Why HSW and not HCW?

Hi guys,

a couple of comments.

To Johnny Cage: a vanilla investment banking job is one of the easier ones to get if you're attending a top 10-15 business school. The four powerhouses of sell-side finance are Wharton, Chicago, Columbia and NYU Stern. However, you're perfectly likely to get interviews coming out of MIT Sloan, Northwestern Kellogg, Cornell Johnson, Tuck at Dartmouth, UVA Darden, UMichigan Ross, etc. As Buyside CFA and Cartwright mentioned, people at Stanford are much, much more interested in private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and investment management. And FYI, just about everyone who already works on the sell-side is too. Only a minute percentage of Columbia/Chicago/Wharton grads who are going into banking post-MBA already have a pre-MBA banking background: these guys are scrambling to work at PIMCO or KKR, not Goldman or MS.

As for ranking these things... who are you asking? This honestly depends on the eye of the beholder.

• For the general population (which doesn't give a rat's ass about MBAs, to put it charitably), they will all know about Harvard and Stanford, and most know about Wharton. After that, it gets pretty random. I acquired a pretty good impression of Columbia Business School when I was a teenager because my next-door neighbors were a suave, sophisticated couple who met at CBS: both worked in the asset management branches of GS/JPM/Citi/take your pick. Mainly, though, I thought THEY were the ballers, so CBS looked good because of them, rather than them looking good because of CBS. And THAT is the cornerstone of the admissions game: you're supposed to make the school look good, not vice versa.

• Who takes that third spot after HS? It's generally accepted that it's Wharton, but the only people who argue vigorously that it's another school are people who spend a lot of time thinking about business schools.

• Personally, I think Wharton occupies an intermediate step between HS and "the rest of the Top 10". I say this based on recruitment prospects, and the caliber of the people who attend, as well as the strength and depth of the alumni pool. They're a pretty accomplished bunch.

• Which are "the rest of the Top 10?" I'm not going to enter in this BS "Top 5 vs M7 vs top 8 vs Top 10 vs Dirty Dozen vs Fantastic Fifteen or Sweet Sixteen". For most people, it USUALLY goes something like this after Wharton: Chicago and Kellogg (one for finance, the other for marketing, one for geeks, one for partyers); MIT Sloan is pretty much the same; and hot on their heels are Columbia, Dartmouth, Haas Berkeley... and then it's NYU Stern, Yale, UCLA, etc... Bla bla bla yawn yawn yawn. As someone put it to me, after HSW, it's about "the 15 or so schools that claim to be Top 10".

• Johnny Cage, you seem to really like Columbia. I like it a lot too, although 90 per cent of that was colored by the first two CBS grads I met. Since, I've met plenty who were a lot more pedestrian in their accomplishments, but pushy in their attitudes. I still like CBS, but it's lost a bit of its romance in my eyes.

• Why? Above all, its absolute BULLSHIT ED yield-management ploy. They're trying to game the other schools. I think just about everyone believes that if you game them back, FAIR GAME. Apart from that, it's a bit crowded, and some people describe it as a factory. Still, if what you want is to land that JP Morgan, BarCap or Deutsche Bank interview for M&A, it'll serve your purposes beautifully.

Hope this helps. Anyone going to any of those schools I mentioned is IBD Associate material.