Has Booth clearly surpassed Columbia/Kellogg/Sloan?

Chicago Booth has always been a great b-school, but its rise in the last 5 years has been simply astounding. David Booth's $300 million donation in 2008 was a true game changer, for it allowed Booth to do several things: revamp career services, expand centers for marketing and entrepreneurship and offer generous merit scholarships to top candidates who may have gone elsewhere. And from a purely aesthetic standpoint, changing the school's name to Booth probably raised name recognition as opposed to being known as UChicago GSB.

I bring this up because I recently had a chance to catch up with friends of mine (mostly in NYC finance) who were offered admission to various schools in round 1 admission. About 90% are sure they will take Booth over Columbia (they already got Booth but awaiting Columbia since they are rolling admission rather than round based). Their basic reasoning was that Booth's flexible and analytically rigorous curriculum will make them stand out during the finance interview process and that in the world of finance, Booth now has more respect and credibility than Columbia.

I would love to hear people's thoughts on this. Is Booth's rise here to stay? Are they now one notch above the other MBA business schools">M7 programs?

 

At least this isn't as bad as the regular P&Q "Booth is better than Wharton" articles, but your Chicago bias is showing a bit. ;)

I think all of the M7 schools have their own particular niches: Booth -- finance, strong academic tradition Kellogg -- consulting, CPG, fun Columbia -- NYC, finance, value investing MIT -- tech, entr., best parent university

You could really make a case to choose any one of them over another non-HSW school (I think you could include Tuck and Haas in this list as well, as they both have very unique strengths).

 

I think i'd tend to agree more with @holla_back . Each of the other M7 schools have their strengths. However, I will say the comparison between Booth and Columbia is probably the more apt one for you to be making. Both offer similar outcomes post graduation and they have very similar strengths. When it comes to the other schools like Kellogg/MIT its much harder to make a valid comparison. Sure some people would pick Kellogg/MIT over Booth and vice versa, but the issue is that those people are usually looking for different things from their schools (focus, global reputation,research, etc). Ex. If I want to be an entrepreneur or work in technology...there is almost no way i'd pick Booth over MIT. However if I was more interested in finance then the decision becomes more murky.

 

How many marketing-focused people would turn down HBS to attend Kellogg, even though Kellogg is the niche leader in marketing? While I agree that each of the schools has its own niche, at some point general reputation outweighs the benefits of attending the "niche" school. I think this point is when you jump tiers.

I believe mbavsmfin's statement was driven by the fact that he believes Booth's reputation is driving it to the point where it is leaving the commonly accepted tier consisting of Kellogg / Sloan / CBS. As a Booth student I'm incredibly biased, but I think there is validity to the fact that Booth is improving at a faster rate than the other three. There is no definitive right answer --- reputation is just the commonly held perception of the university and everyone has their own view.

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CompBanker:

How many marketing-focused people would turn down HBS to attend Kellogg, even though Kellogg is the niche leader in marketing? While I agree that each of the schools has its own niche, at some point general reputation outweighs the benefits of attending the "niche" school. I think this point is when you jump tiers.

I believe mbavsmfin's statement was driven by the fact that he believes Booth's reputation is driving it to the point where it is leaving the commonly accepted tier consisting of Kellogg / Sloan / CBS. As a Booth student I'm incredibly biased, but I think there is validity to the fact that Booth is improving at a faster rate than the other three. There is no definitive right answer --- reputation is just the commonly held perception of the university and everyone has their own view.

Co-signing this.

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
 

I know multiple people who have chosen CBS over Booth. Anecdotal evidence really isn't meaningful. Ultimately all that matters is post graduation employment and both schools place strongly into finance careers. Booth has great advantages with it's flexible curriculum. Columbia has the advantage of being in NYC so people can intern during the school year. No school is perfect and while I have issues with the core curriculum, as a career switcher being able to work part time at a hedge fund during the school year was a pretty strong selling point for Columbia.

