You should add: "I'll need a $500G job to pay off my education costs. As a Ivy League School Graduate I won't be much wiser, but also much dumber than other graduates, so I'm sure I'll get a job. Look, last week I made $135 trading eminis, so I'm smarter than some top CEOs. I want 2 B your School student sooo much! Please let me in. Full respect, man... Aphie Aphexcoil Corso, I guess their connections plus documented knowledge help them to get a fund manager job. I don't think that at Ivy League Schools you can learn some valuable things which aren't available on the internet for free.
One more thing: it doesn't look good (on a fund website for example) when fund manager has finished high school only! For marketing purposes and fund image - MBA, PhD or some famous University Degree is some sort of guarantee that manager knows what he's doing. Yeah you can give LTCM example here, guys with Nobel Prize...
"However, in the hedge fund industry none of that matters! The only thing that matters is good, consistent, objective returns." That is just naive and untrue. At any given time there are lots of absolutely shitty fund managers out there, many of them MBA types from top schools. Of course, they don't last very long, but then they just get replaced by more of the same. They pick Ivy leaguers because if a guy screws up, the guy that hired him can say "but he had great credentials, so its not my fault". Credentials help raise money for funds, and help to deflect blame when losses occur.
G'day mate! This is a bit of sports trivia actually. While we spell it "Ivy", and it is appropriate, the real name comes from the days when there were four teams playing football together, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and I cannot remember the fourth. But it was called the IV League. Hence the name. Now here is another.... Name 10 Divison 1-A football teams, whose name does not end with the letter "S"! For example, UCLA Bruins does. Name 10 who do not.
... Perhaps a measure of intelligence of the customers and management of these hedge funds and wall street firms is that they believe the best candidates are only available at Harvard etc. Start observing the business world: many world class companies are NOT dominated or headed by a Harvard or other top buisness scholl alum. In fact if you look at the list of indicted officers and directors in recent years it appears that the list is skewed towards graduates of top business schools. The culture on the street is one of money and top schools are where money hangs out and thus it makes sense to recruit where the odds favor a corporate culture match and perhaps, added benefits through connections to the firm. I'm sure that harvard, stanford, UChicago etc wished they could control the world. Fortunately, for society, they dont.
I agree. This is how I feel after getting a degree from an Ivy league school, and then working at several investment banks and a hedge fund.