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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Alright OP, this is an area I'm very familiar with and can give some insight. Wall Street is still very prestige driven when we're talking about desirable roles (investment banking, sales & trading, and buy side role e.g., private equity, asset management, hedge funds, etc.). This has improved in recent years but there are many online resources that show the 'target' schools that these institutions primarily hire from. The heavy hitters are Ivy League schools (esp. HYP and Wharton), and similarly prestigious programs, but there are some slightly more accessible schools that your kid should look into if interested in 'high finance':

UVA (Darden)
Georgetown (McD)
U Michigan (Ross)
NYU (Stern)
Emory (Goizuetta)

These would all be reaches, but not totally out of the question. They all have dedicated business schools that have very strong pipelines into IB and Wall St. more broadly. Indiana University's Kelley is another program that places remarkably well and has lower selectivity than the usual suspects. Fordham and Boston College also have some success, but limited comparatively.

Outside of these, some schools do very well regionally (SMU and UT Austin for example), particularly in the Houston scene, though your kid might be less interested in going to college/working there.

I'd ignore much of the advice you'll hear about small schools that "punch above their weight". It's not that some SLACs don't do well (WASP, CMC, and some other very selective LACs do great), but for the most part this is kind of a fiction. I know many people who went to Bucknell or Villanova pursuing finance -- none of those people work in IB, PE, S&T, etc., though they can do fine if targeting corp. dev or accounting I guess.

Main takeaway: Wall St. has its favorites, and breaking in from outside of them is a very uphill battle. It's also worth mentioning that it's a very tough, very cutthroat career path. Definitely the kind pursuit where it's helpful to have other options in mind when you're in college.[/quote]

Great summary.  Until a few years ago,  i did m and a for a top nyc law firm. It seemed like everyone i worked with at our client companies was an alum of an Ivy, a very top SLAC, or a very short list of other top schools (stanford, mit, chicago, maybe michigan). As others have said,  there also are grads of NYC colleges who live and breathe finance and work harder than anyone (crazy how well Baruch grads, often first gen Americans,  do). I literally never came across anyone from Bucknell, Lehigh, or most of the other schools mentioned in this chain. The industry employs a lot of people and has a lot of non-glamorous jobs that a Bucknell grad could fill,  but I've never seen them among dealmakers, traders, etc.[/quote]

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