How many target kids go straight to MF PE?

As background for my answer, I went to a semitarget but interviewed with a fair amount of the megafund analyst programs, got a few offers and wound up going to banking -- will explain my recruiting and decision process below.

For starters, probably a good answer to name the seven firms that have raised a buyout fund near or above 10Bn that have analyst programs: Blackstone, KKR, Warburg, Vista, SilverLake, Ares, Bain Cap. Note that there are other firms that have hired analysts in the past, and have either ended the program, or hire ad hoc (TPG, Carlyle, Leonard Green), as well as a bunch of other reputable growth or middle market shops that hire analysts (Summit, Insight, GA, Crestview, Cerberus, Audax, etc.) All in all, the universe of decent investment funds that will take an undergrad is actually larger than most people expect. Conversely, the number of analysts that each of these funds will take is much smaller than most banking groups. In total, the number of analysts at the seven big buyout funds listed first will be about 30 (about 10 apiece at vista and kkr; 2-4 at the rest). All of them have target schools with recruiting pipelines, but most will interview kids from any decent schools if you network hard enough -- Vista definitely gets the most school diversity though as they lean heavily on their CCAT cognitive assessment and care way more about what score you get than who you know or what school you went to. Would say roughly 1/2 of the 30 analysts that wind up at these funds are H/W and probably 1/2 qualify as diversity.

A lot of people think that these are the best jobs out of undergrad that exist on Wall Street -- I did too when I was interviewing for full time, but I learned a lot through the process and have some differing opinions now. The best advice I can give is to think deeply about the value proposition of the role you are accepting in comparison to your alternatives and what it means in context of your career goals. In simpler terms, most people do two years as an IB analyst, then two years as a PE associate, then they have a ton of choices: leave to bschool to try to break back into PE, or exit to a hedge fund, Corp Dev, or downstream sponsor. By starting out directly into a PE role and skipping banking, you are potentially shaving two years off of this path -- what does this mean to you? I know people that did it to get top hedge fund looks faster, or learn about a specific sector, or just had to be in an investing role and hated advisory -- all valid reasons, There were also people that took it for the "prestige" of being in a role that few people recieved -- they didn't consider the number of things you compromise by starting at some of these funds: Location (Bain Cap in Boston, Vista in Austin, Ares in West Coast), Pay (Blackstone, Vista, Bain Cap well below EB analyst comp), Sector Siloing (Vista and SilverLake are tech only), Unstructured analyst roles (KKR, and WP are newer programs without a fleshed out role or training for the analyst yet), Promotion delay (Blackstone and Vista are three year analyst programs), Having a large analyst class / network and more. Most importantly is the fact that you lose two years to figure out what you want to do post-pe if you're someone who isn't crystal clear on what that path is yet.

When it came down to my decision to choose what I wanted to do full time, I declined two megafund analyst offers to accept a return offer at the top banking group I had summered at (PJT RSSG / Goldman TMT / EVR M&A). Although uneducated freshman me would have called senior me an idiot for doing this, it made a ton of sense once I actually understood each of the programs and my own goals. I knew I wanted to do two years of PE, but had no idea what I wanted to do after that -- doing two years of banking first gave me more time to learn and figure that out. In addition, the banking offer was going to pay me a lot more and get me to the PE associate role in two years (one of my MF offers was a 3 year analyst program), and not silo me into a specific sector (the other offer was tech only fund). Being at a top banking group meant that I knew I would still get looks from all the same funds during on cycle, and my class wound up having no trouble getting great PE placement equal in caliber to the offers I had turned down. All in all, I'm in no rush because my career is gonna be 30+ years long -- I take no issue with spending an extra two years to add another solid brand name to resume and strengthen my skills in a known and commoditized training ground, but others may or may not feel the same. About a quarter of my banking analyst group turned down a pe analyst offer while pretty much every mf analyst I knew turned down a good IB offer, so ymmv.

TLDR: The kids going to MF PE out of undergrad aren't smarter/better than the kids in top banking groups -- they're just are more ready and willing to specialize and know what they want. Only take an investing role out of undergrad if you really vibe with that firm in particular (not just their brand name), or if the offer is much better than the average outcome from whatever banking group you could go to instead (not gonna tell you to take a generalist offer from Wells Fargo over KKR). Don't be one of those kids that just takes an Apollo Credit or Vista PE or Insight Growth Equity offer and is forced to go back to bschool because their career has hit a dead end in an asset class, location, or sector they don't even like.