Business major - which school would you choose between

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Thanks. Love hearing the feedback. We very likely will not have these 4 options lol. Like beyond unlikely. But thinking ahead because DS got into UGA and was offered money (not a ton) but still waiting on Wisconsin, UT Austin, UF, UNC (won't get in) Michigan, UMD oh and Vanderbilt (ridiculous reach along w. UNC)

I was told Wisconsin was "better" or more competitive than UGA.

I just panicked cause Michigan is a fortune and I know he would want to go on the unlikely chance he got in.

So in a hypothetical gets in everywhere and money is no object situation, it would be Vanderbilt, Michigan, Texas, UNC, Georgia, Wisconsin, UMD, Florida.

But everyone has their realities.

Texas and UNC are going to be unlikely. They don't take a lot of OOS. Vanderbilt is very good with financial aid, so if that works, definitely.

The real conundrum is Michigan. Great school. Ross does very well with placement. But it's fricking expensive for OOS. The kid really needs to be a gunner and promise to pay you back to make it worthwhile.

Indiana Kelley is better than Wisconsin. And I like Wisconsin. But Kelley is better.

Georgia is good, but it's going to be regional. A degree from Athens is not going to play in NY or the West Coast. Same with Florida.

One of the PPs here. The one who first brought up regional job markets. I am a mid-career Ross MBA working in the Midwest. I don't really hear of many Ross students coming from or going to the South. I'm sure some do, but it's not a focus area for Michigan students.

OOS U of Mers tend to be very wealthy and the really obvious OOS kids are from the NYC metro area. That builds the school's Northeast connections. Probably helps with Wall Street a little - but that kind of finance has never been a Michigan specialty. That probably explains the Poets and Quants ranking also shown in this thread.

Apparently Californians are among the most mobile for higher education. Partly because there are so many of them, their state schools can't meet all the demand for spaces. So again, U of M has a decent California contingent. They have all sorts of jobs from startups to entertainment law/MBA.

Texas, at times, has been an active hiring market. Some of my classmates went to Dell. Engineer MBAs have a lot of options there.

If you want to get an idea about what Ross BBAs are like, have your kid look up Youtube videos where students review their application files. Did your kid do a good job on the essays? The reviewers are tough. Even on the kids who got in.

I agree with the poster above. To get great payback on Michigan tuition, your kid will need to be more of a gunner (Type A wannabe mover and shaker) and be ready to go where the high-paying jobs are.

Some things that you mentioned later that I think are worth more discussion...Indiana is definitely worth considering. I hear a fair bit about them. I honestly wasn't aware that Wisconsin was even in the B-School game. That is not a slam - that's my truth. Their job market must not overlap much with Michigan people. I visited the Indiana campus this summer and thought it was nice/comparable to Michigan.

The employment geography after graduation issue is critical in my opinion. There are lots of successful senior businesspeople who did not go to a ranked or prestigious school. And usually a lot of favorable hometown sentiment. A fancy degree isn't very helpful if people think you're likely to be something they don't want - a snob, a person who wants too high of a salary, a person from a part of the US they have bias against, etc. Or worse, they aren't really aware of how your school fits into the rankings picture.

H.R. looks at school rankings for salary banding sometimes, but the hiring managers are the ones who usually choose the interviewees and make the final decisions. A lot of people prefer to hire people they feel comfortable with instead of people who have had different experiences from them. That's why home state/local schools often do well.

Again, I think you'll do well by reviewing the career placement info from the schools. I'm not a snob so I think it could come out in favor of U GA. Make your kid use his analytical skills to figure out the financial merits of each option, rather than going on rankings or emotion alone.

Good luck!

What ????

This is little more than a rambling diatribe--much of which is incorrect.

While all readers appreciate reading thoughts from one with an MBA from one of the schools under discussion, the thoughts should be expressed in a more coherent manner and, at the very least, be partially correct.

I’m interested in this thread. I thought that post was excellent and rather succinct. What exactly do you contend with?

Nothing about that post was succinct.

Not trying to be impolite, but there is nothing of value in that rambling disjointed post. Appears to be just random thoughts scribbled in a hurry.

What do you find informative in that post ?

Also, lots of silly comments about recruiting and snobbery.

Imagine for a moment that not all of us think like you do. Also imagine responding to a post on here without being a d*ck about it.