 

Herein lies the problem. When people mention Columbia's greatest strengths, the first thing that comes up is the NYC location. To me that is a huge red flag because essentially the school is relying on its location as a crutch. Ultimately though, that is a foundation of sand, not stone. When a crisis affects NYC or the city in general goes into decline under DeBlasio, Columbia's trump card will be considerably weakened.

In contrast, Booth continues to rise despite being in Hyde Park, a terrible neighborhood (yes, most booth students live in downtown chicago but you get my point). Its excellence is truly inherent: flexible curriculum that allows you to take the right courses in prep for interviews, analytical and quantitative rigor, no-nonsense midwestern humility, superb faculty, highly cerebral and interesting student body, one of the best career services in the world, and breadth of finance courses. Columbia meanwhile has a new motto: "At the very center of business," which is just another way to remind people "hey! we're in NYC! don't forget about us!" It's symptomatic of Columbia's desperate attempts to compete with Booth.

Finally, regarding the article on poets and quants. Yes, Columbia does better than Booth in private equity. In baking and trading, they are equal despite the fact that Columbia is in NYC. In investment management and hedge funds, Booth has an edge. More mutual funds recruit on-campus at Booth and hire more as well precisely because they have so much respect for Booth's rigor and the way they prepare students. PIMCO hired 9 from Booth last year full-time; they hired around 7 from Columbia even though the latter has a larger student body. AQR, Wellington, Capital Group, and Citadel recruit at Booth but not Columbia. The list goes on.

 
mbavsmfin:
PIMCO hired 9 from Booth last year full-time; they hired around 7 from Columbia even though the latter has a larger student body. AQR, Wellington, Capital Group, and Citadel recruit at Booth but not Columbia. The list goes on.

Now you are just making shit up. AQR is the only one of those that isn't currently recruiting at Columbia.

 

mbavsmfin, wow, you know how to stir up some controversy :)

maybe as a Columbia financial engineering alum, I have to disagree with your description of the analytical and quantitatively rigorous MBA curriculum at Booth. The standard MBA curriculum anywhere is not quant nor rigorous, even at a top-ranked finance school like Wharton. Now, if you take PhD classes or grad classes in engineering outside of the b-school, you can get a quant education anywhere. So in theory, an Ohio State MBA could be a lot stronger in quant (math/stats/programming) than a Booth MBA, especially if he's an Indian/Asian IT guy with a low verbal GMAT.

Prof. Tsay's class and Prof. Cochrane's Asset Pricing class are both excellent (Prof. Cochrane offers it on Coursera for anyone interested). However, most MBAs just don't have the mathematical background or work ethic/motivation to slog through such difficult material. And isn't the point of an MBA to get a job anyway? it's not really an academic degree.

I don't have any special bond to CBS since I only took a couple classes there. But I'm pretty confident you can get any job you could have had from Booth out of Columbia. I wouldn't say that's the case in PE for the likes of HSW. Outside of academics, one thing CBS has going for it are the CBS Follies- you get a sense the kids are a cool, funny and easy-going bunch.

 
Best Response

This is a bit absurd. Is Booth probably a slightly higher ranked school than Columbia? I guess so, at least right now. They are so close, however, that to say one has "clearly surpassed" the other is too much. I just don't get the need to decide that one is definitely better than the other. They're both great schools, and they both place incredibly well, especially (but not limited to) in finance. Further, to ignore Columbia's significantly greater presence at the mega-funds (as evidenced by the P&Q article last week), when both these schools are major finance placers, seems to be a major oversight.

We're also missing a key element by looking only at cross admits, which alone, is an incredibly narrow sample to look at (how many cross admit friends can you possibly have? 4?): those that value Columbia the most, and would pick it over Chicago, probably apply ED. That eliminates the decision process. Those that are on the fence about CBS, or feel more like you do about the superiority of Booth, will likely apply to both in a regular round, but they're already leaning towards Booth. That doesn't mean Booth isn't better, it just means that especially in this case, looking at those admitted to both is not necessarily an accurate measuring stick. I won't even get into the fact that I actually know a few people that chose CBS over Wharton last year - and no, I don't think Columbia is better than Wharton, it just shows that every situation is different, and all these schools are elite.

