Top Feeder Companies to Chicago Booth

Former employees of the Big Four accounting firms–Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG–account for half the top eight feeder companies into the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, according to an analysis of the class’s Facebook page by Poets&Quants. Financial firms figure prominently on the list, befitting the school’s strong reputation in finance. Citgroup, Goldman Sachs, BankofAmerica, and Swiss-based UBS are among the top ten.

But there’s also a wide range of companies represented from such industries as technology, consulting, consumer packaging. They range from Microsoft and IBM to Bain and McKinsey.

The Facebook data provides a rare glimpse into the educational and work backgrounds of the students accepted and enrolled at Chicago’s Booth School of Business. 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 Booth 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 407 members of the 575 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.

The list of the top feeder companies to Booth fails to fully capture the wide diversity of this year’s incoming class which boasts a snowboard instructor, a pro golfer and director of student development at CamelBack Church, the manager of organization effectiveness at American Express, a software engineer from Cisco, the deputy research director for the Democratic National Committee, a science editor from book publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a mayoral fellow from Baltimore, and a high school math teacher for Teach for America.

Many of the MBA students, moreover, hail from smaller financial companies that lack a national or global profile. Callieach De Weingart-R, for example, worked at Advent International after stints in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. Ryan Pertz, who gained his undergraduate degree from Duke, worked as an associate at HM Capital Partners after a stay at JP Morgan. Andrea Brezing, another Duke grad who worked for Goldman Sachs, worked at Protege Partners, an investment management firm that invested in small hedge funds.

Though Chicago has a smaller representation of MBA students from the military than some other schools (none of the military academies, for example, make the top feeder organization list), there are some notable military recruits to the MBA class: Mike Bigrigg, who graduaed from the U.S. Navy Academy, was a wounded warrior transition officer with the U.S. Marines Corps. Paul Creedon, a graduate of Boston College, was a submarine officer in the U.S. Navy. And Brady Noon, a who earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester, managed and negotiated weapons systems for the Navy.

(See next page for table of the top feeder companies for Chicago’s Booth School of Business Class of 2013).