What's Recruiting like at Non-HYPSW Targets?
Curious what recruiting is like from non-top targets (excluding HYPSW + Penn/Columbia), so schools like Duke, Dartmouth, UChicago, Northwestern, Brown, Cornell for example. What does the median outcome look like? I go to a semi-target state school for reference but debating trying to transfer. Does people at these places generally do as well as HYPSW? What exactly is the difference between the two tiers.
Wharton alum adding my 2 cents, recruited for everything under the sun. There's literally zero difference in terms of a recruiting standpoint, there is no firm now that will hire exclusively out of HYPSW besides maybe 1-2 funds that used to hire only from Wharton (Silver Point comes to mind). I would say that the recruiting tiers realistically look something like this:
T1: HYPSM, Wharton/Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, UChicago, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown.
You will get looks at every firm from the above because a) all traditionally prestigious ivy / T10 schools and b) all have strong OCR besides maybe Brown (unfamiliar with the school). You can't complain if you go to any of these schools.
T2: NYU, Georgetown, Michigan, Notre Dame, UVA, Williams, Amherst, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, Emory, WashU, Vandy, USC, Middlebury.
I don't care if you say Georgetown is better than USC or Michigan is better than WashU. In the grand scheme of things, for the average student who grinds recruiting at any of these universities, they can place similarly. Sure Michigan, NYU, Georgetown might have more OCR but that's negated by the amount of competition at the schools. There is no meaningful difference in recruiting across these schools, if you work hard, you can get a job in finance.
T3: Would add good schools that are fringe semi- and non-targets here. Think schools like UNC, UCLA, IU, etc.
Much harder to place from these schools than the schools above, but doable with hard work.
T4: Everything else.
JHU/ MIT in T1.5 --> per capita placements are all extraordinarily strong but there's like 10-20 kids in the entire school recruiting and very few alumni.
It’s super interesting to see certain banks specifically recruiting from schools now too. HL comes to mind in their Dallas office, a ton of SMU alum now. Seems like semi/regional targets have been able to narrow the gap with their IB/SMIF/Finance clubs.
Mostly agree, except...
cornell and georgetown are 2 targets that are friendly to transfers from community colleges; i must say that i have seen some real hustlers come out of those 2 schools.
Yeah funny you mention Gtown and CC transfers. One of most impressive people I've met in investment management was one of those people. Roughly my age and about to be PM at a BB's AM arm. Great guy too.
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