Wharton Full Ride vs Staying in PE

Because wharton’s “specialty” is finance and it does ‘t even do that as well as H/S

If you look at when people are given a choice, the HBS and Stanford brands are chosen over others. Part of it is how long those programs have existed and part of it is riding off their undergrad perceptions.

Now because the above is true, they largely get their pick of the litter. This results in what I said above where some people think by going to neither, they effectively admit to everyone they are not the pick of the litter and that the signaling will harm their career. 
 

Now the irony to that in my opinion is if you need to bank on the signaling of the degree to prove you are the pick of the litter, you are certainly not the pick of the litter. Go getters go where there is opportunity and prove themselves every day. They move if they aren’t getting utilized right and work relentlessly to achieve and learn. The negative stigma behind MBA’s is exactly against this point. Numerous highly successful business people have stated something along the lines of “MBA’s are all bullshitters who use their brand to get paid a lot, but contribute very little innovative problem solving or work ethic” It’s an extremely common trope in the business world. Few things are more common than an arrogant HBS person who has extreme overconfidence and lack of ability to back it up. Heck I might even argue because of their degree, they feel they don’t need to prove anything which is exactly the sort of person I don’t want to hire or have as a ceo of a company my firm invests in.
 

My experience hiring from MBA programs and watching my friends go through it:

• HBS and Stanford get the people who had the most pedigreed job experience early on and are 5+ years or so into their career. They also have high test scores or won some diversity or accomplishment ticket. Usually it’s a combo. The result is a lot of people who in my view got pretty lucky with their early career and also worked hard. An example I know, an Indian girl who went to Goldman and blackstone and got a high gmat. That person almost certainly goes to hbs.
• Now there’s a second type of person who maybe was less focused in undergrad or maybe they were from another country, so the path to Goldman wasn’t as clear. Heck, maybe they started in engineering because they were good at math and went that route, before thinking computer science was the place to be, then they learned being a good math brain in business makes more than engineering. So after an engineering degree they got a comp sci degree and finally an MBA. Because they were from a different country and had different work experience, the top two MBA programs didn’t want to touch them.

Well, the first case is a person I know who had a crazy panic attack and ended up divorced and now running some women only vc firm that only invests in women founders and their platform has been consistently unsuccessful with crap returns.

The second is the current CEO of Microsoft right now heralded as probably the best CEO of the 2020’s. He went to booth. Adcoms clearly f*cked up by not letting him go wherever he wanted.

Even adcoms will admit, they run an imperfect process. Their criteria is largely test scores, race, job experience. There are loads of reasons why one of the above might not tilt your way for their decision, but in the long run you could outperform the schools average or even the top percentile of your class in a given year.

OP do a google search of alumni from Wharton and realize you can be one of those people rather than looking at the average of each school or some stat on the amount of founders from each or firms that visit. I can say wholeheartedly, 90% of the MBA’s I have interacted with are overconfident clowns. It’s true for every institution. A degree tells me they are at least moderately competent, but whether it’s HBS GSB or Kellogg, I’m still going to ask them questions and analyze what they have done in the past or today to determine if they are a fraud or legit. Go to Wharton and be legit and you will be able to get to wherever you want on a long enough time line and with enough ambition.
 

Again, look at the average gmat at the m7’s and realize people are equal intelligence at all of them, the difference is commonly the work experience. The first 5 years can tell a lot about someone’s future, but it isn’t everything. Loads of people pivot or shift because of how long a road and how much luck is involved in a career. A lot of successful people burn out and/or don’t take risk and a lot of people that seem middling end up with a chip on their shoulder and because they don’t have that ideal job they take a chance and it ends up better than that blue chip role.

There’s a Peter Theil quote that says, “every Rhodes scholar had a great future in their past” Often success prevents people from taking chances and the pursuit of pedigree ends up preventing truly exceptional outcomes.

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HBS is strictly need based. Most other schools have a mix, though any 'full ride' is going to be skewed towards 'merit' and really trying to put that person in your program.