Yale Placement

Sorry for the winded post. I have a lot of questions, so hopefully it isn't too painful to read through!

Hey, so I am an incoming freshman at Yale, and I did some digging around on Linkedin to see where Yale alumni end up at, and I found some pretty worrying results. This year, I was accepted to Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Stern, so I researched other threads on here and it seems like Yale was overwhelmingly suggested over my other choices. I was happy with my choice, but after taking a deeper look into Yale's placement, I am starting to think I made a huge mistake by not going with one of my other choices (primarily Columbia).

I won't list all the MBB, BB, and HF and PE shops because it must of been nearing ~50. I literally took a look at every shop that is reputable. As you might expect, Wharton absolutely kills it in terms of where the employees at the top place work at. They constantly outnumber every school, with the exception of Harvard, but still Wharton beats them out consistently. Obviously, Wharton is an unfair comparison for Yale since it is the top UG b-school with everybody gunning for finance. A much more reasonable comparison would be Harvard. Yale and Harvard are as similar as two schools can get. Academically, curricular, and prestige wise they are pretty close. But Harvard out-places Yale at these top HFs and PEs at ratios of 2:1, 3:1, and sometimes more. There's some places where there is 150 Harvard alums and only 30 Yallies. Same goes for Columbia which also out-places Yale as well. If you don't believe take a look.

When I was reading people's threads comparing Yale's placement in comparison to other schools, I saw that the difference can be chalked up to selection bias. It sounded reasonable. Yale the school know for it social activism has less people going for finance than Harvard and Columbia. But I took a look tonight and Yale OCS reports that more Yallies enter finance and consulting than Harvard and Columbia. For context, Harvard and Yale have similar class sizes with Columbia being around 600 students larger.

Yale OCS reports (https://ocs.yale.edu/outcomes/yale-college-outcom…) that for the Class of '19 15.6% entered finance and 10.6% consulting. For the Class of '18, Harvard reports (https://ocs.fas.harvard.edu/files/ocs/files/final…) that 13% go* finance and 10% *consulting. For Columbia (https://www.careereducation.columbia.edu/sites/de…) 15% finance, 11.1% consulting, and 5.2 investment management (HF ?).

Obviously this isn't a case of selection bias. Contrary to this thread, and what I though as well, Yale does not have less finance interest kids than Harvard or Columbia. As a matter of fact they have more than Harvard and only slightly less than Columbia. So my question is why does Yale place so poorly when you take a look at where big firm's and HFs employees attended. It's not even close. Harvard is light years ahead in their placement, yet Yale sends more people into the industry. Where they go is anyones guess, since they're nowhere to be found when I took a look.

This can' t be selection bias. The only shop I found where Yale outperforms Harvard is D.E. Shaw. Other then that, it's a landslide for Harvard and Columbia. As an incoming Yallie I find this really worrying. It seems that besides the fact Yale has the name that comes closest to Harvard's it places nowhere near what its prestige implies. For such a prestige focused industry, I don't understand why Yale does so poorly. I am really tossed up since it really seems I should have picked Columbia. Trust me, I don't want to disregard the school I'm going to, but I'm just overall concerned with those numbers. Obviously, I may be wrong, and if that's the case I would love to hear everyones opinion regarding this.