Rutgers NB Honors College vs UIUC

UIUC places about 10-20% of its finance majors into FO IBD, S&T, or ER roles. (I am including some Chicago prop shop roles in this, however).

In CS and ECE, something more like the top 30% of the program can get placed into Chicago prop shops. And the top 60% can land somewhere nice in tech (IE Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, etc). Remember, UIUC (along with Berkeley, UT Austin, Virginia Tech, and Georgia Tech) outranks most ivies in CS and Engineering. To be sure, TMG, Wolverine, Jump, Citadel, XR, etc will also hire a lot of kids from MIT and Stanford and the like, but UIUC wins on proximity. So in a sense, UIUC is to the Chicago prop shops and algorithmic trading firms what NYU or Columbia is to Wall Street. An excellent school that's a short distance away. And the Chicago prop shops generally pay better than Wall Street. And landing at a good prop shop is a bit like landing on the buyside straight out of undergrad. Some of them-- like Jump, Sun, Spot, and Getco-- carry the same branding as the buyside and some firms like Citadel are actually the buyside (and before you ask, HFT and algorithmic trading aren't exactly back office IT).

UIUC is a little bit easier to get into than Princeton, but it's a little bit harder to graduate from. This is just my opinion, but having attended both schools, the juniors and seniors in Engineering at UIUC are at parity with the engineers at Princeton (the same can probably be said of the other ~top 5-10 state school engineering programs).

And UIUC's finance and accounting programs are both excellent. I wouldn't quite rank the finance program up with Wharton (which to be sure treats finance like an engineering degree while UIUC doesn't), but UIUC's Accy program clearly deserves its ranking next to Wharton's Accy program, at least on CPA exam pass rates and placements within the accounting industry. It is ranked as one of the best in the country, and gives you with a route to the Big Four as a safety net with some options for IBD or Research (though fewer than Wharton Accy to be sure). Be sure to check out Business Honors, the Investment Banking Academy, and the Chancellor's Scholarship. Also be sure to check out the business fraternities and the technology and management minor.

Again, my bias is towards engineering which is what I'd honestly like to steer a UIUC student who's really serious about landing on the sellside or buyside towards, but business majors at UIUC have a lot more fun than Engineers. To be sure you get that with Rutgers, too. But I think that in terms of placements, rankings, and most importantly first job outcomes, UIUC Engineering stochastically dominates Rutgers Engineering, and UIUC Accounting stochastically dominates Rutgers business. Rutgers is an excellent school, but the Midwest just has a different approach to both funding and hiring from flagship state schools than the Northeast.

If you're OK with landing in Chicago or Minneapolis and not NYC, go with UIUC. It's one of those weird schools that's in the same league as Rutgers (literally) but is also, at least in some majors, in the same league as Princeton or Columbia or Cornell.

If Rutgers is in-state but UIUC isn't, we should talk more. Maybe the best choice is Rutgers for $80K over four years rather than UIUC for $200K over four years. But if the price is the same, for my money, I'd choose UIUC. On a good day, for a good student and networker, in the College of Business or the College of Engineering, UIUC (or UW Madison or UMich or UC Berkeley) is basically a Cornell for the price of a Rutgers.