And left. Perhaps he knows one or two things we don’t. FWIW, you and I went to the same law school, but apparently you found it much more impressive than I did.
"Companies such as Goldman Sachs, Bain, McKinsey (and Google, Facebook, etc.) are certainly stronger lures for “the best and the brightest” than a mid-market company in Iowa or whatever non-“elite” company you admire. "
It’s not about what I admire or don’t admire. It’s that people aren’t all lemmings who uniformly desire the same thing.
@Pizzagirl, correct, not everyone wants the same thing. But if people have the choice, they’ll disproportionately lean towards GS, Bain, etc.–and it’s not due to being “provincial”. Provincial is staying back in one’s home state and rejecting opportunities.
@SomeOldGuy, and after Warren Buffet graduated from the U. of Nebraska, he headed back to the Ivy League, at Columbia for business school. Yes, perhaps he knows one or two things that we don’t.
@pizzagirl “Sigh. Only in those fields! Do you think the hiring manager for a media company job cares in the least about GS? What IS this assumption that banking defines business?”
Well, my point is that much of the value of attending a top college is really in the opportunities that present themselves. However, it is still up to the student to take advantage of them.
@HappyAlumnus wrote: But if people have the choice, they’ll disproportionately lean towards GS, Bain, etc.
Do we really need to backtrack 100 or so posts in this thread to point out that while this is true for some people, it certainly is not true for everyone, and in fact is almost certainly not the case for the majority?
As @Pizzagirl, just a few posts ago, noted: What IS this assumption that banking [or you can insert your preferred industry or company] defines business?
An elite school where “everyone” is headed to finance must be boring as hell. Thank goodness for the elite schools that also have future nonprofit leaders, politicians, ministers, teachers, actors, artists, musicians, and a thousand other possible professions. And how pathetic that elite schools are deemed as elite in your mind because they are vocational schools.
“Elite firms engage in higher-profile work. For example, look at today’s New York Times; the two banks handling the Kraft/Heinz merger are not Goldman Sachs, and it’s pointed out how rare that is.”
I don’t see what’s so high profile about being the hanger-on. The people who make the deal worthwhile are the people at Kraft and Heinz who make products people want to buy.
“The financial world is based on “We are smarter than you so you should hire us”. The school is used as part of the proof of intelligence.”
It’s the ones who are hiring the financial firms who have the money and fascinatingly enough many of them didn’t go to elite schools.
Try to find if there was a recall tweet…
Yeah, I’m sure those Physics majors are just chompin’ at the bit to get into Bain or Goldman Sachs…
I think that people have significantly different views about this issue because we all see it through the lens of our own experience. For some students, a top school can make a significant difference in your life. For other students, it may not. For others, the demands of a top school may actually be a negative. For each student the situation is unique. Furthermore, those that went to top schools want to believe that it was worthwhile, and those that didn’t want to believe that they didn’t miss anything.
Essentially, if you want to find evidence to support one view or another, it will be easy to do that.
I went to an elite school and my kids are at elite schools. And all of them are schools that do fine on the all-so-critical measure of placing in banking and consulting. My beef isn’t that I don’t believe elite schools don’t have advantages - they do. It’s with the assumption that the world revolves around finance / banking and that everyone wants to do those things. It’s just very narrow thinking.
“If you have 100 of “the best and the brightest” and give them the choice, sure, some of them will want the mid-market company in Iowa”
This is precisely the narrowness I mean. Mid-market is a term used in banking as opposed to bulge bracket, boutique, etc. It’s almost as though you cannot even conceptualize any career path or field that isn’t banking. Are you simply not aware that there are thousands of great opportunities outside of banking, where smart people gather and do stimulating, interesting work and get well paid for it?
Select just about any non-STEM major and research which universities have the best programs, and you will find the same 10-20 elite schools on the list every time. So forget economics and banking, which I agree is not nirvana, and talk about history, philosophy, English, anthropology, classics etc. and you’ll always see some variations of the Ivies, Stanford, and the top publics on the list of best departments. If a non-elite university shows on a top 20 list, it makes the news. Literally. Someone will write an article crowing over it. Saw that for the University of Cincinnati regarding its classics FSP ranking. All the others on the top ten list were the usual suspects.
So for an undecided student, attending an elite school will maximize his chances of ending up in a good dept. no matter what major he settles on.
Re #530:
“Yeah, I’m sure those Physics majors are just chompin’ at the bit to get into Bain or Goldman Sachs”
Are you not aware that firms of this type do hire science and engineering grads? At the last firm I worked at, I worked closely with a group that had several physics PhDs, They successfully recruited a physics grad student from a top program to join them while I was there. Several of the actual traders there also had advanced engineering degrees.
Years ago I interviewed at the financial strategies group at Merrill Lynch. The head of it had a doctorate in meteorology. The head of the similar group at Goldman was Fischer Black, whose background, before switching to economics, was in physics and mathematics. The similar group at a firm I worked at was crawling with science & engineering majors. And several traders and bankers there of my acquaintance also had that background.
There was a prolific CC poster from years past who was evidently doing some grad program at MIT, He made a number of posts bemoaning the significant percentage of the MIT class that was going into finance instead of engineering.
@Pizzagirl “My beef isn’t that I don’t believe elite schools don’t have advantages - they do. It’s with the assumption assumption that the world revolves around finance / banking and that everyone wants to do those things. It’s just very narrow thinking”
- All of this is out of context. The point was that it is not always so easy to boil the advantages of a top school down simply to the name. That there is also value in the better access to experiences and opportunities.
- I work in Finance so I don't know why it is "very narrow thinking" to use an example from the area I am most familiar with? It illustrates the point. Would you like example from engineering?
“Mid-market is a term used in banking as opposed to bulge bracket, boutique, etc.”
It is used in banking, but to denote the size of a company. Any company. Not the size of a financial company particularly.
And the same term would be used by anybody not in banking too, to denote the size of a company. Anybody who invests on their own, or reads the Wall Streeet Journal would know that term, not just finance professionals. I can’t think of another term for that, just offhand. I take it back, I guess “mid-sized”…
Six of one half a dozen of the other, to me.
Come on now guys… this is just getting silly now. The VAST majority of physics/engineers are not going to consider Bain or Goldman Sachs prime companies to work for. If you really think otherwise, then I would strongly encourage you to step outside and get some fresh air.
… to wit, this notion of a universal “best” [colleges, jobs…] simply does not exist as it does not take into account individual interests/experiences.
You are totally missing the point. EVERYONE doesn’t want to work for these top firms and live in NYC. And that includes some of the best and brightest. And it’s not because they are “provincial”. Some folks simoly look at the advantages and disadvantages of the NYC professional life, and say…no thanks. There are plenty of opportunities for me in Iowa, or Nebraska, or South Dakota, or Utah…or wherever.
It does not mean they are slackers or not motivated to do well in their careers. It simply means…they do not want to live or work in NYC.
Give it a break. There are plenty of talented professionals out there who don’t “aspire” to work at GS, McKinsey, or any of the IBs in NYC. That does not diminish their talent or desire to earn a good living, and live a good life.
I can’t believe people are still going back and forth on this. Clearly, no one is going to change their minds.
If some want to believe that it’s x company or bust, so be it. Seems like a very unhappy way to live one’s life but to each his/her own.