NESCAC schools are LACs - many state flagship and business schools (ie Babson, Bentley) are known for their internships and business track. If my DS is interested in business but athletic options are pushing him towards a NESCAC school what are the schools with the best alumni and business intern opportunities?
All the NESCACs have strong alum networks and all place well in business…which is a broad term that covers many jobs and industries.
One issue that a student has to figure out if they have business career aspirations is what they would major in at an LAC that doesn’t offer business majors. Many will reflexively say economics, not really knowing what that major entails. Something for a student to spend some time researching and thinking about, because the study of Econ is quite different than finance, business admin, etc.
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As one perspective, Hamilton appears in this Town & Country article:
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One thing you can do is calculate the "sell-out"ratio of each of the school’s graduating seniors, a method introduced by the New York Times in a recent article on elite colleges:
You arrive at it by going to the college’s career center website and combining (where available) the percentage of seniors accepting offers of employment in the “Finance and Consulting” sectors with the percent who go on to careers with “Tech and Engineering”. At Princeton and Harvard, for example, the ratio was pegged at “close to 60%”. I think you’ll find that at the NESCACs, only two of which offer engineering as a major, the ratio is closer to 40%.
At some LACs, courses in finance topics, such as accounting, corporate finance, financial economics and international finance, can be found within the economics curricula.
Not a NESCAC, but shares some of their qualities, Washington and Lee University is a LAC with a business school, and an extremely robust alumni network.
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Just a minor correction. Most NESCACs are LACs, but Tufts is also a NESCAC, and it’s a research university.
The advantage of the NESCACs, which is shared with most of the the small colleges in the NE, is that they are strongly linked to the financial world of the East Coast. They also have really really tight alumni networks. My kid attended Middlebury, and, when a student needed a recommendation, a place to stay, etc, the fact that the students was attending Middlebury was enough for any alumnus/a to go out of their way to make things happen for them. Moreover, there is also a connection between NESCAC colleges, and the fact that alumni of other NESCAC colleges will look positively on graduates of any other NESCAC college.
That being said, like any LAC, it is regional. For example, if you want to work in Ohio, NOTHING beats OSU, including Harvard, Stanford, or MIT.
In a very general sense, flagships have huge networks, but the links are weaker, while smaller colleges have smaller networks, but they are very tight.
@merc81 That is a poorly researched article, and it’s based on the claims of a “College Consulting” company, with their own agenda, and the data is from “Payscale”, which is always a huge issue.
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I’d say that it offers structure to what otherwise might be untethered opinion. And in the case of Ohio State, its inclusion in the article coincides with a school that you used as a favorable example.
It’s a BS article because it says absolutely NOTHING about the alumni networks. It is just about the average salaries of alumni and the claim that “this college has many famous alumni”. As far as we know, Bucknell alumni won’t lift a finger to help other alumni, even if the fellow alumni are begging them on their knees for help.
In fact that article provides us with absolutely no facts, not a single little tiny piece of a fact, that demonstrates that Bucknell even has an alumni network as such. All that they provide for us is the average salaries of alumni and the claim that they have many famous alumni. I assume that becknell has an alumni network, but there is nothing in the article that supports that assumption.
It is a random selection of schools with absolutely no criteria for their selection.
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It certainly does, e.g.,
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I am sure that most of them have amazing connections but this is one of the reasone S24 chose WIlliams, internship placement and support and amazing job placement and alumni contacts.
Much of the article discusses the alumni networks of the included schools in quite specific terms.
Again, “they have great alumni with great jobs who sometimes talk to students”, doesn’t actually say anything of use, and definitely doesn’t provide a reason to consider these particular colleges as having “the best alumni networks”.
If, on the other hand, they provided actual facts related to networking like “X% of alumni involve themselves in mentoring students and new graduates”, or, “X% of alumni participate in networking events in various cities (or virtual networking)”. Things like that actually tell me that there is an actual active network which involves a good number of alumni.
As I wrote, from the fluff that they provided there is really no proof that any alumni are actually doing anything for students from these colleges and new graduates.
Based on what little they provided and the criteria these seem t be using, Harvard, Stanford, or MIT should be #1 on their list, since these colleges have far more alumni who are super wealthy and super well-positioned to provide help for other alumni.
It’s a pretty narrow way of selecting a school, but the easy answer is you’re most hirable from Williams/Amherst. Possibly Amherst its kind of a cool name. These schools have recognition pretty much anywhere, not just among academics. In terms of starting a company/project people genuinely do not care where you went to school, given recent news, MIT and Stanford, (even the very top schools in the world) no longer are really giving a boost to their graduates in terms of authority. Speaking of authority id go back to Tufts, which likely has the most famous alum, ceo of the biggest bank in the US, although I don’t think he liked tufts very much - allegedly he was very bitter he didnt get into some ivy. It’s all kind of complicated, you should try to ask a different question and you’ll get better answers. With regard to lack of business majors at NESCACs I don’t think this is a bad thing, it’s not usually well received if someone is to say they majored in business so you should trust them, finance is a different story but even that is essentially just an easier version of math I think.
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