In real estate, the mantra is “location, location, location!” If you want to secure a coveted spot in an investment bank, it pays to study on the American east coast.
That was a recent finding from efinancial careers. In their bi-annual rankings for finding front office jobs in top investment banks, five of the top seven MBA programs were located within a four hour drive of Manhattan. In the Top 20, another five programs were within a short drive of London’s financial district.
That’s hardly a surprise, of course. New York City and London have been see-sawing as the globe’s banking epicenter for some time. Sure enough, their local MBA programs cater to the strengths of their market. Here’s something even less surprising: The top MBA programs are among the elite, known for their financial acumen and deep and influential alumni networks – with Ivies like Wharton and Harvard and global powerhouses like INSEAD and the London Business School among the top names.
RANKING TRACED TO eFINANCIALCAREERS’ MILLION PLUS DATABASE
The ranking stems from efinancialcareers’ resume database. The site, which doubles as a news and recruiter outlet, reports a readership of over 1.3 million finance professionals, not to mention a database of over 1 million CVs (with 24,000 new ones new CVs each month). The ranking is based on the percentage of MBAs at each school who landed front office work (i.e. corporate finance, sales, and trading and equity research) in top tier firms.
In particular, the ranking focuses on tying MBA programs to specially-tiered institutions.
“We’ve allocated a greater weighting to those working for investment banks we’ve deemed ‘tier one’ than ‘tier two’ or ‘tier three’. In our ranking, tier one banks include Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Tier two banks include Barclays, Credit Suisse and UBS, and tier three banks include BNP Paribas, HSBC, Nomura, Royal Bank of Scotland and SocGen. Together with the proportion of people on the CV database who have secured an investment banking job, we’ve come up with the ranking below.”
COLUMBIA BEATS OUT WHARTON FOR THE SECOND CONSECUTIVE YEAR
As you’d expect, Columbia Business School ranked first, no different than efinancialcareers’ 2014 ranking. Nearly a third of Columbia MBA graduates on efinancialcareers’ database – 32.24% –hold a front office job in a tier 1 bank. Overall, 44% worked in efinancialcareers’ top three tiers, roughly equivalent to the 43% of Columbia alumni overall who work in finance.
Columbia University – Ethan Baron photo
In Columbia’s 2015 class, 37.1% of graduates went into finance, edging out Wharton (36.9%), Booth (34.8%), and Stern (34.0%). They earned median salaries of $125,000 (same as Wharton, Booth, and Stern) and $50,000 median sign on bonuses (higher than the $40,000 grossed by Booth and Georgetown McDonough grads). Overall, JPMorgan Chase was the top financial destination for 2015 full-time MBAs, with 14 graduates heading south to Park Avenue. They were followed by Goldman Sachs (13), Bank of America (9), Citi (9), Morgan Stanley (8), and Barclays (6). Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were also the top employers of Columbia interns in 2015.
Wharton also retained its second-place ranking for front office jobs in the investment banking sector. Overall, 28.5% of its graduates in efinancialcareers’ database worked in Tier 1 banks, with another 11.5% in the second tier. Due to Wharton’s sheer size – it enrolls over 1,700 full-time MBAs alone (second only to Harvard Business School and nearly 450 more than Columbia) – the school offers a nearly unmatched alumni network in the financial sector. In a 2014 Linkedin review by Poets&Quants on the number of MBAs in top financials, Wharton ranks among the top two for alumni placement at Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Credit Suisse, and Bank of America (ranking behind Stern at every firm except Wells Fargo).
Rounding out the top three was the London Business School, where 27% of its 2015 graduates entered finance – a major dip from the industry’s popularity before the financial meltdown (44% for the Class of 2008). 2015 graduates also earned a median starting salary of $120,680 (with $196,006 being the maximum salary reported) and a median bonus of $45,304 (with the max being $140,598).Like Columbia, consulting firms were the top recruiters at LBS. However, among financials, Goldman Sachs (9), Citi (6), and Credit Suisse (5) were the top picks among the 401 member class.
(To see how your school fared, check out the table on the next page.)
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CORNELL SKYROCKETS TO FOURTH AHEAD OF HARVARD AND NYU
Looking for some surprises? Start with Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management. It jumped 11 spots from the 2014 ranking to finish fourth. Here, 27.92% of graduates work in Tier 1 institutions (higher than Booth, NYU, Stanford, Tuck, and NYU) and another 12% holding front office positions in Tier 2 banks. And this could provide some real synergy for the one-year Cornell Tech MBA program in New York City, giving aspiring entrepreneurs and digital mavens a network of potentially friendly funders.
Imperial College Business School
Cornell wasn’t the only program to make a big jump with efinancialcareers over the past two years. INSEAD (12th to 5th) and HEC Paris (26th to 8th) each made big moves, buoyed by respectable showings in the first tier that were bolstered by strong performances in the second tier. London’s Cass Business School climbed 11 spots to 14th, leapfrogging both Oxford and Cambridge. Most notably, Cass had the third-highest percentage of its graduate pool in Tier 1 banks (28.77%) – better than Wharton, LBS, and Cornell.
However, Cass’ rise pales in comparison to crosstown rival Imperial College Business School. Unranked in 2014, Imperial vaulted to 11th overall, with 26.05% of graduates in efinancialcareers’ resume base working in Tier 1 investment banks – double that of Manchester and Cranfield combined. For the 2015 Class, the school lists Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Morgan Stanley among its top recruiters. Spain’s IE Business School – known for its entrepreneurial leadership – has also emerged as a banking mecca, rising from 33rd to 18th – with nearly the same percentage of Tier 1 front office staffers (22.32%) as INSEAD (23.92%) and IESE (23.23%).
YALE TUMBLES FROM 3RD TO 10TH
However, the news wasn’t positive for a number of schools. Most notably, Yale (-7), MIT Sloan (-6), Chicago (-6), Cambridge Judge (-10), Northwestern Kellogg (-12), and Rice Jones (-15) all tumbled in the past two years. Yale, in particular, experienced the worst. Once ranked above Harvard and LBS at 3rd in 2014, Yale fell to 10th overall, though it still posts respectable numbers in the first tier (27.22%). That said, the total percentage of its graduates’ resumes being in front offices of banks in the top three tiers (39.77%) was actually lower than all but one school ranked in efinancialcareers’ top 20.
Sloan, Booth, and Judge each slipped out of the top 10. Along with Imperial Business School, the University of Hong Kong (30th) and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (33rd) also joined efinancialcareers’ rankings in 2016.
Overall, the London Business had the highest percent of school CVs in the top three tiers at 46.08%. LBS was followed by INSEAD (45.34%), IE Business School (44.93%), and Wharton (44.83%). Among top 15 American MBA programs, only Virginia Darden, Michigan Ross, and UCLA Anderson missed efinancialcareers’ cut.
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