****REAL**** Target School Rankings 2025

IU Kelley over any of the schools in A tier (excluding UVA) is laughable. I do/did not go to any of those schools for context. 

p good list imo, will say don't sleep on UCLA.

Anybody moderately interested in IB at Stanford places at will. Naturally a lot of tech groups but industrials, fig, generalist, repe, etc as well. Haven’t done the numbers but suspect that ratio of [students interested in IB]:[alumni in IB] is better than Wharton and comparable to the rest. Should be S++.

Congrats on Kelley!!!

.

Kelley on par with Penn? 😂

You forgot Miami Ohio in S+++ tier, pls fix

Least obvious Kelley graduate.

Stanford should be S++, move Duke and Penn (non-Wharton) up to S, Brown up to S-, Dartmouth down to S-, IU-Kelley down to C. 

Duke and Northwestern are easily S tier lol this list is atrocious

Congrats on Kelley and Notre Dame, and sorry about your rejection from NU and Duke!!!

You forgot the LACs - Williams / Amherst / Middlebury / Bowdoin / Tufts all place extremely well given their class size and percentage of students aiming for high finance each year. Smaller alumni bases yet they go to bat for their schools and top candidates, with the ability to network across all LACs mentioned above if one attends (Williams is legit, they have alum across the street). Many LACs also have pipelines to buy-side opportunities out of undergrad

Carnegie Mellon snub

Been working for over a decade and have never encountered a single person from this IU Kelley school irl. I've literally only seen mention of it here on WSO. In fact, did not know this place even existed until I joined this site...

Anyways, on what basis you would put it above UC Berkeley, UCLA, UMich, UVA. et al. which I'm 99% sure are much harder to get admitted to with better recruitment pipelines?

I went straight to buyside out of school so don't have the best view on these target school rankings for IB (but the HF I currently work for recruits from tier A and above, EXCLUDING IU). And I do deal with a fair number of bankers/sellside research folks. I'm more than half-convinced this post is a psyop from an IU student.

I used to get a bit annoyed reading these but seeing IU Kelley that high makes me laugh at how absurdly out of touch OP is. Enough to where this post is a joke

Northwestern, Berkeley, and UT Austin are all tier A schools. IU is definitely tier B. Just because there's a funnel for two kids to get PJT RX and Apollo FIG doesn't make a school elite lol. You have to look at the diaspora of placements and all three of these are way better (each regularly send multiple kids to top PE SA programs, the MM HFs, and many different top banking groups). 

Think UT should be pushed up. Push down ND and IU. Note that Rice places ~80% in Houston so would push it down one if levelled to NYC. 

Congrats on IU Kelly! 

ACTUAL TARGET LIST

S++ — Harvard, Wharton, Yale, Princeton

S+ — Stanford, MIT

S — Columbia, Penn (Non-Wharton), UChicago

S- — Cornell, Duke, Dartmouth, Brown

A+ — Northwestern

A — Stern, Ross, Georgetown

A- — UT-Austin 

B+ — UVA, Notre Dame, UC Berkeley

B — Emory, WashU

C — Vanderbilt, USC, JHU, Rice, IU-Kelley

D — UCLA, UNC

F — UIUC, UF

Ridiculous take re: IU Kelley...

I would put all of the A tier, Northwestern, UNC, UCLA, and potentially even Berkeley, UT, and Rice above IU Kelley, and I'm not even shitting on it / recognize that they place well.

Also, MIT is hard to rank, particularly in S+, because people self-select out of high finance (most, if they do go into the industry, likely go into quant finance). I'm sure you would get looks just based on the brand, but it doesn't have a pipeline, nor would I consider going to it over some of the other Ivy League schools if my goal was IB / PE / HF.

Two things can be true at once- yes, IU Kelley places into top BBs and EBs, but that also doesn't mean that for the average student, it is easier to get into IB than in a place like ND or Georgetown. There is one very specific club that is needed to place at IU, and without that, you're basically screwed. One of the reasons that I'm an ND shill is because they have non-competitive clubs and a super strong alumni network, which means that it's pretty doable to get an IB offer, as an average student, even if it's not quite as prestigious of an offer as you would like. For someone like me who is taking out over $150k in student loans, I just want an easier path to paying it back. The risk/reward wouldn't be worth it for me otherwise.  

How does Leeds (CU Boulder) stack up against the list?

This is so ridiculous lol. "IU Kelley" is not a target school. It's a school you go to if you have a 1200 SAT and were a dumbass in high school and you might be able to slip your way into an average group at a bottom-tier bank. That doesn't mean "IU Kelley" is a target school or is impressive in any way. There was a time when most top-tier banks only hired the cream of the crop students. Luckily, MF PE is still that way.

So for those of you high schoolers who are truly interested in what schools are "target schools," it's not rocket science. If the school is good, then it's a target. That's it. There are no shortcuts that you can take if you have a 3.3 GPA and a 1200 SAT to weave your way into a "target" school that's actually a shithole just so you can land an IB seat. Sure, you might be able to land the last seat in the pecking order in Citi DCM and burn out in 2 years. If you don't have a history of achievement which your undergrad institution literally EMBODIES, you will not get into MF PE, you will not get top bucket, you won't get anything, and hiding behind these sad tier lists won't change the simple reality that maybe you should have tried harder in high school.

If you were lazy and/or a dumbass without any history of achievement in high school, whether that's academic or athletic (you know who you are), then chances are your school is not a target school. I don't care how many people it placed into Deutsche Bank ECM 3 years ago, it's not a target and no one on the street thinks so either.