Lastly, you seem to be obsessed with Columbia's so-called decline. As I pointed out to you in another post a few weeks ago (can find it if you'd like), there is no evidence whatsoever that Columbia has declined, other than a general blip that coincided with the financial crisis. Their ranking has remained steady, and in fact is slightly better than it was ten years ago.

 
BGP2587:

Lastly, you seem to be obsessed with Columbia's so-called decline. As I pointed out to you in another post a few weeks ago (can find it if you'd like), there is no evidence whatsoever that Columbia has declined, other than a general blip that coincided with the financial crisis.

Depends on how you define "decline." In 2012 they had a 19% decline in applications, combined with a big decrease in yield. 2013 applications were up ~6%, but that's still far off its high.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10000872396390444433504577651962999932518

 

Yup. What's happening to Columbia is not merely a blip; it's symptomatic of a structural decline. A school cannot remain world-class by relying exclusively on location and the ephemeral "ivy league prestige." Booth has diversified beyond its core finance excellence and is now strong in consulting, marketing, tech, and entrepreneurship. Columbia is still clinging to the traditional industries and is way behind in innovation.

 

I will also add that the flexible curriculum, touted by many, was actually a drawback for me when I was looking at schools. No knock on Booth, because it's an awesome school, but as a married applicant thinking about school in a big city that I have a number of good friends in, the lack of core curriculum worried me. Most of my friends at b-school point to their best relationships coming from their first semester cohort/cluster/whatever other schools call it. The fact that Booth doesn't have those worried me a bit. Sure, you probably get an element of that by taking similar classes as like-minded students (e.g. prospective consultants will take a lot of strategy classes), but I thought that a school with a structured core would provide both of those for me.

Just another perspective on that type of curriculum. No one version is better than another, it just depends on who you are and what you want. That gets us back to the original question - there is not necessarily better or worse with these two schools - a lot of it depends on your individual situation and what you're looking for, even if they are seemingly comparable places at first.

 

This thread reminds me of ESPN columns. "Has Durant surpassed Lebron? KD is on a 12-game 30+ PTS streak, the third longest in 30 years of league! But LBJ's FG% has been going up 1-2% every season for the past eight years! But KD's PER is 2.2 higher than LBJ! Is KD the new best player on the planet??"

The truth of the matter is, if we assume that an NBA team owner's goal is to win a championship and that an MBA student's goal is to get a target job, both options will be more than satisfactory. I would argue that KD and LBJ are both worth more than the max (or near max) contracts that they got, as would MBA degrees from both CBS and Booth be worth it for most applicants. Before the Miami-OKC game last night during the pre-game session, ESPN was asking PJ Carlesimo which of the two would he rather have to start an NBA team. This question is as hypothetical and irrelevant as "who would win a 1v1 game, Jordan in his prime or Kobe in his prime?". The fact is, having either KD or LBJ to start your dynasty will open up a lot of windows in coming years to win championships. Does simply having this one superstar get you the rings? No, it takes a good coach, a second / third reliable offense options to share the load, a good perimeter defender, a good post defender, and certain luck with injuries (or rather, lack of injuries) to win it all. Similarly, I would argue that, while going to a good school may certainly be a pre-requisite to achieving your goal, (of getting a good job) you need a lot more effort and luck on your part than that to make it.

Now, this probably does not apply to MBA students who are 1) sponsored and going back to their company, 2) going to school for fun or 2 years off work, or 3) going to school with the primary goal of expanding their network.

 

@pr0ficient - Apologies. Should have been more clear - the analysis I did was related to rankings, which OP has claimed had been consistently declining for Columbia over the last decade (not true). That application drop is definitely a real thing (and more facts than OP has used in any of his analysis), but it also states that it followed four years of mega application growth, and as you stated, it was followed up by a decent rebound. Growing 4/5 years, with one really bad year, is not a sign of steady decline, especially when Booth has also seen a slight decline the last couple years. Booth's isn't a significant decline (~5%), but it's not like it's growing app volume by 10-20% every year while Columbia is crashing down.

