HBS vs MIT vs Princeton vs Stanford

[therealslimkt]

Posting for a friend who's not on this forum. He's choosing between HBS, MIT, Princeton and Stanford. Interested broadly in behavioral/experimental/micro theory - not really committed to any field but that's the neighborhood.

 

How would you rank the choices and why?

[ftcrazyft]

Someone I know has a similar dilemma (not the exact same schools) and multiple senior and junior professors at a top 10 institution are all telling him the same things: econ program gives you a better shot on the job market. The down side is that you have to work harder given that the faculty to student ratio is lower, and most of the time funding is lower.

 

That said given the particular area of interest I would rank them as follow: MIT, Stanford, HBS, Princeton. HBS is probably the only B School that has better placements than the lower ranked top 10 econ programs. Although if your friend wants to do behavioral instead of experimental, I would rank MIT much lower.

 

Hopefully others can give additional info or correct me if I'm wrong.

[pulsars]

Harvard is probably the best for behavioral. I think HBS students can work with Harvard econ profs, although I don't know the extent to which they are "allowed" to work on theory (from my impression, HBS is heavily IO/finance).

[mathenomics]

(deleted) Edited March 1, 2019 by mathenomics
(mistakenly gave an irrelevant answer. deleted!)

[drrtgcc]

If the interest lies mostly in Behavioral/Experimental and micro theory, then definitely HBS, I would think. There is no real practical distinction between HBS and Harvard Econ. You share the first-year and second-year classes, share offices with Harvard Econ people in the Econ building (on top of getting your own second office at HBS), and absolutely have the same access to Harvard Econ professors as regular Econ folk. Any field is available to you as an HBS student that is available to Harvard Econ, so the two programs are in practice one and the same (except HBS has added perks like presumably more money, the second office, etc.), and some slight differences in requirements re: the "distribution requirement" versus some MBA courses, but that should not be an issue.

 

So conditional on an interest in Behavioral, you can't go wrong with Harvard (Rabin, Laibson, Shleifer, Gabaix, Ben Enke, Gautam Rao, David Yang, Shengwu Li, etc.)

[kingofsartre]

Harvard is top for behavioral. No other school comes close. HBS.