More state school kids on Wall Street
i've noticed an increase of kids from state schools working on Wall Street compared to the top 15/20 schools the past 5/6 years. is this a trend anyone else noticed? why aren't kids from HYP not wanting to work on Wall Street?
HYP are busy saving the world from global warming obviously, come on bro.
Or working as "community organizers."
They're not smart enough. State school kids are the cream of the crop.
America wanna see me live, not work. Look at this America, look at how Tron is livin' in the city.
hahaha awesome
^ nice
Yeah, you know JPMorgan actually started recruiting CUNY Baruch kids for their back office jobs a few years ago.
The fact is that state schools are bigger than the private schools. Harvard graduates 1700 students every year; Wisconsin graduates 10,000. The average student at Harvard might be smarter than the average student at Wisconsin, but the top 0.5% at Wisconsin might just be smarter than the top 2.9% at Harvard.
Why is that?
-Wisconsin has more programs that Harvard. Frankly, Harvard doesn't do all that great in Engineering and they don't have a finance program.
-Wisconsin is cheaper than Harvard- particularly for residents of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and other states that participate in Wisconsin's reciprocal in-state tuition program. A lot of kids can get into Harvard but can't afford to go, despite not qualifying for financial aid. (Some of my classmates at Illinois were in that camp with MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc.) UW Madison and Michigan get large numbers of those kids because they really have nowhere else to go.
-Wisconsin is closer to home that Harvard. Let's face it; a lot of kids can't survive in a culturally Northeastern environment straight out of HS. They grew up on a 40-acre farm in Iowa and need a compromise between that culture and the northeastern private school culture. State schools (along with a few competitive Christian schools like Hope, Calvin, and Notre Dame) provide a good compromise by having a strong focus on truth and intellectual honesty while still being willing to acknowledge traditional values.
-State schools have bigger research programs and many of the technical disciplines simply require bigger programs to do some of the coolest research. Brown doesn't have a nuclear reactor. Indiana does. Guess which school has a better nuclear engineering program? Illinois has the NCSA and three supercomputers. Princeton (though an excellent CS program) doesn't. Guess which school does better in the rankings? (Sorry, Princeton, it's just not fair- we get to cheat with the NCSA.)
A lot of programs require a critical mass of students, researchers, and professors- often 1000 students and 50 professors in a single program over four years. You simply can't get that at a small school like Harvard where a program might have 100-200 students over four years and ten professors.
By most measures, large state schools recruit just as many of the most intelligent students as the Ivies. When I went to Illinois, ten students who were attending had perfect SAT scores, representing 2% of the country's 1600s. We had 100 HS valedictorians (albeit mostly from smaller schools downstate.) And we had some of the best basketball players in the country. :D The average student wasn't smarter than the average student at Harvard, but the top fifty students probably gave the top fifty at Harvard a run for their money- and 2/3 of them probably thought that $80K/year was A LOT of money. The same story plays out- just with slightly different situations, at a lot of other flagship state schools.
So if you're a bank and you know that a kid from Georgia Tech might be just as smart or almost as smart as a kid from Harvard, but he's going to give you an hour a week for every $1K you pay him since he thinks his time is worth no more than $20/hour, wouldn't you want to hire him? Isn't he a better value? And besides that, you're not going to be able to get the top 3% from Harvard anyway- they're all going to hedge funds.
To the OP, was this a serious question? WTF?!
It's because of the law of averages. Top 15 State Schools graduate like 250,000 students a year. Top 15 private schools maybe 25,000. There's like 10 x's more students. Like above poster stated, the top 1-2% at State Schools are also highly intelligent and can succeed just as well. No offense, but the premise of the question was pretty retarded.
The bigger questions becomes, of the 250,000 state school graduates how many apply and most important what is acceptance rate. The actual number doesn't really matter. But the percentage of "making it" into banks is the because the main driving force.
The banks are just more open to sourcing talent from different schools. They tried out some state school kids, found they did well, and went back for more. Simple as that.
Plus, "state school kids" is far too broad of a bucket to categorize people into. The talent pool at "state schools" like Michigan, UC Berkeley, Virginia, UNC, Texas, and UCLA is much closer to the Ivy League than it is to, say, SEC schools or crappy public schools in the northeast.
We don't use the term "private school kids" and then lump in schools like the University of Miami, Bob Jones University, and the University of Phoenix with the Harvards and Stanfords of the world.
