Top Target Status Losing Value
I'm a student at an HYPW school and have a lot of friends from my high school are at other supposedly "lower targets" (think UMich, UVA, Georgetown, UT Austin) and are getting the same (if not better) SA offers than many kids at my university with similar profiles (GPA, ECs, and prior experience).
Beyond my personal anecdotes, I see that my school isn't even on the WSO top ten list for IB placement and that some of these lower targets are seemingly placing much better. This is really frustrating to me since it seems like I could've worked WAY less hard in HS and attended one of these lower-tier schools (or go for almost free from merit scholarships) and then end up with the same result in terms of placement. I'm just confused why people on this forum encourage kids to go to HYPW type schools when it seems to make no difference in placement, probably costs more (since no merit aid), and is much harder to stand out even within the school due to high level of competition and volume of connected kids?
Must be Princeton...
Because wall street isn’t the “brain drain” it used to be and the smartest kids don’t go into finance. They go to tech, consulting, etc...
Your life isn't finished after the first investment banking job you get post-college. Try on-cycle PE recruiting and you'll get a sense of how much HH prefer Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Wharton even to a great school like Cornell. Try to raise funding for your startup idea 10 years down the line and you'll get a sense of how much VCs prestige whore over Stanford/Harvard/MIT. Run for Congress and you'll notice how Harvard/Stanford/Princeton (and Georgetown) have the most alumni. It really pays to go to a top-tier school, especially Harvard or Stanford these days.
At an EB but from a semi-target.
I’d go to a lower BB for a HWPYS degree in a heartbeat
You go to HYPW because you'll be set for life on the name of the school alone even if you don't have an IB analyst job. It doesn't guarantee you'll make f-you money, but it does pretty much guarantee you will do, at the very least, alright in life. You think anyone would dare to even consider Art History majors from Michigan for an IB job? Nope. They hire them from HYP.
I personally think it's because the talent gap between the HYPW kids and the kids at Michigan, UVA, Gtown has gotten closer. I would argue that the kids at both groups of schools are similar, if not the same, in academic standing and so the real differentiator becomes the quality of the person like Analyst 1 said above. I am sure that kids at Michigan, UVA, Gtown got into some Ivies and made their decision based on factors other than the name of the school (best fit, financially, which school would be more fun, etc). Not trying to say the quality of kids at HYPW has gone down, but rather the quality of kids at the other schools has gone up.
I can tell you that you're absolutely wrong. I went to a NE prep school (Andover/Exeter/Choate), witnessed 4 classes go through the college process, and had access to the admissions scattergrams. Gtown and UVA literally took anyone who applied from my hs (scattergram was basically all green) and HYP only took kids at the top of the class with substantial hooks. Only kids in the bottom half of my class matriculated at a UVA/Gtown and the kids in the top half used those as pure safeties or didn't bother applying at all. I don't know how you came to believe that the schools in the 20-30 range are now equivalent to HYP.....
For the rest of us that went to normal high schools all of these colleges would be reaches for everyone lol
I went to a normal school so your view is very different than many others (not saying your view is wrong, just completely different experiences). I have two friends at Harvard and one at UVA and can say with 100% confidence that they are similar and the UVA kid is arguably the smartest (better GPA from the same classes in HS and better ACT/SAT scores). If you re-read my response, you would also see that I said the talent gap has gotten closer. I never said that they were equivalent, I'm not that naive lol.
The bottom half of your hs didn't have a chance at UVA because you didn't go to Andover/Exeter. Stop comparing your lower-tier high school to those two schools to support your argument. My hs sent 39 percent of its students to an IVY/MIT/Stanford in my year. 39 percent.... UVA is not even a top 20 school overall and not even a top 3 state school. So yes, the kids who went there were for the most part in the bottom half of the class (unless he/she was a Jefferson scholar as you mentioned). I honestly don't know why UVA kids have such huge egos. Everywhere on this forum, I'm seeing UVA kids hype up their school and on Linkedin, I'm constantly seeing UVA kids post about their internship. Just why.......
A UVA finance major is going to be more polished and knowledgeable about the industry than a Harvard art history SJW.
totally not true. I went to TJHSST, the single largest feeder to UVA at 100 and 25 some kids to HYPSM each year. On average there was a clear drop off in credentials between the two crowds. Even when technical/non technical major is taken into consideration.
Totally agree with you that there’s a big drop-off. People who go to TJ like you or an Andover/Exeter/Choate like me know this from firsthand experience...
Can you guys jack each other off over your highschools more, please?
dude quants make so much more money than us in IB, fuck IB be a quant (which you can only really do from top top targets)
Wrong, for quant and swe roles in general, it's much more meritocratic and there's a far smaller emphasis on hiring from "target" schools.
This is completely wrong. I’ve talked to many quants in the industry and literally all of them said they went to an info session on campus and got on through OCR. As a nontarget I have absolutely 0 companies that come to campus and will have to fight my way in to the quant space.
Bunch of non-targets in here jerking each other off and trying to make themselves feel better.