These Are The Best MBA Programs for Finance #Finance

How’s this for a rhetorical question? Are there some great business schools for Finance? Of course there are. But which ones are they? Hmm. That’s a hard

question to answer I guess. When it comes to identifying the business schools that are Finance powerhouses. The usual cast of characters invariably appears HBS, Wharton,

Columbia, Booth. But if you take a closer look, a couple of dark horses start showing up. In fact, the school that sends the greatest percentage of its students into Finance

is. Nope. Cornell Johnson. Ithaca may be 200 miles to Wall Street. But it seems like recruiters are camping out by Johnson by the dozen because some 40% of graduates head into none;">Finance. What is driving Cornell’s prominence in Finance is that it does a great job of minting investment bankers. This is due to its

Investment Banking immersion program. Developed over years, Cornell supports its Ivy Focus students through an exceptional Investment Banking curriculum. Deep ties to the major banks and ongoing coaching and mentoring make the program stand out. If you want to get

a job as an investment banker, Cornell just may be worth the extra look. Unless, of course, you like the city, in which case, think about NYU as almost 30% of the class goes into Investment Banking and the financial sector is at its doorstep. Ironically, if you’re focused on

Investment Banking, that maybe the place not to go is Harvard or Stanford. That’s right. Both of these schools send far less graduates to banking than many lower ranked schools, though they’re a fraction of the size. Tuck and Duke both send about the same number of

graduates to Investment Banking as Harvard does, or about 40 per year. How can this be? Well, I guess it comes down to how you define Finance. Frequently,

when applicants think Finance, they don’t think about the grueling hours of Mergers and acquisition. They think about the outsized

Profits of private Equity and the romance of venture Capital. And this is the piece of the Finance industry that HBS, GSB

and Wharton dominate. While most schools send 1 to 3% of their classes into PE and VC, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton send about 20%. Wow. But if you start pulling those numbers apart, the story’s a little more nuanced. MIT sends a lot of folks into VC, while the road to PE from Booth is

pretty well-trodden, let’s even go a little bit deeper. Kellogg and I are not Finance schools, right? Well, maybe that’s true. 17% of Kellogg’s students and

23% of MIT students study Finance. But if students do study none;">Finance, half of all students at Kellogg and 38% of all students Finance students, that is, again, at MIT go into PE and VC. These are far higher

percentages than those at the preeminent Finance school, Columbia Business School. So why is this? A few reasons. First off, most private Equity and venture

Capital firms don’t formally recruit at any school. It’s rare that they hold information sessions, interview on campus or sponsor events that are generally too small and their jobs are too much in demand. Rather, it’s a profession of connections, a true life

example of not what you know, but who you know. Second, you need to understand the path into this lofty world of PE and VC. It generally looks like this Investment Banking analyst, a private Equity analyst to business school. Back to private

Equity, though you can get there from consulting at times as well. Slightly different is the venture Capital world, where the trajectory may include a stop at a startup or a tech firm. So in some ways it becomes this virtuous cycle of the top schools accepting PE

or VC analysts and sending them back to the firms that they came from, or to other peer firms. So what do you do if your heart is set on PE or VC, but some of the top schools may be out of reach for you? For PE, start off with Investment Banking, which you get from many top 15

schools settle into a tough job, ideally focused on a single industry and then start talking to anyone and everyone you can at the more than 14,000 PE firms out there. Breaking into venture Capital may mean heading to a VC backed startup. Getting to know the funders, tracking down

partners and various funds and buying them lunch until the right connection is made. This is a route graduates from any business school can take. As you begin to broaden how you look at the world of text-decoration: none;">Finance, even more schools bubble up. Impact investing? Think Yale and its new Ming Impact Investment Fund actually run by students. Asset Management? Go to Texas, UCLA, Darden and actually manage millions of dollars in real

Assets. Real Estate Finance? North Carolina. Even if you don’t go there, go to UNC’s conference. And if you’re thinking about

corporate Finance more broadly, Budgeting, corporate structure, Cash Flow, you can get there from practically any top 30 business school. So

what is the best school for Finance? The short answer is it depends on what you mean by #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance. And for that reason, it may not be the school that you think. A final point in every top 20 school. There are graduates who go to every corner of the text-decoration: none;">Finance world. Sure, at HBS they may send 50 students to private Equity, but at other schools they’ll still send a few every year. And with the right amount of effort, it may just be you. Okay, that was pretty exhaustive, but if you

actually want more, please check out our insiders guides for more information on each of these schools.