Amherst College, Boston College, or WUSTL?

Hi everyone! I am in a bit of a strange and unexpected situation regarding my college selection process, and I was hoping that you could potentially provide some insight or advice:

So, for the past few months, I have been verbally committed to Amherst College for baseball. As a recruited athlete, I was told that I had the coach's support for my regular decision application and that I had a relatively higher chance of acceptance. Unfortunately, however, upon receiving my decision, I was actually waitlisted by the school. Looking at past forums and discussions on this site, it appears that I will not be hearing anything from Amherst until at least the first week of May, and thus I am unsure as to where I now stand with their admissions office. The coach has said he will update me as he learns more information, but so far he has not reached out.

This brings me to my next point, as I was also accepted to Boston College's Carroll School of Management and Wash U's Olin Business School. I was not recruited by either one, and was simply admitted as a normal applicant. Yet, because I had been preparing to enroll at Amherst, I'm undecided on which of these two I should attend in the case that my baseball commitment falls through.

In terms of rankings, prestige and job availability after graduation, it seems that Amherst > Wash U > Boston College. I am completely open to other interpretations, but after looking at many different sources and talking with many individuals, my personal knowledge leads me to place the three in that way. I will likely major in finance or economics, though, so I would prefer to work in the northeast, and my only concern about Wash U is its job placement outside of the midwest. I would think that Boston College, on the other hand, offers better overall opportunities for that scenario. So, whereas Wash U likely has the stronger prestige and academics, and Boston College has the more advantageous location, Amherst seems to have the best of both worlds.

As a result, do you feel that I should trust in the coach's support of me and wait for Amherst? Have any of you been through a similar recruiting situation before? If I were to move on, do you believe that Boston College or Wash U would be the better choice? Am I wrong for assuming that Boston College places better in the northeast than Wash U solely because of its location? Is either one considered a target school?

I apologize for the length of this post and the flurry of questions, but any help you could offer would truly be appreciated! Thank you in advance!!

 

Amherst is heads above both for banking. WashU has very poor banking placement in general and especially so for the east coast. Anyone who places is usually in Chicago or MMs in St Louis.

If you don't get Amherst, I'd go with WashU and plan on transferring to an east coast target sophomore year.

 

Take a better look at Olin's placements, particularly on the east coast:

  1. 26% placement in the northeast with a median starting salary of $60,000
  2. Median signing bonus of $7,500
  3. 14% IB, 4% S&T, 5% AM, 13% Management Consulting, 4% strategy consulting, 3% Internal Strategy
  4. 99% placement 3 months after graduation.

Companies that hired Olin BSBAs:

Accenture, Amazon, Bain, BoA, Citi, Deloitte Consulting, Deutche Bank, GE, Google, Goldman Sachs, JPM, MS, Oliver Wyman, Oracle, among others.

Olin is a top notch business school at the undergraduate level.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

Yeah, I'm not saying that Olin isn't a great business school - there's no debating that. What I'm saying is it's very difficult to be hired for investment banking or sales & trading analyst positions on the east coast coming from Olin. I personally know of many students at WashU and they all have difficulty with finance jobs (I'm not including mgmt consulting) on the east coast which is where the OP wants to be post grad. BBs/EBs are extremely hard to get to as demonstrated by the median starting salary you found - the $60K number implies graduates going to smaller boutiques that underpay the street.

As an anecdotal data point, I know of two Olin kids who hustled hard for their SA positions. Even after a phenomenal effort, one only got a capital markets position at a BB and the other got M&A at a MM. Both had the goal of going hard for BB/EB M&A.

 
White Party Hat:

Yeah, I'm not saying that Olin isn't a great business school - there's no debating that. What I'm saying is it's very difficult to be hired for investment banking or sales & trading analyst positions on the east coast coming from Olin. I personally know of many students at WashU and they all have difficulty with finance jobs (I'm not including mgmt consulting) on the east coast which is where the OP wants to be post grad. BBs/EBs are extremely hard to get to as demonstrated by the median starting salary you found - the $60K number implies graduates going to smaller boutiques that underpay the street.

As an anecdotal data point, I know of two Olin kids who hustled hard for their SA positions. Even after a phenomenal effort, one only got a capital markets position at a BB and the other got M&A at a MM. Both had the goal of going hard for BB/EB M&A.

I personally know a lot of Olin undergrads that got into BB IB so please don't litter the thread with your completely unsubstantiated assertions and unverifiable anecdotes.

The fact is that 20% got into IB/S&T which is phenomenal for any undergrad business school. 26% went into the East Coast which, by any measure, is sizable. The $60,000 starting salary is (a) the base salary and (b) reflects the salary for all Olin grads - not those that got into banking.

“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

Amherst, no doubt. Beats out all these schools for finance and IB placement due to the prestige and network. Don't even consider WashU. Olin is terrible for IB finance. Unless you want to live in damn St. Louis for the rest of your life, don't go to WashU. It can't even place well into Chicago.

 

Has to be a troll. Amherst college is a top 5 school academically. Didn't one of the Tiger Cubs go there? I live in MA and when I cruise buy-side shops here looking for cold call fodder there is always at least a couple people from Amherst or Williams, typically with an MBA from HBS, Tuck or Wharton to boot.

 
short_round:

Just because your hill billy friends never heard of Blackstone or Evercore doesn't make them less prestigious companies to work for. It just means you know a lot of simpletons... I don't ask a homeless person about their preferences on tailors in Manhattan.

I was going to say the same thing.

To OP: Just wait a couple of weeks and see what Amherst has to say. Then worry about the decision.

 

I went to WUSTL and had a great college experience, but was pretty disappointed when it came to recruiting. I was not in the b-school, but was in a related field (econ), and I quickly realized that BB IBD (at least without family connections) was a real long shot, even with great grades etc. I ended up switching my goal to consulting and was able to be pretty successful there, but still think the recruiting left something to be desired (only one of MBB seriously recruited, although this was 5 years ago).

Also - I did take a few classes in the b-school and was not impressed with the academic rigor or quality of professors. Overall, it seemed that the dumber kids on campus were in the b-school and the smarter ones were in the life sciences, social sciences or engineering. Olin was pretty widely known on campus as "b-school pre-school", so much so that the Olin student government made t-shirts that said "b-school THE school", which I thought was pretty pathetic/embarrassing.

Overall, I think WUSTL is probably on-par with Amhearst in terms of academics/prestige, and definitely ahead of BC. That said, I definitely buy that Amherst/BC hit above their weight in recruiting due to being on the east coast, and WUSTL is significantly disadvantaged by being in the midwest and not even Chicago at that.

 
Esuric:

Dude you didn't even go to Olin. You studied econ and wanted BB IB. How many BC econ majors go to BB IB?

When I was a freshman/sophomore I was considering transferring into Olin from engineering, which is as easy as filling out a form since Olin knows any engineering student with decent grades will get straight As in the b-school. As part of doing my diligence, I learned that very few Olin students make it into BB IBD, and also took some Olin classes, which did not impress me. Thus, I transfered to Econ, and I am very glad I did.

I have no idea how many BC econ majors go to BB IBD, I simply wanted to share what I DO know with the OP.

 

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“Elections are a futures market for stolen property”
 

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