It also baffles me that you consider New York this temporary, weak thing. I cannot possibly see how New York City is a foundation of "sand", but a flexible, analytical curriculum is a foundation of stone? Columbia could adopt a more flexible, analytically rigorous curriculum tomorrow. Booth cannot move to New York, nor is New York City going to be deemed irrelevant in the next few years. New York has survived the Great Depression, the Great Recession, a couple of world wars, a massive terrorist attack on it's financial center, an almost bankruptcy, and is still the business center of the world. I'm relatively confident that a new mayor isn't going to sink Manhattan.

I feel like I'm knocking Booth constantly here, which is not the goal. I just think this strange, blind promotion of one school while knocking another school, BOTH OF WHICH ARE VERY GOOD, makes no sense. And yes, this is why half this board thinks your Brady (because no one else thinks CBS relies on its "Ivy League Prestige" to be a good school).

 

[quote=BGP2587]

It also baffles me that you consider New York this temporary, weak thing. I cannot possibly see how New York City is a foundation of "sand", but a flexible, analytical curriculum is a foundation of stone? Columbia could adopt a more flexible, analytically rigorous curriculum tomorrow. Booth cannot move to New York, nor is New York City going to be deemed irrelevant in the next few years. New York has survived the Great Depression, the Great Recession, a couple of world wars, a massive terrorist attack on it's financial center, an almost bankruptcy, and is still the business center of the world. I'm relatively confident that a new mayor isn't going to sink Manhattan.

Agreed.

 

@mbavsmfin why do you always have such ridiculous posts about prestige. It is literally splitting hairs between any of the schools you mentioned. In my opinion not one is better than the other, just personal preference.

Now if you wanna get down to facts look at the employment reports of both Columbia and Booth. They are identical. There is virtually no difference into the placements within finance and more specifically subsets within finance IB/AM/HF/PE/VC/ER. Both schools have MBB as the top 3 hires. Either school will get a person the exact same job with the exact same likelihood - its that what really matters?

No one that is doing hiring blinks an eye on whether or not someone went to Columbia vs. Booth (or other top schools for that matter). Frankly just by proximity, CBS might get better looks in to AM/HF due to its location. As much as people might have tried to be dismissive of that fact, nevertheless it is a fact. Again back to person preference, look where people end up after school at Booth 184 graduates in Chicago vs. 129 in NYC+BOS.

At the end of the day none of this matters, stop worrying about such silly things and just live life.

 

Here are the 2013 salary statistic - they're much better than I expected.

http://www7.gsb.columbia.edu/recruiters/employmentreport

He names that jump out to me include: Apollo, Appaloosa, Artisan Partners, BackRock, Backstone, Citadel, Fidelity, Gabelli, Goldman Sachs, GMO, Institutional Capital, Oaktree, Owl Creek, Perry Capital, PIMCO, SAC (rofl), Stanford Bernstein, Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe, and William Blair

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/_KarateBoy_
 

I believe the reason that Booth is considered quantitative is because the professors take a quantitative approach to teaching pretty much everything. A lot of the class material is rooted in economics. I don't have a great comparison to other schools, but I'd wager there is a much heavier math component to a Booth class than an Ohio State one. Another thing to keep in mind is how fast the professor moves through the material. There is no "defined MBA content" for each class at each school. The professors just design the course however they want. Booth professors are not shy about covering a lot of material over the 10 week quarters. Of course, not every student wants to put in the effort and chooses to focus on other things during their MBA (such as getting a job), but that flexibility is really given to each individual student.

Anyways, that's why I think Booth has a reputation as being more quantitative and rigorous than its peers.

CompBanker’s Career Guidance Services: https://www.rossettiadvisors.com/
 

I don't think there's any question that certain b-schools, particulary Booth and Sloan, are more quantitative and rigorous than other schools. Not much of a surprise to anyone that these two schools are especially quantitative. However, going back to OPs point, I don't think quantitative rigor makes any difference in rankings. HBS is certainly less quantitative overall, yet is clearly above the two schools mentioned above, and not getting passed anytime soon.