That said, the Big Ten, ACC, and the Pac Ten have a number of programs that blow many Ivy Leagues out of the water, while other schools are just reasonable state schools. All of them have smart people who would do well in investment banking,
UVA: 13,617 students Cal: 25,530 students Michigan: 26,208 students
Total: 65,355 students
Total from all Ivy Leagues: 59,206 students
Good catch, I meant to say "most" SEC schools. Every public school, especially those that are the flagship public university of their respective state, are going to have talented students. I was speaking more to the average students at the top public schools, who are much closer to your average Ivy League student than to your average (non-Vandy and, to a lesser extent, Florida) SEC or SUNY student.
Illinprogrammer is the biggest troll for state schools hahahah.
Oh, of course- I would prefer to frame it as "salesman" rather than "troll". But I wouldn't troll for them if I didn't believe the state school I went to prepared me just as well or even better for success at a bank than if I had gone the private school route. You don't have access to the nuclear test reactor as an engineering undergrad at Yale . Harvard doesn't offer a graduate level algorithms course to undergrads. As far as I know, most of the Ivies (except maybe Cornell) don't let you work on projects for developing surround 3-D applications on facilities only the NCSA can provide. And NONE of the private schools teach you to fend for yourself- or teach you how the real world behaves- as well as the public schools do. Freshman year is literally sink-or-swim, and you go from living with your parents to dealing with professors who don't give a &@%* if you drown- even if it's because of a problem THEY'RE responsible for. Definitely a good way to build mental toughness.
Everybody has their own experience, and maybe it's just that mine is wildly different than many others' on this board.
well
what weighs more? a million pounds of lead or a million pounds of feathers?
smart kids at state schools are just as smart as smart kids at ivies.
also, the quality "gap" between the top state schools and the ivies isn't that significant.
And NONE of the private schools teach you to fend for yourself- or teach you how the real world behaves- as much as the public schools do. Freshman year is literally sink-or-swim, and you go from living with your parents to dealing with professors who don't give a &@%* if you drown- even if it's because of a problem THEY'RE responsible for. Definitely a good way to build mental toughness.
I literally lol'd when I read that. That statement can be turned around so easily. You come off like you have a huge chip on your shoulder and need to tell others why a state school is just as good if not better.
I got into a number of private schools so I don't think I have much of a chip on my shoulder, but ultimately, my thrifty Dad wanted me to go to Illinois. When I got there, it was worlds apart from where I grew up. People thought I was filthy rich because I owned a 5-year-old Mustang. I went from a nice bedroom of my own to sharing a cinder-block dorm room with a born-again Christian from Peoria. Half the kids couldn't afford to get lunch at the fast food joints on campus, let alone any kind of car. And I realized that that's what life is like for middle America- and the life I enjoyed growing up on the North Shore of Chicago was something more like 18 seasons of The OC than real life.
For someone with my background, public school was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I had gone straight from an upper-middle-class suburb to private school to an investment bank, I never would have seen how the other 99% of the country operated.
lol, that's pretty funny. i grew up in the same area as you- which suburb were you?
i had no idea that the UI kids weren't well off- i have several friends who attended wisconsin and from my experiences there everyone at Wisconsin was either 1)from an affluent north shore Chicago suburb (Lake Forest, Libertyville, Barrington) 2)from an affluent Minneapolis Suburb (Edina, Eden Prarie), from an affluent Milwaukee suburb (Mequon, Whitefish Bay) or from an affluent East Coast location (Chevy Chase MD, Rye NY). Of course, my friends were in the UW Greek System and never associated with the townies so who knows.
Lol, even my shitty non-target has a nuclear lab :)
I agree with IlliniProgrammer. I am from low middle class and at my state school I've never met an extremely wealthy people. Upper middle class? Yes. Wealthy? No. Most of top kids @ state schools come from not-so-wealthy background.
When I hear everyone complaining about the Volcker Rule, I can only imagine what my old roommate Justin would have thought about all of this. He probably would say something like, "Let me get this straight. My taxes are probably going to go up because a bunch of bankers screwed up, we're bailing them out, and now they want to keep taking the same risks with taxpayer insured money so they can keep getting a bonus that's ten times or more what my parents make???!!!"
There's a lot of pros and cons to going to a private school, but one of the pros is that you understand how most of America thinks; how the rest of America defines "fair."
Who cares where they come from? If they are talented, work hard, and prove themselves the rest is history.
Getting into IB from state school is no easy feat so give these kids credit for having the motivation to learn, deal with rejection, and push forward.
