Yale vs wharton

Colleges & Universities Yale University
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<p>I’m glad I met you Mancune, you’re a good debater. But yet again, I find that I disagree with you. I will attempt to refute you point by point. </p>

<p>He said: “Like all Wharton undergrads, you view an education’s purpose by its proclivity to place you in whatever flavor-of-the-moment boutique all your friends are excited about. So, let’s do a little investigation.”</p>

<p>False. The Whartonite you are talking to disproves it. I have a strong interest in philosophy; Penn allows me to pursue my interest in Philosophy with some of the world’s best professors, study alongside brilliant students, and read Plato and Heidegger to my heart’s content. While simultaneously studying topics that I find equally intellectually stimulating, topics like financial theory. I am a utilitarian in the Millhousian stream. I believe that the value of what we learn can only be judged on the outcome that that knowledge has on greater society. If you think about it, we, students at elite institutions, have been endowed with great cognitive abilities. That was no mistake; we have an obligation to use our abilities to enrich society, whether that be in art or finance. Economics tells us that specialization makes for a more efficient market; therefore, you should specialize in a field that you are best in, in order to have the greatest impact on society. So if finance interests you, study that. If it is physics, study that. In my purview, that is the only metric that can be used to decide whether a subject is worth pursuing or not. I also believe that there is nothing inherent about Philosophy that makes it more of an intellectual undertaking than stochastic calculus, for instance.</p>

<p>Wharton allows you to pursue BOTH philosophy, biology, chemistry, or whatever it is that tickles your fancy and broadens your mind (as you put it) and the finance courses, management courses, and other courses that a utilitarian would value. So you get the best of both worlds. The better career options, the efficiency of the degree, and all of these other things are just added benefits. At least 30% of Wharton’s undergraduate class does double majors, even greater numbers minors in something else. Everyone explores a full range of liberal arts topics, whether they double major in them or not. The fact of the matter is, you still get a liberal arts education at Wharton through Penn’s fantastic college (which is ranked right behind Yale on US News let us remember). </p>

<p>Now, onto the Wall Street Journal article. Firstly, I’d just like to point out that Penn currently has more billionaires than all of Yale University combined. Many, if not most, of Yale’s billionaires inherited their wealth, I would know since I went to the same prep school a number of them did. Penn has 27, Yale has 19. Wharton alone has produced more billionaires than all of Yale combined. Wharton, at the undergraduate level, has produced more billionaires than any other university; Harvard comes in second. At the undergraduate level, Wharton is king. Whartonites are known for their domination of the finance field, so it is not unexpected that when the biggest financial crisis of our era hit, Whartonites were hit the hardest (as the numbers show they were, many have since recovered). At the MBA level, Harvard is an immense, but we are talking about the undergrad level here. Imagine having access to both the Wharton and HBS networks? That is pretty cool.
[The</a> Billionaire Universities - Forbes.com](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/19/billionaires-harvard-education-biz-billies-cx_af_0519billieu.html]The”>The Billionaire Universities)</p>

<p>He said: “I was a Wharton MBA student (Lauder) so I know well what Wharton is all about. I took finance with Franklin Allen and Jeremy Siegel and Gary Gorton (now at Yale, I think) and marketing with Jerry Wind. I put up with the gunner 20 year old Wharton undergrads who think that grinding out equations on derivative gammas is the holy grail of life. I found them narrow and homogeneous in interests and outlook and generally less interesting as a group than my peers at Yale as an undergraduate. “</p>

<p>Well, that is your personal perception. Clearly, as a Yalie, you are likely to assume that your alma matter is superior to most other schools, it is only natural. Wharton Profs have been quoted as saying that Wharton undergrads work harder and are smarter than their MBA counterparts, some call that “toolish behavior,” others call it drive, ambition, and perseverance. It all depends on your perspective. I’ve been told by some very successful traders, that Wharton students tend to come off as more real and down to earth, and therefore more bearable. They are far more likely to be sports literate for instance. </p>

<p>He said: “Look at the business world. Who has created the businesses that literally change society over the past 30 years? Bill Gates and the Zuckerberg kid from Harvard; Steve Jobs from Reed College; Princeton kids founded Amazon and eBay. Stanford students produced google and yahoo and a gazillion others. A Yalie gave us realaudio which ushered in the audio download revolution. I just don’t see as many Whartonites starting truly creative ventures with revolutionary prospects – they’re just too narrow in outlook.”</p>

