<p>akx - again, I would disagree. If a prospective student likes, say, Chicago and Dartmouth equally as much, and the only tiebreaker factor is placement on wall street, Dartmouth gets the definite edge. I mean this not in terms of raw numbers, I mean that, with two similar applicants, the Dartmouth student will probably fare a bit better than the Chicago applicant. </p>
<p>For finance and business specifically, Dartmouth offers some resources that Chicago cannot match. Since the sheer number of Dartmouth grads on wall street is considerably higher, Dartmouth is a more known commodity on wall street, the Dartmouth alumni network is certainly tighter, and in the networky-world of business, this matters. Moreover, at each school, the nature and culture of the school rubs off on each student a bit. Again, Dartmouth is sort of custom-engineered by this point to produce people who will succeed on wall street - and 4 years at dartmouth will provide a student with better social “training” (more exposure to the work hard/party hard atmosphere, being surrounded by others also interested in finance, etc.). At Chicago, on the other hand, if you are more of a pre-finance, pre-professional guy at the start, you will spend four years swimming against the current at U of C. It’s just not the same type of environment. </p>
<p>To provide a more concrete example of this, lots of my friends at Chicago spent 2-3 years taking econ classes, getting interested in the academic nature of the subject, and then, all of a sudden, deciding to go work on Wall Street. They all did fine, but in contrast to this approach, more Dartmouth students are grooming themselves for a position on Wall Street from earlier on in their college careers. Again, its just a different type of environment. </p>
<p>Raw numbers aside, and just looking at the situation in terms of proportions, I think Chicago does about as well as Cornell, the College at Penn, Northwestern, and the like. It falls considerably short of the standard found at Dartmouth, Princeton, Wharton, etc.</p>