U. Wisconsin-Madison or U. Illinois Champaign?

openedskittles
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:33:32 +0000

Neither of these programs are horrible, they just aren’t the best, and investment banks are mostly interested in the best.

If you want to do finance, especially exclusive jobs like investment banking, these are probably the best schools for you:
[Undergraduate business specialties: Finance - Best Colleges - Education - US News and World Report](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/spec-finance)
Judging by the other universities you are considering, I’m assuming you might have trouble getting into these schools, but you might have a good shot at Indiana. They have a larger program that is rather easy to get into, especially for being so good. The catch is that you have to prove yourself a bit more while you’re in college to stand out, but if you can do it, you can definitely work in investment banking coming from Indiana.

Like others have said, you can also break into investment banking by going to an ivy league or similar school and doing math or economics. However, these schools often leave grads in a lot of debt (usually subsidized loans, but you’ll still need to pay them off) and that the debt is almost never worth it if you can do a top finance program for half the price (or less like I did) where the exact same companies hire. It’s also harder to stand out among thousands of liberal arts majors at a top university than a couple hundred or fewer Finance majors in a business program (and not all of them want to do investment banking).