<p>Warren Buffet reformed the way we think about finance (since you mentioned a Harvard drop out (Gates), I’ll mention Buffett since he was at Wharton longer than any other school he attended). Donald Trump innovated the way we think about real estate evaluation and marketing. Cohen has and is innovating the nature in which hedge funds operate. Lauder innovated the cosmetic industry. I could go on. Countless derivatives and financial innovations were produced by Wharton graduates. Simply mentioning ways that HYPSM grads changed the world, and conveniently overlooking Whartonites contributions does not make your argument valid. But anyways, all of that is irrelevant because you committed a key fallacy; none of the people you mentioned actually went into business in the traditional sense. They studied, and focused intently on, a few of their specific industries and ran with it. Most dropped out, leaving their liberal arts education unfinished so that they could concentrate on the field they are most interested in. If someone has a very strong interest in computers, they should pursue that intensely, as gates did even in high school –what a tool. I’ve made a thread that talks about Gladwell’s theory, check it out: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/899983-gladwells-theory-supports-wharton-ug.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/899983-gladwells-theory-supports-wharton-ug.html&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>If you look at the list of the top ten Wall Street dudes you referenced, every single one was trading and doing very pre-professional things in college. Back in the day, Wharton offered little in the way of liberal arts, but that is no longer the case. Now, it is much easier to become truly great at what you do and get liberal arts experience at Wharton. The fact that you brought the hedgies up helps my argument.</p>

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<p>“Again, if you’re smart enough to get into Wharton undergrad, you’d do better to get the kind of broad, creative education that HYPS fosters and hang around with those kids, at least according to my personal observation. There’s time to become a finance dweeb later [like me].”</p>

<p>When you are at Wharton, you do not just hang out with Wharton kids. That would be toolish. You stay in dorms with kids in the engineering school, the college and the nursing school, thus you are exposed to a wide range (if not wider) of people. You take classes with them as well. You take classes with graduate students, if you wish, and you get exposed to them as well. Who knows, they may be exposed to the next Noam Chomsky, Gene Falk, Cenk Uygur, or Nassim Taleb. There is so much interaction between the school’s at Penn, courtesy of Locust Walk and the centralized layout of the school, that you are bound to meet new and interesting people. You do not miss out on any of that by going to Wharton. It is not like Wharton sits in isolation from the rest of Penn (like HBS does at Harvard).</p>

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<p>1a1 </p>

<p>I graduated from Yale with a double major degree in Economics and Slavic Languages and Literature around the turn of the millenium, worked in a famous Wall Street house for a year and a half, left to start an internet based retail business with some friends, raised some venture capital, and was in the process of taking it public thru CS First Boston when the tech collapse happened and we couldn’t raise capital, so it died. I was exhausted and broke so I went to biz school at Wharton (where I had to endure hordes of nebbishy Wharton undergrads and the Ivy league’s ugliest campus) thru student loans and am now back working for a well-known hedge fund focusing on special situations in the emerging markets, the BRICS mostly. There were many, many Yalies at Wharton grad, as there are at all the major professional schools. Yale to Wharton grad is not unusual at all.</p>

<p>kafka</p>

<p>I appreciate your tenacity and energy; the power of delusion is immensely enabling sometimes! I would hire you at my firm, except that you are so sloppy and loosy-goosy with numbers, that I couldn’t bear to proof your models and comp sheets! For instance,</p>

<p>The billionaire red herring. Here is a summary of Forbes billionaire results for 2009:</p>

<p>[billionaire-university.html:</a> Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance](<a href=“http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/107531/billionaire-university.html]billionaire-university.html:”>http://finance.yahoo.com/college-education/article/107531/billionaire-university.html)</p>

<p>Penn has 18 billionaires vs. 16 for Yale. Penn also has an alumni base that is twice as large as Yale’s! Pound for pound, a Yale grad is almost twice as likely to be a billionaire as a Penn grad. Now let’s narrow it to Wharton. If you check the actual Forbes article, which I own, you will see that Wharton accounts for 14 of these names. Wharton graduates 500 undergrads and 800 MBAs or 1300 a year, almost all of whom head into business. Yale graduates about 1300 a year, many fewer of whom go into business. Something like 15% go into medicine at Yale, 20% go into law, and a LOT go into teaching, arts/creative, media and non-profit. I would guess that maybe half of all Yalies end up in business. That would be a pool of about 650 Yalies plus another 200 at Yale SOM or 850 each year headed into business. (Yale SOM has a tiny graduate pool compared to Wharton, being onlyl 30 years old and 1/4 the size of Wharton grad.) Yet despite the much smaller numbers, Yale holds up very well, producing as many billionaires as Wharton does. Proportionally, it tops Wharton by a good margin. If you are someone probably headed for business, then, you have every anticipation of doing just as well in your career as any one from Wharton, probably better on average. </p>

