Oxford University or US Ivy Colleges

Good evening,

Currently, I'm a British citizen living in the U.K. If I do get accepted for undergrad at either Oxford or an Ivy like UPenn/Brown, which country should I choose to study in? I do prefer Oxford to the U.S. as it's just 3 years and I like the concentration in one field, which would be economics and management for me. Do IB or buy-side firms prefer Oxford or a top-tier U.S. institution? The main end goal would be to work in NYC, but I'm not an American citizen so that would be tricky. 

6 Comments
 

If you want to be in NYC and you're not a citizen, you'll need to be at one of the Ivies. Makes it too hard visa-wise for firms to take a shot at you if you're at Oxford and have no connection to the States. You get special considerations as a US-based international, I believe, and to be honest, I have not seen that many Oxford or Cambridge alums on Wall Street.

 

I didn't get into Wharton so would've been at Penn CAS studying economics. Even if I got into Wharton, I like to think I would've still picked Dartmouth due to the culture and better Greek life but who's to say. I also did not want to be in a city.

For Columbia, Dartmouth places better per capita and within the buy-side out of undergrad (at least that's what I was told when choosing). I can anecdotally confirm that, I feel like we send a lot out of undergrad into top shops and based on the surprisingly low amount of Columbia coworkers I have. It would've been nice to work part-time during college but I wanted to have a fun time in college so that wasn't really a concern. I'm also coming from a lower-income background so Columbia probably would've been a bit too expensive for me. 

In addition, culture and the social scene are dogshit at Columbia.

 
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