The top 2% at a majority of these schools will put out very talented students who will have the knowledge base and skill-sets to succeed in IB, if they have the drive to get in.
Hey ERWE422: I am from Peoria and went to U of I; however, I am not a born-again Christian so I guess we weren't roommates. Growing up in middle America is humbling and Big Ten Universities aren't chump change. However, I had classmates that went East to continue their education but they had money and also had the pressure from their parents that an Ivy League school was their only choice. Do the terms legacy and money mean anything?
What's your point? It seems to me that you're trying to strawman.
1.) You have been in situations where you can't afford to eat at Subway because $5 is too much money to spend on lunch. 2.) You had a job that paid $10/hour and thought it was a lot of money to be making. 3.) You choose to drive at 65 mph rather than 75 because it will save you $7 in gas on a three hour trip.
When you've been in that situation and you get to a bank like JPM, Morgan Stanley, or Lazard and find out you might be earning more than $25/hour after all is said and done, YOU WORK YOUR BUTT OFF.
When bankers are complaining about the Volcker Rule, you cringe, because you know how Middle America actually sees it.
When you go somewhere new and need to make friends, worst comes to worst, you can make friends with the lady at the checkout counter. You know how to make for a fun conversation with her.
And when you meet someone who had the same kind of experience as you at an investment bank, you quickly become friends. Us humbled folks have our own sort of fraternity. :D
I went to Syracuse and there were plenty of very wealthy people to say the least. I think there are smart people all over the place.
Reason why it is easier to get into banking at an Ivy than somewhere else is because banks are lazy. If you got into an Ivy league school then you probably meet the minimum bar at an IB. It is simple as that. Plenty of smart kids at all schools, but if you are coming from U of F then the bank actually has to get off their ass and do a little due diligence.
Why do people by bands? Because in a world with so many choices it is easier to identify a brand with quality. Simplifies life. There is a term for this which alludes me now, but it is a well known concept.
What it comes down to is you personally can get the same education anywhere as you could at an Ivy league school if you apply yourself (and this is, obviously, in relation to your intellectual capacity). The differences are as follows:
1) Ivy League schools, and T-25 in general have better networks. While they undoubtedly offer an amazing education and have amazing faculties, their age and brand-recognition is far greater than just about any other school. Their better networks come from having been better for longer and having been known for longer.
2) Of the top 1% of graduating high school seniors, the majority of them will go Ivy if they have the economic ability to. The Ivy's tend to provide for those that are going to struggle financially. However, some of the smart ones slip through the cracks when they only get 20k of the 40k tuition covered.
3) Preference. Some people just want the location/like the campus/whatever. If you're a genius and you like U of Michigan more than Harvard, you might go to U of Michigan. Being a genius it really isn't going to hurt you, especially when you graduate with a triple major and a 4.0 gpa.
I had more points, but meh. Really none of this shit matters a year after you're out of school and in the workplace, as long as you're doing a good job. As far as getting to that point, if you aren't a genius, work your ass off and you will find yourself there. Anyone will take a hard worker with an IQ of 110 over a lazy ass with an IQ of 125 any day. If you're not a hard worker and just had this realization that you did the absolute minimum possible to get a 3.4, but you REALLY REALLY REALLY want to make a lot of money in IB, you're either screwed now or in two months when you're fired for being worthless.
/ramble
Not consistent with my experience. Once I attended an Ivy, my network of Economics contacts broadened, and more doors opened than with my state school background.
I noted that the Ivy Leagues have better networks :p
I'm not going to respond to every single one of IlliniProgrammer's points. I agree with him that top students at state schools are quite bright, and i'm sure a few of them have turned down schools like harvard, princeton, MIT, yale, stanford, for financial and/or cultural reasons. For me personally, I grew up in a suburb in the south, and really wanted the ivy league experience. I wanted to explore a different part of the country, meet people who had different experiences from me, and wanted to be around really smart people. I can see why someone who grew up in a small town in iowa or indiana might not want to go to an ivy because they just won't feel as comfortable. Ultimately it comes down to what you prefer. Having said that, I personally think going to an ivy can be very rewarding and offer advantages that a state school may not be able to provide.
Private school kids tend to get beat up in Brooklyn.
-burrrrn
As someone said, there is a difference between Cal/UVA/Michigan and University of Alabama/New Jersey Institute of Technology. We don't put Harvard/Stanford/Wharton in same category with Marquette University/Stevens Institute of Technology.
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