<p>So, lets review. We have shown over our threads that:</p>

<p>Yale produces 4 times the number of Nobel laureates that Penn does, proportionally</p>

<p>A Yalie is 3 times is likely to get into a top professional school as Penn grad</p>

<p>A Yalie is 6 million times more likely to be President and 12.7 million times as likely to end up on the supreme court</p>

<p>Despite all of the sloppy Wharton brou-ha-ha, a Yalie is proportionally more likely to end up a billionaire</p>

<p>Now, if you were a reasonable person, where would you send your kid?</p>

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<p>^^^^hahahahah… ouch!</p>

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<p>This has turned into a never ending story and I think that we can all agree that both wharton and yale are equally good, both have their pros and cons and it really comes down to what you want</p>

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<p>Most of the Yale guys inherited their wealth and have it in private companies; the Whartonites were deeply invested in the financial system and were more adversely affected. The guy who lost the most money ($30 billion - Anil Ambani) was a Whartonite. The numbers I quoted reflect the true situation better. </p>

<p>Look at the Yale list for yourself. Two from the mars family, Cullman, Cargill, and the list goes one. Point is: their Yale education did not make then wealthy. You can’t say the same thing about Wharton’s list. Except for Lauders (who are among the few remaining billionaires and inherited a lot of their money) essentially all of them are self-made men. If you were born a billionaire, then yes, you are likely to remain a billionaire by attending Yale. It’s mostly old money.</p>

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<p>Until you can actually back that up through a full breakdown of billionaires (and former billionaires) from both schools, that’s just an unsubstantiated attack.</p>

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<p>But we all know its mostly true</p>

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<p>Hey,</p>

<p>I have compiled many of my arguments in favor of Wharton here: </p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/902457-wharton-mythbusters.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/902457-wharton-mythbusters.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Do check it out, there are a lot of misconceptions floating around about Wharton, you would do well to be able to differentiate between the fact and the fiction.</p>

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<p>Thanks so much.</p>

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<p>I was just thinking: since around 45% of Wharton kids go into investment banking, wouldn’t it be better for me to attend Yale, a school with fewer kids interested in ibanking and such (more focused on English, humanities). I think firms still recruit at Yale and the number of students competing for the same jobs would be smaller. Does this make any sense?</p>

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<p>I was just thinking: Since 90% of HYP kids get into the top med schools, wouldn’t it be better for me to go to a school like Amherst where fewer kids are accepted into Med schools? I think all med schools accept applications from Amherst, but the number of students competing for the same jobs would be smaller … </p>

<p>As you can see, that makes little sense. Don’t second guess your abilities, having more kids that go into IB is a good thing, it means you will have a larger alumni base to call on. It means that your job will be more secure. It means that the higher ups will probably be alums of your school and will pull for you. The fact of the matter is, if you are not good enough to get an IB job out of Wharton, you won’t get one at Yale either. Plus, you have many more recruiters on campus at Wharton, so you have more options in the financial world. Many smaller elite overseas companies will only bother to send recruiters to Wharton or recruit from there. If you want an IB job in Wharton, you will almost certainly get one. Think long term kid, long term.</p>

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<p>But that analogy makes no sense?</p>

<p>Amhest can’t replace Yale when speaking about Yale and Wharton relatively … but I digress.</p>

<p>I’m pretty sure recruiters go to both schools quite a bit (obviously Wharton is favored), but I’m just saying that it seems it would be easier RELATIVELY at Yale than it would be at Wharton. At both schools, getting an IB job is very possible.</p>

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<p>The fact that you are competing against more kids is balanced out by the fact that companies reserve more jobs for Wharton kids, because they know that more smart kids that are interested in them are there. They know that if they offer you a job coming out of Wharton, that kid is far more likely to take it than the kid at Yale. That’s part of the reason Wharton places so much better. Ceterius Paribus, firms will take the Whartonite over the Yalie. That’s way some firms recruit solely out of Wharton. That’s why, at essentially every bulge bracket IB firm, Wharton undergrad is the most represented school. </p>

<p>Companies are not stupid, why would they allow such a loop-hole to exist? Everyone would just take the easy route out then and the company would be overlooking arguably better talent at the larger school. Companies look to higher kids where they can find smart, motivated kids, who will accept their offers. </p>

<p>Think about it logically. You have two equally intelligent groups of kids, one that studied business and liberal arts courses and one that only studied the liberal arts. More kids from the first group are interested in working for you than the kids in the second group. Who would you give more job offers to? Obviously to the kids in the first group and that is precisely what happens.</p>

