A Yalie Takes A Stand against I-Banking
Posted on November 14th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Admidst the controversy about Occupy Harvard, Yale senior Marina Keegan blogs in Dealbook (on NYT.com) about how investment banks recruit on campus—and why so many students are seduced by their siren song.
Each fall, our country’s top-tier banks and consulting firms cram New Haven’s best hotels with the best and brightest to lure them with a series of superlatives: the greatest job, the most money, the easiest application, the fanciest popcorn.
They’re good at it. They’re unbelievably, remarkably, terrifyingly good at it. Every year around 25 percent of employed Yale graduates enter the consulting and finance industries. At Harvard and Stanford, the numbers are even higher.…
Keegan’s argument? There’s no innate love for i-banking on the part of young people. It’s just that they don’t really have a clue how to find work—and the i-banking recruiters make it sooooo easy……
(I myself think that this is slightly more true in New Haven than in Cambridge, where the popularity of economics concentrators suggests that more students come to Harvard already thinking about how to cash in on their $60k a year education.)
…that such a large percentage of students at top-tier schools enter an industry that isn’t contributing, creating or improving much of anything saddens me.
Twenty-five percent is not a joke. That’s a lot of people. That’s a lot of talent and energy and potential that could be used somewhere other than crunching numbers to generate wealth. Perhaps there won’t be fancy popcorn at some other job – but it’s about time we started popping it for ourselves.
Yup.
5 Responses
11/14/2011 9:49 pm
This is a better than average column of the genre, because it is equivocal on the question of whether the fault lies with the students or with the companies that recruit them. And it doesn’t state flat out that Yale is the evil party.
Keegan is certainly wrong to say “none of us are actually special.” (I bet she did not claim that about herself on her college applications!) I expect that these firms come to Yale and Harvard to exploit the quality of their admissions offices. A day spent in New Haven or Cambridge is just a day very efficiently spent, which is not to say that with more effort and time it would be impossible accomplish something similar in State College, PA.
Keegan is certainly right that these firms have the recruiting down to a science of which B.F. Skinner would be proud. Those tchotkes really do work. That’s why Google and Microsoft and Facebook have them too (and if you’ve ever seen the open snack spaces at those companies, you would laugh about the idea that popcorn would attract anyone).
So here is the question I would really like to know the answer to, because it would make the debate over this issue less emotional. Are the students who go to these jobs disproportionately (relative to the Yale or student body as a whole) children of the privileged or children of the underprivileged? I could imagine either (except that they couldn’t all be children of the privileged, there aren’t enough of them). Is the percentage of financial aid recipients in the group going to Wall Street more or less than the percentage in the College as a whole? If more, should we really be surprised, when we admit kids who have little money, and whose parents have little money, and whose siblings can’t afford to go to college, that they decide to try to make some money rather than doing TFA? It’s a different argument if those who decide to get richer are disproportionately rich already. I don’t know the answer (and am not particularly interested in answers confidently asserted by people with a data deficit but a surplus of axes to grind).
Neither the curriculum nor the leadership at either Harvard or Yale does much to convey the message that getting an education at one of these places is a privilege and the recipients have a duty to society, to civilization itself, to pay forward the debt. I don’t think the spirit of any of the great research universities does much along those lines. Maybe a good place to begin would be for the Yale president not to try flattering his university by comparing it to the airline of Singapore.
Of relevance: Shameless plug for a panel on civic education to be held at Harvard, at which I hope questions about the moral mission of undergraduate education might get debated a bit.
11/15/2011 6:57 am
Couple thoughts, Harry.
Levin’s remark was banal and silly, but I think his real crime there was trying to flatter his hosts.
Good question about financial aid recipients and Wall Street. My anecdotal hunch is that there’s no necessary correlation. Of my Yale classmates who went to Wall Street—and my family members who have—I thought the correlation was a) people who grew up in New York and saw the importance of having a lot of money there; b) people who grew up around money and were comfortable with it and used to it. Lots of Groton (my boarding school) folks went to Wall Street and as a general matter they came from money; it was easier to go with that flow than to defy it.
11/15/2011 7:28 am
But that was a different Yale. The number of those people in the class has gone down; they have been replaced by students on scholarship. Do we know that the number of students going from Yale to Wall Street has gone up? If so, it is hard to infer that it is because the rich are trying to get richer. More likely the poor are trying to get richer.
11/15/2011 7:31 am
richard, you’re always very animated by anything to do with Harvard’s president(s), but why not yale’s? this yale campus in singapore, for instance.
11/15/2011 7:58 pm
Anonymous 7.31am, why don’t you enlighten us regarding your issue with Yale’s international strategy. At least they have one. Harvard, in contrast, appointed a very high level committee to deliver a strategy. The committee produced a report 5 months ago and to date, the Harvard community has yet to hear what President Faust thinks about the report, or to be able to read the report itself.
It seems that in New Haven things happen in the open, under light.
And by the way, Yale has more than a campus in Singapore, I just visited a whole liberal arts college they are building in China.