PM me your Placement #s

In response to what seems like an endless cyclical influx of high school kids who can’t tell their asses from a hole in the ground asking what school they should attend/transfer to, I think there may be a solution.

Everyday there’s a couple dozen discussions asking people to compare schools, and it usually prompts arguments, arbitrary labeling (non/semi/target), and sometimes awful advice.

U.S. News and Bloomberg rankings don’t necessarily take into account what 90% of these kids are looking for – IBD placement.

Why not create a database that sorts schools by number of juniors it places in summer analyst positions in IBD starting with Summer 2014? I say junior year placement, because sophomore internships are usually obtained through the individual’s effort (no ocr), and Senior FT placement is determined by one’s performance during the SA stint. Surely with a userbase this size, there's enough students/alumni to represent each top school and provide clean data.

Is this a good way to keep this site from becoming the next College Confidential and stop diluting the useful content?

** If you actually want these rankings to come out, PM me your school's placement, and any other data you may have from other schools.

 

I think this is a great idea and something we have the data to work with. Over the next few months, we are actually going to start releasing a lot of "WSO Community Rankings" based off of the data we have collected in the WSO Company Database. I don't, however, think this will reduce the bickering / arguments. :-)

When you say "IBD", I assume you're referring just to front office positions? In our WSO Company Database, we are already showing the "Top Undergrad Schools" by Company (ie, which schools they recruit at the most)...we haven't cut that by "IBD" / non-IBD and we could cut things a lot of ways, but right now it's just company specific...

We're working on a lot of different initiatives to make the Company Database even more useful, including football field compensation charts by Company based on title, group, etc...I wish we could do all of these more refined cuts as well right away, but it takes some time given our web development team and budget.

But yes, it's coming...

Thanks, Patrick

 

@wallstreetoasis.com

Good to hear - I think Bankerella made a good attempt at taking a decent sample of bankers she interacts with, but like this, it's just a sample. I like how your database will show the breakdown of where they go, but I'm talking about a very specific and accurate list that shows exact junior placement in FO IBD... including product & coverage group numbers, because from what I've gathered, that's what most of these kids come on this site looking for.

I, for example, can tell you the exact number of kids who got internships for 2014 at my alma, because of our close knit Wall Street network. I know there must be at least a few at each of these schools with that inside info.

 

yes, good point...I think with some work we'd be able to back into that data by looking at our company reviews and compensation data (= they actually worked there) and then looking at year, group and school. What % we are getting year to year is hard to say (10-20%?), but it might be a good cross-section and tell us some data, but not everything (right now, we also have % of interns getting ft offers which I feel is a valuable stat).

I think many of the questions in the forums can be answered by the data in the WSO Company Database, we just have to get better at #1 pulling that data out and #2 directing new / young users to use it. Just like search, it likely gets underutilized. :-)

Will definitely give this some thought...

 

I like it. Like you said, there's quite a bit more transparency which is what makes the MBA business schools ">M7 so apparent, but it would be very interesting to see how the top 30 schools stack up.

 

Solid post. It just baffles me that's it's taken this long to even think about quantifying someone's chances at breaking in to Wall Street with a comprehensive placement list.

You'd think of all people... the finance nerds would want to gather, clean, analyze, and present data for their schools.

 

People make it to banking from those places, because they are very affluent, intelligent, well-connected, and in prime location.

That's an extremely small demographic, but the data will show that they have great placement. It's a matter of going to the best school you can get into with the best placement. Combine that with the college experience you're looking for, and there shouldn't be much discussion as to which is better - you have to make that decision yourself.

You have to look at the size of the school as well.

 

Very good idea. There was a similar thread not too long ago, should be a good starting point. May be a very nice addition to the information already accumulated on WSO.

I'm talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, buddy. A player. Or nothing. See my Blog & AMA
 

Great idea. However, I think many people don't know they want to do IBD until they get into college and hear about it from their peers. I know when I first heard the term "I-Banking" I thought it meant "internet banking."

 

Without knowing how many kids at each school applied for the positions given out, the data would be pretty much useless. Not to mention OCR vs non-OCR distinction. If 3 kids get offers at some random bumblefuck school, and 30 kids were interested in investment baking (but you don't know that), and all three obtained their offers through networking efforts since OCR is non-existent, I'm not sure what you really get out of that data. Which is why the arguments will always be there.

 
gjk:

I somewhat disagree with this idea, if only because it could be very misleading. If two identical candidates go to different schools, then I'm not sure that their placement would be that different. What you're really doing is ranking schools by how smart or polished their students are, and I see less utility in that.

I absolutely disagree with your statement. Sure, a student that got into both Yale and Princeton will likely have pretty much the same chances coming out of either school, but most of the time it's not that simple. Going from a non-target to a target or even semi-target will make a HUGE difference. Consider University of Illinois vs. Indiana Kelley. An outsider (i.e. MOST high school seniors) would consider these peer schools - they are ranked similarly, etc. But Illinois rarely sends kids into Wall Street whereas Kelley sends a very solid amount through their investment banking workshop club. Identical students will have vastly different prospects.

Also, consider a school like Stern. They get POOR consulting recruiting but great banking recruiting. They don't get bad consulting recruiting because their students aren't smart or unpolished, but more because the students there have been more interested in banking than consulting in the past so MBB don't recruit there as hard (I believe McKinsey doesn't even recruit on-campus, unless it's changed). I'd say the opposite is true about Northwestern (much better consulting recruiting than what they get for banking). Again, identical students would have different prospects.

 

It'd be very difficult to actually get accurate numbers for something like this. Getting the numbers through self-reporting through the database would be pretty biased/inaccurate (especially since I know some people that made up data so they could access the database). And getting the numbers through employment reports via different school career centers wouldn't really work either since a lot of schools bunch up investment banking with other positions (i.e. they may say 15 are going to JPM but don't go further in depth in terms of how many in IB, how many in operations, etc..)

 
Best Response

Here's the elephant in the room. If you are 19 and interested in investment banking then there is a decent chance to get into that career field out of Texas - San Antonio. The reality is, the benefit of going to a prestigious university is that you can be a senior in college, an art history major, and not even know what investment banking is and break into the field if you decide that's the way you want to go. Very few people who are 18 or 19 years old who are actively pursuing Wall Street-type jobs won't be able to break in with such gigantic lead time for getting internships, networking, taking the right major, performing well, joining finance clubs, and impressing professors.

Whether you attend UVA or Ohio State, if you know at the age of 18 or 19 that you want to get into investment banking then you can do it by being proactive. Most top 100 universities produce at least a half a dozen high finance candidates each year. If you're on WSO asking about which undergraduate program to attend to break into finance then you're already 95% there.

 

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