<p>So no, that’s just not how it works.</p>

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<p>*hire</p>

<p>“companies look to hire kids…”</p>

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<p>Alright, let me edit my analogy then. Say you want to be an engineer and you want to choose between two equally good schools, Yale and Princeton. Now, Princeton is superior to Yale in engineering and sends way more kids to top engineering firms than Yale. But, according to the logic you used above, even though Princeton is better at engineering (and is regarded as such by top firms, some of which probably do not recruit at Yale) you should go to Yale because more people at Princeton are pursuing engineering so there is greater competition. Obviously, the firms that are recruiting take into account the amount of students interested in the firm from the school and adjust the number of offers that they hand out accordingly. This offsets the competition between students for the same jobs at Princeton. Actually, you probably have a higher chance of landing the job out of Princeton since companies know that the yield for such jobs would be greater at Princeton than at Yale (since Princetonian are more interested), so they will overcompensate for that by giving out more offers at Princeton. Plus, if you do get a job, you will have a far larger alumni network in the field to help guide you. The same is true of Wharton and Yale in banking / PE / HF / VC.</p>

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<p>Yes, W recruiting is better than Yale’s, but W competition is also extremely fierce and cutthroat. I have friends there who admit to a certain degree of backstabbing and intense competition because you are competing with 500 classmates for the same type of jobs. I would just go to Yale, have a more rewarding and enjoyable four years of college and a more liberal-arts curriculum, and still do pretty well career-wise, because honestly, if you are going to be equally outstanding both places, it’s what you do that really matters, and both are great institutions, so it’s all up to personal fit. Based on my personality, I would want Yale though.</p>

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<p>The whole “cut throat, back stabbing, knife wielding, eye-gouging” BS is only pandered around by people who have never actually taken a single course at Wharton and are unable to refute any of the other arguments in support of Wharton. Go to the Penn page, you will see many posts that specifically address that false-hood. </p>

<p>I think this guy sums it up well:</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>Read myth No.3 on here for more details: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/902457-wharton-mythbusters.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-pennsylvania/902457-wharton-mythbusters.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>First of all, I have to say that I am probably biased because I am a Yale alumna, but I did go get an MBA afterwards (at Columbia). I would highly recommend going to Yale because it is an INCREDIBLE place and has GLOBAL RECOGNITION which you will carry with you for the rest of your life. Many institutions recruit at Yale and having the Yale name on your resume is something that will get you noticed, I think more so than a U Penn or Wharton undergraduate degree. The market place for jobs is getting more and more GLOBALLY competitive. With a Yale degree, you will have a name that is recognized in Asia, Europe, Latin America etc. In my case, I have worked in Europe, Asia & Europe, and every employer was impressed with the Yale name. Additionally, the Yale alumni network is FANTASTIC. There are Yale Alumni Clubs almost everywhere you go. So in Hong Kong, Korea, London, Miami, etc., I was immediately able to join a club and have contacts who have helped me decide where to live, go hiking together, helped determine schools for my kids, etc. Yale alumni are also on the whole very impressive people. I have found that people with business undergraduate degrees more narrow minded. You can always supplement your education at Yale later by taking courses in accounting, getting a CFA, an MBA, etc. But a Yale degree is PRICELESS. I can explain more if you have questions.</p>

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<p>Wharton has more Global Recognition where it matters - the business world. Sure, your average farmer in China is more likely to have heard of Yale, but any business professional would have heard of Wharton and would respect it more.</p>

<p>Fact of the matter is, Wharton has a larger international alumni base than any other school in the world. Nearly 50% of Wharton MBA alums are international and work internationally. In any given country (considering how weak the Yale MBA program is) Wharton would outplace Yale by a factor of five or more (considering that Wharton out places Yale at the undergraduate level and totally eradicates it at the graduate level). The top foreign companies sometimes recruit solely out of Wharton. </p>

<p>All the aspiring businessmen in these country dream of getting a Wharton or Harvard or Stanford MBA, not a Yale one. Wharton has arguably two of the most famous alums in business: Warren Buffett and Donald Trump (Bill Gates would also be in this category - but he went to Harvard), as a result it has immense global recognition. Many of the top businessmen you talk to in these countries are far more likely to have gotten their MBA from Wharton, done a deal with a Whartonite, had a Wharton work for them, than they are with a Yalie. If you go to Wharton undergrad, you have more than 80 thousand alumni in business to call upon with clubs all around the world, go to get your Harvard MBA after that and you nearly double that. Bottom line, Wharton’s alumni network is far far stronger. A Wharton degree is priceless.</p>