Good to meet you osborncox
@topcan
I'll stir the pot a little. When you measure MC jobs as a yardstick for how good a school is for placing people in MC, you need to be careful of three things:
1) How many of these people were ALREADY in MC
2) How many of the student body even bother applying to MC
3) How many of them are placed IN a head office (e.g. London or NY or Paris) and how many were placed in satellite offices
Reason 1 is fairly self evident. 2 is important because it is a self selection argument . 3 is interesting and I did not know about this until I joined b-school and interacted with folks interested in consulting. Comprehensive statistical analysis conducted over beers at a pub suggest that it is a lot easier to get placed in an smaller office of any consulting firm than in the major centers. London office in particular is very high in demand; most LBS folks tend to apply to London office (or say Munich office for Roland Berger) and placements here should be given a higher weight. I believe the NY schools have this problem too.
Anyway the original question was around the student body and environment of the school. So let me start with a few quick differences :
1. Size (as someone mentioned earlier INSEAD is 3x the size of LBS). Do you want a tight knit community or do you want to lost in a crowd
2. Location - self evident in terms of busy city v/s quiet city and also in terms of opportunities you have to self recruit and reach out to interesting industries (that would never come to recruit at b-school normally)
3. Time frame - Would you have time to explore career ops beyond consulting at INSEAD ? Probably not in 1 year. Furthermore will you have enough time to have fun / bond and study and find the dream job in 1 year ?
4. Exchange - INSEAD does only Wharton and has a campus in Singapore I believe(I could well be wrong here). LBS does well most of the world.... (including Wharton and Singapore)
5. Expenses - LBS WILL be more expensive period
6. Work permit - If you are non EU and wanted to work in UK, you will, going forward have some interesting times trying to obtain tier 2 sponsorship from UK employers. The cap doesn't apply to UK graduates
7. Other programs - LBS also has a large contingent of other programmes running simultaneously such as the Masters in Finance, Masters in Management (catered to fresh graduates), Executive programmes such as EMBA and Sloan which is offers along with MIT and Stanford). This makes LBS campus a great networking and social hub.
These are some quick differentiators to answer the original question. I'm sure there are more. But at the end of the day everyone has a different priority set which determines which school they apply and go to. Doesn't mean that school a is better than school b etc. This thread has become a pro/con discussion to a A > B discussion more often seen on b-week threads.
osbornecox wrote:
LBS is nothing to scoff at, but I haven't met anyone who swears by and raves about it the way I have with INSEAD, which has legions of followers (I include Brits in this assessment!). The rationale for choosing LBS is that you want to get a finance job in the City of London or Canary Wharf, or that you want the internship to experiment - in these cases, it is a wiser option over INSEAD. Otherwise, all other paths point to INSEAD as being the more rational choice, with the caveat that US employers still haven't quite figured these two schools out and therefore their US placement doesn't live up to the caliber of their student bodies (on a separate note, I see this as indicative of how 'international perspective' truly ranks in the pecking order of US priorities - LOW).