The REAL REASON why Columbia has less recruits than Harvard. GOOD STUFF HERE.

IlliniProgrammer

jjc1122columbia is a great school. They have gotten insanely selective and only lag harvard,princeton,stanford,yale, when it comes to selectivity. Most people who go there turn down the second-tier ivies and some of them even turn down yale and stanford (very few say no to harvard and princeton). Having said that however, columbia is a tier below the other elite schools when it comes to finance recruiting. It does very well in law school and grad placement though.

The truth about Columbia is that it's impossible to get in unless you make every effort to look like a brainwashed Columbia zealot. Columbia- and actually, MIT, have this sort of inferiority complex about getting turned down by students and make every effort to ensure that an acceptance will translate into an admission. This also helps prop up their rankings, since most rankings formulas look for acceptance-admission conversion ratios. I am still waiting for a personality cult to form sort of like what you see at a firm whose name rhymes with Quitadel.

In other words, somebody with a 680 GMAT can probably get in if they show up in NYC every week, mail in poems about how they want to go to Columbia, and go to all of the Football games. Columbia will accept that person and reject someone with a 740 GMAT who got into HBS because the guy who got into HBS won't convert into an admission.

It's a great school that competes well with any MBA program (including HBS), but comparisons get awkward if the school is subtly trying to play the rankings game. In any case, if you want to work at a BB in NYC, a Columbia MBA is a perfectly good degree- particularly for research or IBD.

As a liberal arts students, my parents would not allow me to apply to UPenn, their argument was that it was "below me". I did not understand that at the time, but I do now. The Wharton undergrads are a pretty smart group, the UPenn undergrads are the kids who could not get into another Ivy or the Wharton program.

Your post is a perfectly good example of the foolish elitism that tends to evaporate when the people who survive hit the street. Some of the smartest kids in my analyst class- which included folks from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, etc, were from non-Wharton UPenn.

Wharton's a strong program, but there are smart people everywhere. Sometimes, people who aren't smart enough to recognize other intelligent people have difficulty understanding this concept.

Yeah, I agree with this. Columbia is obsessed with their yield, and applicants have to show that they REALLY want to go there. This is especially true for the business school. It's a great school though, and I have nothing bad to say about it.

I had no idea citadel was cultish. But due to the difficulty of getting in, prestige, and high pay, I guess it's understandable why the employees there feel that way.

B-School BoundAs a liberal arts students, my parents would not allow me to apply to UPenn, their argument was that it was "below me". I did not understand that at the time, but I do now. The Wharton undergrads are a pretty smart group, the UPenn undergrads are the kids who could not get into another Ivy or the Wharton program.

Plenty of non-wharton upenn kids had other ivy options. Granted, they didn't get into harvard, princeton, yale, but that holds true for the rest of the non-HYP ivies.

B-School BoundAs a liberal arts students, my parents would not allow me to apply to UPenn, their argument was that it was "below me". I did not understand that at the time, but I do now. The Wharton undergrads are a pretty smart group, the UPenn undergrads are the kids who could not get into another Ivy or the Wharton program.

I don't think it was necessarily that they don't think UPenn is a good school (though this is probably just my own bias). In my experience, Wharton is basically a trade school; I met parents from there who bemoaned how their formerly intelligent children could do nothing except for recite accounting after spending $200k to send them there, and I know top CEOs and fund managers who really dislike the idea of narrowly focused undergraduate business degrees. Now, I know kids from there who have genuine personalities and mutli-faceted intelligences and knowledge bases, but I think that is because they are that way intrinsically, not because of anything Wharton did.

I realise this is not directly related to the OP, and that the thread has already gotten side-tracked enough (with jjc's ridiculous implicit suggestion that you should want to work at Citadel, even if you know you won't like the place, because it's really prestigious), but to bring this post back on point, I think the sort of focus on banking you see at Wharton is emblematic of the sort of viewpoint the OP and some others are espousing. Who cares that kids at your school don't want to do banking (or law, or consulting, or something professional)? Are you really going to look down on them become of that? That's just a ridiculously normative and judgemental opinion on your part. Are the Columbia students who don't want to go in the corporate world somehow "not as good" because of this? This reflects the same sort of judgement that the people who look down on bankers, simply for being bankers, are making. Please, try to think objectively, rather than using your own life choices as a self-reinforcing validation mechanism.

PussInBoots

alwayshere86 Columbia actually has a large role in wall st. Shit, if you look at blackstone, they only recruit from harvard, upenn and columbia. I think that says something in itself.

Lol Blackstone recruits at Cal and a number of other schools as well :)

correction, you're right, there are a few more. I just only remembered the ivies.

sorry about that.