 (at least when I graduated) ever made it to a 4 year school. I had engaged parents and got great grades, but neither of my parents went to good colleges. I also had a perfect ACT and a near perfect SAT.
I applied to 3 colleges for Mechanical Engineering and got into all three...Colorado, Illinois and MIT.
I got a partial athletic scholarship to CU and generally wanted to live in CO. Picking my school based on career prospects was not on my mind as an 18 yo, and I had no one to guide me about why that matters. I only applied to MIT because my mom made me since it was “the best” engineering school, and I was good at math.
I had a cousin who went to Princeton for football and ended up in IB because “that’s what Princeton men do,” who encouraged me to pursue that path. He and I aren’t all that different. He just got recruited to a better school for a different sport.
I started at GS in my first job out of school and was intimidated by all of the Ivy League kids. I learned in about 2 months that many of those people were less prepared for the job than this ignorant farm hick. I just worked as hard as I could and that was enough to succeed.
Exactly. I was the eldest of 3 boys being raised by a single mom. I got into some great East Coast schools, with partial scholarships. But my mom pulled me aside and said "You got into Berkeley with some aid and scholarship. I can't afford to help you go East. You have 2 brothers following you. We don't have much money. You gotta go in-state. I'm sorry, that's all we can do." That's life. Good people go to non-targets and semi-targets, and one just has to hustle. Here's to kicking ass in 2020, with much love to fellow state-school people out there.
No no no, you were a victim, and we need to take from the rich-but-unworthy and give to you.
Even if you’re a student at the University of Utah, you can still break into IB if you have the right work ethic
Go tell that to David Solomon that, he'll definitely appreciate knowing that some random HYP was "undoubtedly better than him"
The banks are looking for the most impressive all-around people. That means good grades, smart answers to questions, maturity, drive etc. Its a mix of characteristics they want and they are solving to maximize that.
Attending a top college isn't a great proxy for that. It's an OK proxy. I mean, what does it really take to get into HYP? Its primarily about your GPA from ages 14-17. That's already rife with issues. Its a different stage in a person's life. And the schools do a terrible job of correcting for degree of difficulty because they have a separate agenda of favoring certain racial groups, donors, athletes etc.
So I think the bank would love to get all their kids from HYP but but too many talented people will have already slipped through the cracks in the admission process of those schools. So the banks have to look more broadly to find the very best.
The reason is simple, many firms (I can't say if GS specifically does this or not) find that recruits from HYP or other-ivy and ivy-like prestige do not perform much better if any better than recruits from quality state schools, small privates, etc. This has been a benefit of data analysis int the post-2008 world. Further, recruits from non-targets are often less demanding on pay, stay longer, and otherwise don't carry the ivy-baggage (trust me, if you drop the H-bomb too often, you are getting made fun of, especially at the analyst/associate level).
GS isn't stupid, they do this because it's good for their business.
"GS isn't stupid, they do this because it's good for their business."
Indeed. Actually I worked for a Bear Sterns guy back in the day. He said Bear looked for "PHDs" - 'poor, hungry, and driven'. "Give me a smart, hungry go-getter, I don't care where he went to school." This dude was made senior MD before he was 30, and he went to a lower-ranked state school. And then he got to Wall Street and hustled like his hair was on fire.
I'll chime in because I did think like OP in part from undergrad through probably the first couple months of my career. I went to a target school (though I didn't even know the concept existed at the time) and assumed whatever I recruited for would have candidates from similar schools.
I was pretty surprised when a lot of the interns for the summer and subsequently FT hires were not only from schools not ranked near mine but from secondary state schools and non-selective private schools.
I started working with pretty senior folks at my firm from the start and was very impressed by them. I realized frequently after several weeks of close work they went to schools I'd never even heard of or thought negatively of.
It clicked for me quickly that everyone's upbringing and opportunities are so different that very qualified smart people won't necessarily have gone to top schools in tons of cases, but career growth is blind to all that when talent and hard work shine through. It might take longer to get to that desired firm or industry for someone from another school or with lower GPA, but it's a long career and these things sort themselves out.
When I work with someone now I don't care at all where they went to school and I certainly wouldn't hire the kid with a 3.7 from HYP over the kid with 3.7 from his local public school just based off that.