What are the best colleges for a career in finance? RoundPier Team has been asked this question a few times, in particular, a number of people who are interested in a career in investment banking / Wall Street know that many firms target certain colleges when it comes to undergraduate recruiting. There are plenty of opportunities within finance from traditional front office jobs in M&A/corporate finance and trading to venture capital to back office / operations jobs. Wall Street Oasis and efinancialcareers websites have done a great job ranking universities for investment banking careers (particularly front office). But while there are a number of “target” schools like NYU, Columbia and Cornell that tend to dominate investment banking recruitment there are plenty of other universities which are also well represented on Wall Street, including some Liberal Arts Colleges.
There is a significant difference when it comes to front office vs back office recruitment so when you see some of schools on the list you need to check how many of the school’s graduates actually ended up in a front office role if this is your interest. And within front office there are also a number of different opportunities in banking and investment management. In addition, while major isn’t very important for an entry role in investment banking certain programs are much better represented — NYU’s Stern School of Business and UPenn’s Wharton graduates will have a better chance of landing a top finance job vs other majors. Finally, do your own research to see what area of finance is of interest to you — if you, like many others today, are interested and want to invest in start ups then a career path into venture capital may be very different from traditional investment management jobs as a different skill set is required.
We don’t rank the colleges below but simply prepared a list of colleges that could lead to an exciting career in finance (that doesn’t mean you won’t land a finance job if you don’t attend one of these):
- New York University
- University of Pennsylvania
- Columbia University
- Harvard University
- Cornell University
- London School of Economics
- University of Chicago
- University of Cambridge
- Yale University
- University of Michigan
- University of Virginia
- Georgetown University
- Princeton University
- Williams College
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Amherst College
- Boston College
- The University of Texas at Austin
- Northwestern University
- Dartmouth College
- Stanford University
- University of California, Berkeley
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Duke University
- Brown University
- MIT
- University of Oxford
- Penn State
