What are some of the cons of top colleges?

Answered

Just off the top of my head only 3 on that list of 8 top colleges offer a Finance Major as an undergraduate degree The 3 would be MIT (Sloan), UPenn (Wharton), and Cornell (Dyson). Finance at Columbia, Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, and Harvard not available undergraduate majors. At Columbia and Harvard and Dartmouth, you can get an M.B.A focused on Finance. Arguably, most Wall Street folk, would say that the Sloan and Wharton degrees are more coveted and have more clout than the Cornell one.

There are many career paths with a Finance degree from working on a trading desk at an investment bank to corporate finance to being a consultant or money/asset manager.

I would narrow down what your end goal is and talk to some working professionals and see where their companies recruit from. In the US, the top investment banks are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan/Chase. They all recruit from different colleges some are overlaps others may surprise the readers. Depending on what job you want, you have to determine whether getting an MBA from a Top school is worth the effort since the many of the best financial firms prefer MBA students for their management training programs.

Morgan Stanley recruits from these schools:

Baruch College - CUNY

New York University

Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Columbia University

London School of Economics

The University of Maryland, College Park

University of Pennsylvania

Goldman Sachs recruits from these schools:

Cornell

Harvard

Columbia

Oxford University

Cambridge University

UPenn

NYU

Princeton

Stanford

JP Morgan recruits from these schools:

London School of Economics

New York University

Columbia University

University of Pennsylvania

Baruch College

MIT

Harvard University

University of Chicago

Stanford University

Caveat. If you attended any of the 8 schools, there is a good possibility to still be recruited for a job in the financial industries but maybe not the exact career path you want. Top Wall Street companies definitely recruit at all 8 schools but maybe if they hire a Dartmouth or Williams grad on the trading floor it's because they have excellent salesmanship and personalities or or other qualities outside of the major and the dept. head feels they can learn the rest on the job.