Which school, if any, would be best for applying to a top 20 grad school?

[cstobler]

Hi,

It has been awhile since I have been on this forum. I was working towards my degree a few years ago, but ended up having to work for awhile to make ends meet. I am getting back to it now, but with my sights set on grad school, and since I am planning on going into Quantitative Analysis and Trading (Quant), it is pretty imperative to get into a good grad school.

I was doing some preliminary research, but I couldn't really find any good info on whether any of these schools would be suited for that, or if it would be harder to get into a good grad school with a degree from one of these schools. Does anyone have any info on this? Do you think that if I had a great GPA and a great GRE, I could get into a decent grad school? If you think that none of these schools would help me in my case, are there any other online schools that are more well known/prestigious?

I am brainstorming my options, but one way that could work would be to get my masters at a decent school that would still let me in from one of the big three, and then I could apply for a top PhD with a decent masters degree. Another method would be to figure out my target undergrad university, then figure out how many credits can be transferred, and transfer that many from TESU or another one of the big three. In essence "legitimizing" my CLEP tests to turn them into transferable credits.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Charlie