Let me clear some misconceptions. To me, Ross placement is pretty good but not “omg” nor amazing. One can look up the employment data at their website and decide for him/herself. Keep in mind the BBA program has close to 500 students per class; to me, the brightest spot they got was the 9 grads being placed to GS but that’s 9 out of almost 500. Good perhaps but amazing? Maybe not. I am not sure if all went to investment banking division anyway, probably not. Investment banking isn’t really what it used to be in the 1990s and the first half of 2000s anyway (I was told it’s considered boring in the 70s); the industry has gotten a bad rep since the 2008 financial crisis (justifiably so). Other than the GS placement, nothing else really jumps out as particularly great when you consider the large class size. The largest numbers went to EY, Deloitte, and PwC but they were mostly audit jobs for the accounting majors. These days, the best gigs are in the tech industry in Silicon Valley or management consulting.
Because Northwestern didn’t publish detailed employment data for the Kellogg certificate programs, the only direct comparison available is between the two MBA programs. There’s a noticeable gap - Kellogg MBA grads got higher pay jobs and noticeably higher number went to the most prestigious companies (in the most extreme case, 12 Kellogg grad went to Apple vs none from Ross).
I am almost certain Kellogg certificate programs for undergrads (CPU) have better placement than Ross for three reasons:
- CPU students have access to Kellogg’s resources, including a full-time career coach who works solely for the Kellogg cert program.
- Northwestern has a MMSS (mathematical methods for social sciences) program and according to the placement stats available on its website, MMSS placed proportionally more grads to GS, Bains, BCG, and McKinsey in 2014 even though MMSS grads did not have access to Kellogg recruiting. With around 50 students per class, MMSS is about 10 times smaller than Ross.
- The CPU students take graduate level courses in the program and the pre-reqs are upper-level courses in stats and probability, honors calculus and linear algebra, econometrics, and optimization. The best part of it is that all CPU students have primary majors, mostly in liberal arts or engineering. So the stigma that BBA is a trade and shallow doesn’t apply to CPU. People debate the merit of undergrad business programs; the curriculum at Northwestern takes care of the issue because it got the best of both world. The program can therefore differentiate its grads from thousands of other students, including other BBA grads.
Regarding admission to the Kellogg cert programs, as mentioned before, the Kellogg certificate programs are highly quantitative and rigorous; it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The admission rates have been high due to self-selection and around 75-80%.