Carleton College vs Haverford College for Economics

Just to provide some data, Haverford also reports graduate outcomes, including by major (although not with as many interactive visualizations):

22% of Fords generally ended up in Business and Finance, versus 19.3% of Carls in Business/Finance/Sales. For Econ majors specifically, it is 60% of Fords, 58% of Carls.

That is not quite apples to oranges for a variety of reasons, and my guess is the gap would be a bit bigger if it was all completely adjusted for.

But perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of Econ majors do in fact go into Business and Finance.

And Carleton occupies a somewhat interesting positioning in the Upper Midwest/Great Lakes–going back for a very long time now, it has had a reputation of being the “best” LAC in that region. As those visualizations show, it has long placed a lot of alums in the Twin Cities, but it is also very much a sort of Chicago orbit college too.

So I think despite the lack of physical proximity to Chicago in the same sense as Haverford to NYC, Carleton is to Chicago sort of like prominent rural New England/Upstate New York LACs are to Boston and NYC.

In other words, for academicky kids, Haverford is a good Eastern comparison, but for businessy kids–Middlebury? Something like that.

And obviously Boston and NYC add up to a lot more business and finance jobs, but there is also WAAAAAY more highly-regarded LAC competition in or close to those cities.

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