Careers
How Consulting Firms Choose Their Target Schools
Target lists are operational documents, not prestige rankings. They follow cohort density, geography and conversion rates.
Recruiting teams have finite calendars. A target school is one where a partner can spend an evening and meet enough qualified candidates to justify the trip, repeatedly, year after year.
Three variables dominate: the density of suitable candidates in one place, the travel cost of reaching them, and the historical conversion rate from final round to accepted offer. Prestige matters only insofar as it moves those three.
This is why large, analytically selective programmes in major commercial cities dominate target lists, and why a school's location is not a soft factor. Proximity to a firm's own office changes the economics of showing up.