The Best Schools for American and Canadian Investment Banks Are Surprisingly Very Different

 

By: Tomiwa Ademidun and Elaine Yin

You would probably assume that the best schools for getting a job at Canadian investment banks would be the same as the best schools for American investment banks. However, that would be a wrong assumption. It turns out that Canadian and American investment banks have drastically different recruiting pipelines. For example, University of Toronto was by far the most popular choice for Canadian investment banks with 518 positions filled, while the next highest school, Waterloo had 298. For recruiting in American companies, Waterloo and Toronto finished 5th and 2nd respectively.

 

This is an excerpt of the investment banking chapter in our ebook, The Atila Schools and Jobs Guide | The Best Canadian Universities for the Best Jobs

It’d be interesting to figure out why there are so many Toronto and Waterloo students at Canadian Firms but they don’t have the same representation in American firms. Anecdotally, we’ve heard that American firms are more competitive, so if anything you would expect that the schools which performed well in American firms would also perform well in Canadian Firms, but this seems to not be the case. 

The counterpoint to that is that while  McGill doesn’t even finish in the top 5 amongst Canadian banks but when you look at American banks it finishes first by a comfortable margin.

It’s also important to not just look at how many students place at a company in a snapshot in time, but to look at how these numbers trend over time. For example, Western (and it’s Ivey Business School) is 5th in placements at Goldman Sachs. But if on a year-to-year basis it showed the most growth in it’s recruitment numbers, that could actually be a better indicator of the school’s performance in Investment Banking than the standalone numbers from a single year. 

      

Ideally, we would want to track these metrics over time and see which schools had the most improvement on a year-to-year basis, that could also offer a lot of insight into the state of the “next up and coming” schools.

This difference is also strikingly similar to the consulting chapter when we compared recruiting at Deloite and Accenture to recruiting at Mckinsey, Bain and BCG. In this scenario, Deloitte and Accenture recruiting matches the Canadian Banks, while recruiting and McKinsey, Bain,  BCG recruiting is similar to the American Banks. Recruiting at MBB and the American Investment banks reminds me of the way the legendary quantitative hedge fund, DE Shaw used to describe their recruiting standards, it’s “unapologetically elitist”. 

Elitist has a negative connotation and I don’t mean it pejoratively, I actually say it somewhat affectionately. These firms have very high standards, but they also have a reputation for producing excellent work for their clients and they compensate very well if you are able to meet their high expectations, so it seems like a fair tradeoff amongst all parties involved. But I digress, here are three interesting similarities between investment banking and consulting:

            1. Toronto leads by a large margin amongst American and Canadian Banks, but McGill leads when you look at MBB and American Banks. You   could say that Toronto is like an assault rifle that is able to land students because of the large size of its class. While McGill is more like a sniper and is very good at landing students at precisely the right, top companies. 

            2. As you move down the list of schools for Deloitte and Accenture and Canadian banks you see a gradual decline. Whereas for the MBB and m.       American banks, once you leave the top 5 schools (top 6 for investment banking) there is a steep dropoff separating the top “target schools” from the other schools.      

            3. A larger percentage of the workforce are in senior positions for both MBB and American banks. While in DA and Canadian banks they have a significantly larger proportion of their employees in the analyst class.For MBB and American banks, a larger percentage of their workforce is in upper-level positions like vice presidents, managers etc.

 

This is an excerpt of the investment banking chapter in our ebook, The Atila Schools and Jobs Guide | The Best Canadian Universities for the Best Jobs