Decision Made

They are both about equal in terms of the overall branding. It really comes down to money, geographic preference, personal preference, etc. Obviously for NYC banking, Stern wins out while for socal investment management jobs, UCLA wins out. In consulting and corporate strategy they seem about even. I don't know the MBB placement numbers for those programs, so you should look at the employment reports. On the corporate side, UCLA would place very well with media and entertainment companies; Stern might do better with the more traditional corporate gigs, but again I'm not an expert on consulting or these programs.

Poets and Quants recently had an article about how many MBAs from each school work as consultants. Doesn't hurt to look at that also.

According to John, who runs the site, all the statistics for each profession were for MBAs only.

I think (take it with a grain of salt) that consulting at the MBB level is roughly the same for both schools. I've heard that Deloitte has a strong presence at Stern but not sure about UCLA. I think it comes down to what someone above me mentioned: geography, personal preference, and money. Full disclosure, I'll be attending Stern this upcoming fall but that LA weather looks SO good right about now.

Stern of course!

Look at the recruiting stats for both. In terms of finance Stern is the way to go, great school and great name.

Dont want to be rude but you need to do a bit of research on your own. The best way to look at this is by looking at the stats, below follow the links and you will see that 23% of stern mba class went to Consulting while UCLA around 12% of the class. I dont know how big are the classes because I am lazy too look for that, but please follow the links and read them, they will also include top employers, etc etc Very helpful info:

http://www.stern.nyu.edu/programs-admissions/full-time-mba/career/employment-statistics/

http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/Documents/areas/adm/cmc/2013%20UCLA%20Anderson%20Employment%20Report.pdf

I have a close buddy who is a second year at UCLA and he has confirmed the above. From what he has told me, the MBB consulting is not strong, but a handful of people do land offers. Deloitte takes a bunch of their students and seems to be their leading consulting employer. The Deloitte offers are pretty nice...if you intern and accept a full time offer, they pretty much pay for your 2nd year tuition. Ibanking interviews are fairly easy to come by. They also do very well in tech, which is becoming their biggest recruiting segment. Overall, a very solid school, even more so if you are interested in staying in California.

if you pull some data from ucla's 2013 full-time employment report you can prepare some rough calculations. of the 270 students employed by 3 months after graduation, about 15% went into management consulting, or around 40 people. they also provide detail that McKinsey hired 10-15 students, BCG hired 5-10, and bain hired at least 1. so, if you view things conservatively and figure 10 McKinsey, 5 BCG, and 1 bain, that means about 16 of 40 students who went into management consulting did so at one of the MBB firms, a 40% rate. it's not possible to perform this same type of analysis for stern based on the limited employment data they report, but you can see they have a slightly bigger class, and a greater % of their students go into management consulting relative to ucla. what you cannot calculate is the MBB success rate. could it be more or less than 40%? certainly. is it going to be very different, probably not. personally, if i were in your shoes, this decision would be dependent on where i want to be after graduation, either west coast or northeast.

***just one note to make, 16 people landed MBB consulting gigs out of 40 people who ended up taking management consulting jobs. the big question is whether it is appropriate to use 40 as your base in calculating the 40% success rate. i would imagine there is a decent number of people who specifically interviewed for top tier consulting gigs, didn't land any offers and ended up somewhere else (whether tech, marketing, rotational program, etc.). in reality, the true mbb success rate would be calculated based off all the people who were gunning for that job. ***

The schools' respective consulting clubs will be your best source of information. They should have a very good idea of the base, which would be something like the number of (active) members of the club, or something like that. They would also be able to tell you exactly how many students took jobs and with which firms.

@taquito 879:

There are a few people on this forum that are experienced professionals. Some are Certified Users aka proven to be in the industry and plenty of people have graduated as evidenced by the business school application threads. A junior with internships at GS and BCG already? BS meter just went off the roof. Possible but unlikely, especially given how you write in your posts (and no, operations and HR do not count). I'm not the best writer and I understand this is just forum but work on your grammer. Anybody in IBD or consulting needs to be good at written and verbal communication. I see that somebody else has already called you a troll on another thread...

Examples of your post: "If I am answering you is not with bad intention trust me I wouldn't waste my time." "What does a preliminary approval means?" (repeat posts in your thread asking about a background check) Plenty of others but too lazy to post them.

I just saw your post stating that you were an intern at GSAM AIMS. No, that is not impressive. While there is nothing wrong with working in ops or analytics, let's face reality: most of us do not consider these jobs prestigious. Talking a big game with nothing to back it up. Word of advice: stick to school instead of trolling on the internet. Your efforts are better concentrated in actually getting a job in IB or MC.

And even if everything that you say were true, it still does not change the fact that you're posting without reading what I am asking. Not even going to bother responding back to you anymore - who would have thought my thread would be hijacked into me arguing with a college student? SMH.

I think you have to think about whether you want to live on the East or West Coast more so after and, if you can't get that MBB offer, if you're fine with doing implementation work for Deloitte and even more so what kind of corp strategy you want to do -- media and entertainment or tech companies and Yum brands on the west coast or what NYU offers (no idea) for corp fin. Money is always attractive esp if you're going to be paying off a ton of debt as well as a potential corporate f500 worker vs MBB consultant . what kind of companies do you want to work with, consulting or internal strategy wise ? Figure that out and then figure which school puts you into those companies best.. LA offices have a lot of media and aerospace, NYC obviously finance and pharma in the area too.

Side note I'm not sure why you're saying GSAM AIMS isn't impressive when it is investment management and definitely isn't purely ops or analytics (esp when analytics is becoming sexier by the day across all brands now and may be one of the few other finance roles with cross industry appeal)- IM is a lot more than just buy side research and PM

@DickFuld Hahaha was about to post the exact same thing

OP: I actually agree with the college kid that you need to do far more research. Your goal should be to talk to as many current students/recent alumni as possible. Be less focused on # of accepted offers at MBB and more focused on # of first round interviews that the average person recruiting for consulting gets. All you should care about is how effective the school is at getting its students first round interviews, because after that, it's up to you. The only way to figure that out is to talk to students, and possibly, career services (I did this when making my decision and it was helpful - they track eveyrthing).

They are so similar in caliber that it really comes down to geography, which you seem neutral on. If so, then go with the $$$.

SuperMegan, your high brow act will go over much better on campus than here on the internetz. Loosen up!

@mbahopeful Thinking back, I actually think I was probably below 50% with club officers. I had a couple that were very helpful, but for the most part, did not have a great hit rate. One dude at Columbia, whom I didn't get in touch with until after I had made my decision to go elsewhere, actually put me in touch with people he interned with from Tuck and with a couple people he knew going to my target office. Really, you just have to find those one or two people at each place that can actually be useful (as is the case with all networking, I guess).

@supermegan The problem with your goal of looking for "unbiased" information is that a lot of the information that you need doesn't exist publicly. You need people on the inside. That's fine, and you have to remember that when you're talking to people. However, just like on WSO (where everyone also has biases), if people provide you with facts, then that's what you listen to. For example, if someone tells you consulting recruiting is awesome at Anderson because 14 people went to McKinsey, disregard the awesome part and just note the number.

Also, in my opinion, people aren't as biased as you think, and if they are, there's typically reason for it. Think of it this way: if you talk to someone that went through consulting recruiting, and they tell you how good it was at their school, that probably means, at a minimum, that he/she had success. That's a data point. More likely, it means that the person's peers also had some sort of success, or they would tell you "I did well, but it's definitely an uphill battle". I dunno, biases tend to reflect a positive experience, which can be a good thing as long as you're aware of it.

Have you had a chance to speak to students/alum? Did you end up deciding?