I was class of ‘23. When I applied for college, I was very unaware of “college prestige” (wasn’t born in America) and simply applied for the city, so I applied to 4 schools in NYC: Columbia, NYU, Fordham, Pace. Only Pace and Fordham accepted, and I stupidly picked Pace, should have picked Fordham instead.
HS Stats: 3.3 GPA, 1480 SAT, triathlete all varsity, mock trial.
I majored in finance and didn’t realize how much college prestige mattered until I started recruiting. It was a special kinda hell recruiting from Pace, the school puts ZERO effort into developing finance recruiting pipeline (and no, accounting is not finance) and has zero alumni network in finance. Literally no one heard of the school, and when they googled it, “oh 80% acceptance rate and #250 on USnews ranking”.
Fordham has been making huge improvements in their finance recruiting pipeline, investing in internship on campus recruiting, alumni outreach, and ACTUALLY lowering the damn acceptance rate to not make their school looks like a fuckin charity. Whereas Pace is turning more and more into a theater school, rocking 80% acceptance rate and taking in sub 1100s SAT score theater kids. Which is especially ironic, since NOT EVEN THE THEATER KIDS ARE GETTING JOBS.
It took me blood, tears, and downright ego death to get my first internship and a year after grad to land full time role in finance.
It should never be this bad when the tuition is comparable to NYU, who is literally 100x better on every metric. Which is a shame because NYU literally filed for bankruptcy back in 1970’s, so for most of recent history, Pace was the better school. So please for the love of God, lower the damn acceptance rate and make real changes to actually make this school respectable.