Underrated and Overrated Schools
What's everyone's take on the most underrated or overrated schools in 2024. I've seen threads about this couple years ago. Would like to see if any school has improved their IB placements over the past couple cycles. Just curious.
Overrated - Dartmouth, UPenn CAS, UVA, Notre Dame, Maybe Yale/Princeton (would put them on par with Columbia and Penn)
Underrated - Brown, Duke, Northwestern, Williams/Amherst, UChicago
Y and P definitely not on par with Columbia / Penn
Always thought Y/P has better recruiting, at least in buyside.
Overrated: NYU, mich, Princeton/yale
Underrated: UT, duke, Uchicago
no one underrates UChicago, but it just might be the shittiest undergrad experience in t25. and it produces a lot of really cringe students/graduates.
Why do we care? Unless your target audience is high school students
I'm just curious, that's all. Looking to see if any current students or recently graduated alums can share some light about their school's placements/recruiting.
Overrated: your school
Underrated: my school
NESCAS Schools are super underrated
No one ever talks about the insane recruiting numbers IU puts up every single year. Like where are these kids coming from? Kelley kids in my experience make shit analysts, but you can't deny their placement record.
In my experience it's because of the clubs. they've established recruiting pipelines straight from these hyper-competitive clubs to great firms. Same thing is happening at UMich right now too IME. In my opinion it's detrimental socially (getting thrown into these hyper-competitive, often backstabby communities as a freshman...) which kind of explains why a lot of them struggle a bit when they land in a real job and they aren't only surrounded by their circlejerk circle - but you can't deny the effectiveness when it comes to recruiting.
Yeah, the recruiting environment looks pretty cutthroat.
Same thing at UGA
del
How so?
UMich has a superb underrated program, alumni connections, and on campus organizations that is extremely underrated. This last junior class sent ~12 to BX, however lots of EB presence compared to BB
Are you sure 12x to Blackstone? That's unreasonably high. Blackstone doesn't even take that many students out of undergrad.
Usual Ross cap
x
Pressure makes diamonds...
Cream of the crop at Mich does great things in the industry
UC system in general is almost underrated. Big network means placement is feasible with proper effort starting in freshman year. And the college experience is quite good. Not going to be better than most true semi target schools but if you need to go in state and can’t get into or pay for Stanford / USC not a bad option. Banks aren’t in the business of not hiring good candidates no matter the school they’re from. Good kids find seats.
Top 3 NESCACs (Williams/Amherst/Middlebury)
Washu is underrated. Per capita they’re up there, heard great things from my distant friends that go there.
I actually looked at placement at EB/BB/MBB/HF/PE/VC for every single target and semi-target for the graduating classes of 2023 and 2022, from the university's own websites. Here's what I found.
Underrated: NESCAC LACs, Claremont colleges, all the military academies, Cornell Dyson (Dyson only, there's a shocking difference), WashU, Notre Dame, Boston College
Overrated: Georgetown, UVA, non-Dyson Cornell, Berkeley, USC, NYU
Justifications:
Top LACs and military academies: the targets that everyone always forgets about. Not much else to say other than they've always been targets.
WashU/Notre Dame//BC: Underrated for their placement. Notre Dame in particular is quite impressive, especially with EBs. I unironically think it could be a target in the next fews.
Georgetown: Per capita placement doesn't justify the reputation, especially when you consider the whole school is hardo town.
NYU: See Georgetown.
Berkeley: See NYU
USC: Past 2 years at least have been surprisingly bad numbers-wise and this includes West Coast banking and VC.
Non-Dyson Cornell: Lags way behind Dyson. Hotel is high semi target. CAS is legitimately Boston College level.
UVA: Good if you want to work at Jefferies, I guess.
Shameless cornell student
Just saying Dyson numbers are crazy. Love for the statistics to be proven wrong.
I go to a non target btw.
ND is already a target. A school sending ~80 to BB/EB is impressive.
Cornell's placements are pretty similar to other ivies. Only the prestige aspect that people tend to trash Cornell for. I don't know how bad the competition is at Cornell, but I would expect it to be lower than Stern/Georgetown/Ross.
W
Berkeley gets a ton of flak for being a hard and cutthroat environment, but it consistently places well yoy. Class of ‘25 is well represented at every top bank (GS, MS, PJT/Laz/Evr), the large multi managers (Citadel, P72, etc), even have kids getting MF SA offers now. There’s also a few kids who land analyst jobs at L/S equity shops. NorCal is beautiful, Cal football is a ton of fun, love the weather. Go bears.
Berkeley is also more crime infested than SF, and that’s saying something
What are the placements looking like for New York? I know Berkeley is a strong feeder for SF/Bay Area.
cal football is not a pro 😭😭😭
Texas Schools are seriously underrated - SMU, TCU, Texas A&M, UT Austin
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