Yale vs. Stanford for NYC Finance
One of my friends got off Yale's waitlist, and he is trying to weigh his options, so I thought I could ask you guys for your opinions. Overall, which school is the better option for graduates getting into NYC finance. I know it extremely rare and competitive to go buy side after undergard, but would either school have any benefits in this area.
In terms of fit, they would be pretty much equal. He isn't too worried about location or campus culture. Most of his point of debate revolve around pre-professional aspects: OCR, internships, alumni networking/presence, and NYC employment opportunities. I know it shouldn't be a concern right now, but he is pretty dead set on NYC for work.
In terms of majors, he would be doing Econ/ Stats & Data Science or Econ/ Applied Math at Yale, and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. So this is where it get's interesting, he wants to have the background for quant finance from undergrad (hence MS & E), but he isn't interest in being a qaunt. He just likes the quantitive side of finance. Although he has said getting a quant finance education isn't a primary concern if Yale pros outweigh Stanford. Obviously Yale STEM is piss poor, laughable at best, so it doesn't have anything close to financial engineering, but again, he prefers to prioritize alumni, OCR, etc.
Overall what would be the better choice for finance. Discounting the aspect of "the undergraduate experience" with student life, weather, location, and overall ability to have fun. He just doesn't care about that.
I'd go with Stanford. You can get the same bullshit investment banking internship from any decent college, so I'd rather opt for the deeper GSB alumni network in private equity/buy-side than I would for the ~10ish more Yale alumni I'd find at a BB. As long as you're not retarded, I'd doubt you'd have a hard time breaking into NY finance coming from Stanford. The only school that'd give me pause over Stanford is Harvard.
I was an MS&E major at Stanford back in the day. it won’t get you anywhere close to being a quant haha. the rigorous ms&e classes are really at the grad level, and you’re better off doing CS if you actually want to be a quant. most of the kids in my class just wanted to go into finance and MS&E was the most relevant/easiest major in. We have Econ but it’s harder and too theoretical. MS&E is insanely easy in general and only difficult if you really try to go deep into the grad tracks.
Anyways, yeah Stanford is fun. harder to recruit marginally but if you’re on top of your game it’s not a problem. the distance from NYC is a minus but it’s not a real barrier. Yale probably has a super slight edge when it comes to your traditional finance prestige but Stanford blows it out of the park for anything VC/TMT/Tech PE/Tech Banking related. slightly different areas of strength I would say but neither is clearly better or worse in my opinion. there are some banks that don’t recruit at Stanford, but you can probably easily get into processes with them with a bit of networking. some prestigious PE/VC places will offer you roles if you know where to look and are on your game, but I assume Yale has some potential for undergrad PE exits too