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What you are saying mostly applicable for only the big names you mentioned, not quant industry itself. Firstly, unlike IB or consulting quant doesn’t do nepo recruiting. It might have been your observation but that’s not a fact, especially for the firms you mentioned. Most sane managers wouldn’t be leaving billions of dollars assets for a dumb nepo kid to handle. In IB or PE or consulting, you can do that cause you don’t need any skills besides yapping and capping. And even in lesser known firms where the nepo practices exist, the nepo kids surely wouldn’t be in a quant position. They will probably be the useless manager who barfing around the quants, telling them to do things while not knowing shit.
School elitism is true, but nowhere to the extent of finance again. You see people from those 5 schools mainly because those 5 schools were most Olympiad kids go. And again it’s only true for the big names like HRT. There are hundreds of quant firms in the country which routinely recruit students from more moderate universities like UT Austin, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Duke, UCSD, Purdue etc (by moderate I mean outside of the big 5). There are gas and energy trading firms in Texas and Florida who regularly come to these schools. But they also pay less, most of them pay 180K total in average in first year. I did two quant internships, both of them were at two moderately sized firms, and met a bunch of ppl from various state and mid tier unis.
Lastly, yes for Jane street, HRT, I think it would be odd to find someone who wasn’t a math or coding geek in middle school. My friend who is international and won medals in 3 different international olympiads (people can’t imagine how insane that is), got rejected by all top quant firms. He reached the final rounds in most of them. He shared some of the questions with me, they ask so many hardcore open ended problems (even in trading positions) which is impossible to navigate if you don’t have years of experience in solving Olympiad problems.

What you are saying mostly applicable for only the big names you mentioned, not quant industry itself. Firstly, unlike IB or consulting quant doesn’t do nepo recruiting. It might have been your observation but that’s not a fact, especially for the firms you mentioned. Most sane managers wouldn’t be leaving billions of dollars assets for a dumb nepo kid to handle. In IB or PE or consulting, you can do that cause you don’t need any skills besides yapping and capping. And even in lesser known firms where the nepo practices exist, the nepo kids surely wouldn’t be in a quant position. They will probably be the useless manager who barfing around the quants, telling them to do things while not knowing shit.
School elitism is true, but nowhere to the extent of finance again. You see people from those 5 schools mainly because those 5 schools were most Olympiad kids go. And again it’s only true for the big names like HRT. There are hundreds of quant firms in the country which routinely recruit students from more moderate universities like UT Austin, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, Duke, UCSD, Purdue etc (by moderate I mean outside of the big 5). There are gas and energy trading firms in Texas and Florida who regularly come to these schools. But they also pay less, most of them pay 180K total in average in first year. I did two quant internships, both of them were at two moderately sized firms, and met a bunch of ppl from various state and mid tier unis.
Lastly, yes for Jane street, HRT, I think it would be odd to find someone who wasn’t a math or coding geek in middle school. My friend who is international and won medals in 3 different international olympiads (people can’t imagine how insane that is), got rejected by all top quant firms. He reached the final rounds in most of them. He shared some of the questions with me, they ask so many hardcore open ended problems (even in trading positions) which is impossible to navigate if you don’t have years of experience in solving Olympiad problems.

They visited my uni, UT Austin, a couple of weeks ago