In my opinion, quantitative rigor is a bonus, and potentially an important factor for applicants deciding between schools, but does not make one school better than another in terms of "prestige" (the topic of discussion in the original post).

 

I concur that quantitative rigor is not necessarily a direct proxy for prestige. For example, HBS is surely less quanty than Tepper, but enjoys a better reputation nonetheless. That said, I think a school like Sloan or Booth should certainly appeal to someone who wants to build or improve upon their quant chops before returning to the work force.

 

I don't disagree with you CompBanker that the level of discussion/pace at Booth is more ambitious than at Ohio State. But I would guess the material in the lectures is probably the same.

I would be surprised if calculus is used in any MBA program. I could be wrong, but it seems the focus in finance classes is on CAPM for WACC in a DCF and maybe an introduction to Black-Scholes.

I don't know this stuff that well but my sense is that finance at the PhD level is based on stochastic calculus which requires a very strong foundation in probability, also at the grad level (e.g. Lp spaces, product measures, Radon-Nikodym, limit theorems.) The jump to doing graduate work in econ and finance is so high that faculty are resigned to teaching MBAs at the same level as undergrads.

 

I agree that a Phd level course in finance/economics is certainly more rigorous than MBA classes. Having said that, I think Booth is different from almost every other b-school (except MIT Sloan) in that the upper-level MBA finance courses are very rigorous. Examples include Cochrane's "Advanced Investments," which has kicked the butt of several very smart people I know. Even their microeconomics course can be super rigorous if you take the turbo version with Macarthur genius grant winner Kevin Murphy. Booth's rigor is unparalleled in the MBA world, and for jobs that require technical depth such as fixed income research, portfolio management, derivatives trading, etc., Booth is extremely respected and does a great job of preparing their students for the interviews.

 

I took Cochrane's class... it was extremely hard and also the class where I learned the most. I'll put it this way, you can be as "quant" as you'd like at Booth, there's really no upper bound. I had a physics background and a CFA and was still challenged by several of the more mathematically intensive classes. The vast majority of the MBA students however are so busy/distracted recruiting and just generally having a good time, that they'd rather not bother with too much "analytical rigor". Certainly this is true by 2nd year.

 

I think each MBA has its strength holla_back explained it very well. I have lived in Chicago and in NY and know a lot of people who go/have gone there, they all love it but the program is very Chicago centric. Don't get me wrong, it places a ton of people in IB, consutling and Asset Management all over the country. But I think that if you want to be in tech, or an entrepreneur, Stanford and MIT are way better. If you want to work at a value hedge fund, Columbia and Wharton are much better due to their alumni base and proximity to NY. There are a lot of hedge funds in Chicago, but only a few actively recruit. Citadel, Balyasny JHL, Peak6 Advisors and perhaps Alyeska.

Bottom line is that Booth has not surpassed Columbia, Sloan and Kellogg. To me they're all of equal rating and each one is better that the other in specific areas.

 

AQR Capital Management is an investment management firm founded in 1998 by former Goldman Sachs portfolio manager Clifford S. Asness along with partners David Kabiller, John Liew and Robert Krail (all also from Goldman).

[Asness] graduated from the Management & Technology program with dual degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Thereafter, he entered the finance PhD program at the University of Chicago and became the research assistant to Eugene Fama, an influential efficient market theorist and empiricist.

AQR recruits from Booth, but not Columbia... Hmmm, it's difficult to see why that is.

Booth has done all those great things with $300million. "Columbia has also raised massive amounts of money in recent years, including $500 million toward the $600 million cost for the school’s new Manhattanville campus which is not expected to open until early 2018."

I also invite you to look at the composition of undergraduate institutions at the two: Columbia: http://poetsandquants.com/2011/09/07/top-feeder-schools-to-columbia-bus… Booth: http://poetsandquants.com/2011/10/06/top-feeder-colleges-to-chicago-boo…

I am not arguing one is better than the other, only looking to really destroy the idea that Booth is lightyears ahead of Columbia. Both are top programs, and at the end of the day, it comes down to what you're looking for in a program AND how you connect with current and future students. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who finds it easy to make a decision between the two schools...

 

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