Why does school matter?
How much does being at a target school help? Is it name recognition or is it OCR? What is OCR and how helpful it is?
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Target and non-target students have the same 100m race to fun. Say the finish line is IB. They have the same legs and talents (work ethic, skills, etc.), but the target students start the race at the 50m mark. Half way there.
By that I mean both people can get to the finish line. However, it'll be easier, more streamlined process for the target student.
Race to run* hate to see it.
Banking and finance in general is very relationship based. Relationships are formed best in person. Banking is a relatively small industry, so they'll send out their recruiting team to the top schools because they simply don’t have the resources to go everywhere. Once a school reaches critical mass at a certain bank, those bankers will want to get even more rep from their school, and thus the cycle continues.
That's also why certain schools can snowball at certain banks. For example, my school is kinda doing that with DB from just one alum being high up there.
Same with Illinois and Blair. When you have one high up alum who wants to help it can be a game changer for students
Yup, but at the same time that’s where the catch is. An alumnus who feels they owe their success to their school will go out of their way to give back to said school. An alumnus who feels they where successful in spite of their school won’t care at all at best and may even hold a grudge
Guessing you're from Washington & Lee?
nah
From recruiting's perspective: they only have so many people who can review so many resumes or interview so many candidates. This resource constraint forces them to focus the majority of their efforts on schools where they are both likely to have interested students as well as recruit the best students possible. Inevitably, these are the top schools in the country.
OCR = on campus recruiting. Banks will send representatives to a school to conduct recruiting events and first round interviews. If a bank participates formally in an OCR process, that means your school is a target for that bank (though the level of "target status" does vary depending on how many interview slots there actually are - there are gonna be more slots for the top schools and fewer for the lesser ranked schools).
What this all means is that, for the purposes of banking/consulting recruiting, you want to index into prestige and ranking as much as possible, with a secondary consideration for how many alumni are at the banks you want to work at (e.g. JHU is a top school but has biotech/medical slant in its alumni, not so much banking or consulting, though the overall prestige of the school is still helpful for recruiting purposes). Note: if you are still in high school, please do NOT choose a school solely on how well it places into these industries. You should consider a variety of other factors as well (cultural fit, location, academic opportunities, etc)
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