To answer your question I appreciated the poster’s comments about thinking about postgrad locales when picking undergrad programs. Also the comments about recruiting that you so disdain is something that I never had to go through in my professional career. I’m a liberal arts major so some of this stuff is somewhat new to our family. Hearing from somebody with multiple vantage points about a topic foremost on my mind was appreciated.

But by all means you do you. It seems to really be working.

Hi. PP here. Thanks for sticking up for me, poster above. I really appreciate that you paid attention to what I took time to share. Still waiting for the complainer to identify what info of mine is incorrect. I tried to address a lot of topics in a short space...so it was a bit of a "kitchen sink" post. But that doesn't mean I deserve to take crap from someone with a limited attention span.

Anyone who isn't interested in reading a long post or a casual writing style...feel free to skip past now. I am not going to spend any more time defending my coffee chat/off duty writing style - only facts. Bring on your questions and facts if relevant.

OP's essential question was how to compare 4 business schools in widely different geographies. Based mostly on rankings and tuition cost after merit aid. I think a lot more needs to go into the analysis than that.

Anyone who expects to choose a school based on a media company's ranking is likely paying attention to someone's snobbery somewhere (some of these systems involve corporate recruiter ratings or school officials rating other schools). A lot of the school rankings that DCUM types fret about are gameable and vary a lot from year to year. And many of the rankings systems are extremely poorly constructed from a methodological point of view. But we don't really have time to get into all that. Below are just a couple of links to help parents educate themselves. I'm using MBA rankings here because I know more about them and because really strong BBA programs are less common. A strong MBA program also provides reputational support for the BBA programs.

https://www.bschools.org/blog/guide-to-business-school-ranking-organizations (this is an old page, but still intelligently explains some of the ranking factors typically used)

https://poetsandquants.com/2023/12/11/2023-2024-mba-ranking/ (Check this fresh link out in its entirety, including how they explain that Wharton (Penn) is 31st in 2024 below Vanderbilt, Rice, and the University of Florida, mainly because Wharton students were mad about their Covid-era online education. Draw your own conclusions about how this will affect Wharton applications and career prospects.)

The key issue for parents and children really is: what school maximizes the student's personal happiness/satisfaction and career earnings while simultaneously keeping the cost of acquiring the education reasonable with respect to the gains.

Some people consider geography an important criteria for school, work, and family reasons. You may find some bits of the paper below interesting (though it's not business school specific). It's cutting edge stuff based on LinkedIn analysis.

Grads on the Go - Measuring College-Specific Labor Markets for Graduates - NBER Working Paper
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30088/w30088.pdf

I also took a look at U of M's business school clubs to see how strong it is in the South, because that's relevant to the points I was making about U of Georgia. Perhaps I should comment that I don't consider Texas and Florida to be the South (we could also argue that point). Ross has an alumni club in Atlanta (to be expected, since Atlanta is a major corporate center) and one in Charlotte. Beyond that, all the others nearby are in Texas or Florida. There are 3 clubs in Texas (Dallas, Houston, Austin) and 2 in Florida (Miami and Ft. Lauderdale). I can't get at the club membership size info directly, but it's likely that the club counts are related to the number of recent, active, networking alumni on the ground. So I'd say having only 2 clubs in the South looks weak.

Looking at U of Georgia Terry's web page, I see that they claim 70K alumni in 80 countries. Ross claims 56K alumni in 114 countries. Want to bet that if we had our hands on the data, you'd see a very different US regional distribution of alumni? Could we hypothesize that the chance of running into a Terry grad in the South might be higher?

I'm going to stop here for a while. If I need to explain some more about why BBA and MBA applicants can be overly ranking-obsessed, why corporate recruiters like to target "top schools", how implicit bias and affiliation bias impact hiring, and how geographical and industry differences bias business school graduate salary data, I'll be here all night. That doesn't mean those aren't real phenomena that affect career outcomes.

TL;DR: Comparing 4 different schools in 4 different geographies is difficult. Use the rankings if you have to, but be appropriately skeptical. Don't be afraid to go against the rankings/conventional wisdom if it's right for you. An excellent BBA student can always go back for a higher-ranked MBA.

[Anonymous]

DS chose UT Austin over Michigan. Loves it. Tons of internship opportunities each year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DS chose UT Austin over Michigan. Loves it. Tons of internship opportunities each year.

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What were his stats?

[Anonymous]

Michigan would be my choice