Top Feeder Companies To The Tuck School

Where’s McKinsey? Bain? BCG? Morgan Stanley? J.P. Morgan?

Not in Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business Class of 2013, according to an analysis of the class’s Facebook page by Poets&Quants. Commonly among the half dozen prestige firms that send vast numbers of MBA candidates to top business schools, they are surprisingly absent from the top 26 feeder companies for this year’s incoming class at Tuck.

Yet, just as surprising, the elite Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs has one of the largest contingents at Tuck this year: The estimated nine students from Goldman make up the second largest group in the class behind only Deloitte with an estimated 10 first-years.

After Deloitte and Goldman, the largest number of students represented in the class are from Ernst & Young, Google, LEK Consulting, and PriceWaterhouse Coopers.

The composition of the Tuck class is exceptionally diverse: Besides the typical array of consulting and financial service firms, there are students from Hewlett-Packard, ExxonMobil, Pfizer, Hyundai, Tata Group, and Walt Disney Co.

The Facebook data provides a rare glimpse into the educational and work backgrounds of the students accepted and enrolled at Dartmouth’s Tuck School. Business schools keep this information close to the vest, never disclosing this information in typical class profiles.

Yet, an applicant’s undergraduate and work backgrounds loom large in admission decisions, in some cases dwarfing the importance of other factors from grade point averages and GMAT scores to the quality of one’s essays or admissions interview.

The Tuck School data was collected from the Facebook page for the Class of 2013. Poets&Quants was able to identify and confirm the employment backgrounds of 220 members of the 268 MBA students enrolled in the incoming class. We then used that sample to estimate the number of students from any one institution in the full class.

There’s also a fair number of social entrepreneurs in the group with impressive credentials, often with more typical MBA stints on their resumes before getting into a non-profit environment. Crystal Leveillee, who graduated from Wellesley College in 2005, got into Tuck from a job as associate director of development for Uncommon Schools, a non-profit which starts and manages charter schools in urban areas, though she also did a two-year stint as an analyst at J.P. Morgan.

Andrew Olaleye, who graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia in 2007, spent three years at The Vanguard Group, before becoming the co-founder of a non-profit called Soccer Sisters United. The group provides academic and athletic support of  one of the few inner city all-minority girls’ soccer clubs.

James Valdes, who graduated from the College of New Jersey in 2005, co-founded FishAddix.com, an online community for anglers. As an analyst at J.P. Morgan Investment Bank for nearly three years, however, he was involved in more than 200 initial public offerings, follow-on and equity deals.

(See next page for table of the top feeder companies to Dartmouth’s Tuck School for the Class of 2013)