Yep, didn't mean to imply otherwise. It does vary a lot between disciplines, though. There are a lot of successful people in support roles: technology, "back o

Yep, didn't mean to imply otherwise. It does vary a lot between disciplines, though. There are a lot of successful people in support roles: technology, "back office" (operations, settlements, legal), human resources, etc., from many backgrounds. Sales, research, trading, transactional M&A, wealth management and capital markets desks have a higher percentage of Ivy/prep school folks, especially for folks in the ~VP - younger MD range. Re: try-hard-ism: For example, Goldman derivatives trading struck me at one point as being made up of the lacrosse team captains from each Ivy. A lot of the older folks are "Brooklyn smart" whereas the younger folks are mostly "MIT smart" or "MBA smart". I had an interview with a private equity firm who told me re: their analyst program: "We hire only 24 year olds who went to private school, then an Ivy, then did a two-year program at a top tier investment bank. We find that if everyone we hire is the same person, it's easy for them to work together, and for us to work with them. We took a risk one time and hired someone with a different profile once, and it didn't work out." (Basically verbatim.)