These College Grads Aren't Worried About The Future

Within just weeks, the Class of 2014 will be pouring out of the nation's colleges into a job market that is slightly better than last year's but still a bit uncertain. But at one school and one major--at least--there are no concerns whatsoever.

With graduation set for May 18th, the latest crop of undergrads at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is being eagerly received by an otherwise so-so job market. Led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, a veritable Who’s Who of America’s Corporate Elite have been waving some hefty job offers at the roughly 650 students in the Class of 2014, making freshly minted Whartonites among the most richly paid business undergraduates in the world.

More than 80% of the class is expected to receive average sign-on bonuses of nearly $10,000, on top of annual bonuses over $26,000 each, more than what many MBAs get. And the base salary for these undergrads? While the numbers aren’t yet in, last year’s class averaged an enviable $67,986–and this year the average is likely to pop slightly higher.

As Zoe Greenberg reports for Poets&Quants, Wharton is one of the most respected, and selective, undergraduate business programs in the country. The University of Pennsylvania has a 12% acceptance rate, and doesn’t break the statistics down by school—though the rumors are that Wharton is harder to get into than Penn. It’s not difficult to understand why: Besides the obvious rewards after commencement, students at Wharton have the opportunity to take classes in any of the four undergraduate schools at the University of Pennsylvania, while also studying with leading professors of business and innovation in their own program.

Regardless of what field students are entering, the job prospects for Wharton graduates are quite good. The average senior in the class of 2013 had 11.5 interviews and 2.2 job offers during senior year, according to Barbara Hewitt, the senior associate director of career services at Penn. The numbers are slightly skewed because nearly 40% of students accepted offers after junior year summer internships; those students frequently don’t interview at all during their senior year. Many other students received job offers from their summer employers but did not accept them, and those students tend to interview more selectively with employers than they might otherwise, Hewitt said. About 84% of graduating students had secured a job by graduation senior year.

Even if there’s some truth to the stereotypical Whartonite working no-holds-barred toward a banking internship in New York, students praised the diverse pool of peers and professors they’d met at the school. Students describe the community as “tight-knit,” “welcoming,” and “kind,” and raved about the experience of meeting people from every social, racial, geographic, and political background.

“If you’re really low key and casual, sometimes a person will say—oh you’re in Wharton? I never would have pegged you as that,” Salty says.

Many of the students talk about the stereotypical Wharton undergraduate, a character described as someone who “takes a finance concentration, gets an internship every summer, goes through the on-campus recruitment process, and then moves to New York after graduation.”

The stereotype isn’t entirely inaccurate. About 54% of students in the class of 2013 went into finance and 21% went into consulting after graduation. About 50% of students in the class of 2013 moved to New York after graduation.

The dominance of finance and consulting can be both exciting and frustrating to students on campus.

Lisa Xu says that she was surprised by the lack of diversity in terms of concentration when she arrived on campus. She described meeting people freshmen year who dreamed of starting their own businesses; now they work at Goldman Sachs. “If you’re not swimming in one direction or the other, the current will just pull you,” she says.

Maxine Winston, a senior who will be doing strategy consulting in Boston next year, said the community was one of the unexpected pleasures of going to Wharton.

“I feel like I’ve learned just as much inside the classroom as I have outside of the classroom, just talking to people. I’ve learned a lot from my peers,” she says.

Students at Wharton are a disciplined and devoted bunch, working to achieve in one of the most challenging undergraduate business programs in the country. And you can tell the future is often on their minds.

As we’re leaving an interview, Lynda Yang, a sophomore interested in business and journalism from Shenzhen, China, turns to me and asks, “What are you planning to do with the next few years?” Then she laughs.

“That’s such a Wharton question. We’re always asking each other—what are you planning for the summer? For after graduation?”

To find out who is hiring Wharton's undergrads, check out PoetsandQuants.com:

Top 25 Employers of Wharton Undrgraduates