The percentage of Ivy League graduates that go to Wall Street is stunning. I'm not sure that I buy the author's general thesis but some of the content rings true.
Excerpts:
The social determinists say these students are simply following their tribe. Finance, law and consulting employ smart, high-status individuals in desirable urban locales. Because Ivy League graduates are smart, high-status individuals who generally want to work and live among people like themselves, it makes sense that they take the road more traveled.
These two camps are not mutually exclusive. You can follow the money while you follow your friends. But I’m young enough to know a lot of these graduates, or at least a lot of their recent predecessors. In conversations with them, I’ve come to favor another explanation: Their educations are failing them.
In effect, Wall Street -- like a few other professions, including law, management consulting and Teach for America -- is taking advantage of the weakness of liberal arts education.
For many kids, college represents an end goal. Once you get into a good college, you’ve made it, and everyone stops worrying about you. You’re encouraged to take classes in subjects like English literature and history and political science, all of which are fine and interesting, but none of which leave you with marketable skills. After a few years of study, you suddenly find it’s late in your junior year, or early in your senior year, and you have no skills pointing to the obvious next step.
What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.
...
So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The issue isn’t that so many of their well-educated students want to go to Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It’s that so many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they’re not sure what other contribution they can make.
My hunch is that we have underemphasized the need to learn skills, rather than simply learn, while in college. The fact that Teach for America -- which pays almost nothing and can place its hires far from cosmopolitan hot spots -- is one of the few recruiting systems competitive with Wall Street suggests that graduates are open to paths that aren’t remotely as remunerative as finance and aren’t based in New York or San Francisco. They’re just not seeing all that many of them.
Klein: Harvard’s Liberal-Arts Failure Is Wall Street’s Gain - Bloomberg.
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