Stanford undergrad

It might not be as recruited for NYC offices due to its location, but the brand is stellar everywhere. Network with the right people and Stanford is only an extremely large plus on your resume.

People tend to have a bias against Stanford kids because they have trouble with the fact that they have to start at the bottom of the pile.

Stanford is far away. It takes as long to fly from NY to SFO as it does to fly to Heathrow. Stanford is also somewhat isolated... it's not VERY close to other BIG draw names. Berkeley is an hour drive (which probably means renting cars and staying overnight because you'd struggle to hit Stanford and Berkeley in the same day). UCLA requires a flight. Compare this to Harvard/MIT (5-10 minute cab from each other). Compare this to Columbia/NYU (5-10 minute cab FROM THE OFFICE).

In a nutshell, ceteris paribus, I hypothesize that if you were to move UPENN and Princeton to the California bay area, that Stanford's numbers would go way up.

as dosk and bluefinancer touched upon, a lot of folks from stanford end up going to start-ups or entrepreneurial roles. that said, there are still a lot of students that want to get into banking or consulting, and students that go for that route fare as well as anyone else out there. bluefinancer went into some pretty good details above (and also knows how to make the most of his stanford experience) but the point is, even if you don't take all of those econ and ms&e classes or participate in business organizations, you'd have to be silly to think that coming from stanford puts you at any less of an advantage than the other elite schools (aside from the long flights you'll have to endure if you're traveling to new york for final rounds). one thing that you can always be sure about is when you interview for your next job following your initial two-year foray into finance, you can be absolutely certain that your potential employer has the "prestige" box checked off next to your name even well before you walk into that interview room. and that's pretty awesome if you ask me.

I don't know where the posters here are getting their information, but I was a summer analyst at MS this past year, and Stanford sent the second largest amount of kids (12, compared to Harvard's 15). Stanford sent far more than Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Dartmouth, and Cornell, which were all represented by between four and six people, and even Wharton, which sent eight.

Stanford places a ton of people in IB in NYC, and also in IB in SF/LA. I don't think most of the people posting here have any experience with the university. It's a major target, every single bank recruits heavily from the undergrad population.

The thing is over 50% of Stanford students are from California and want so stay in California, so obviously that lowers the Wall Street numbers. Also, more students are interested in entrepreneurship/technology than in finance. But the ones who want to go to finance generally do, it's far easier than at a lot of other universities to be honest.

They recruit extremely well here, however a couple banks like Lazard only recruit for LA offices. However it is possible to apply and secure NYC positions upon asking (my friend went to Lazard NYC even though summer analyst recruitment was for LA)