Drew Faust, Wall Street and the Failure of the Liberal Arts
Posted on February 16th, 2012 in Uncategorized | 15 Comments »
Writing for Bloomberg, Ezra Klein analyzes why so many Ivy League grads go work for Wall Street.
(The numbers are ridiculous: 17% of Harvard grads, 14% of Yale grads, 36% of Princeton grads. Princeton, that is pathetic.)
Klein references Drew Faust’s cri de coeur protesting Wall Street’s “all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut,” but Klein suggest she would do better by taking a good hard look at the failures of a Harvard education.
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.
One very astute point that Klein makes: Wall Street firms deliberately make applying to them feel like you’re applying to Harvard…because it’s a familiar process to the kind of kid who’s been applying to Harvard, in a sense, all his or her life.
And then there’s this:
A bigger draw, explained a recent Harvard graduate who majored in social science and worked at Goldman Sachs for two years, is how Wall Street sells itself to potential applicants: As a low-risk, high-return opportunity that they can try for a few years and, whether they like it or hate it, use to acquire real skills to build careers.
In other words, Wall Street is promising to give graduates the skills their university education didn’t.
I remember from my own college days that, if you wanted to go work for a bank or, to a somewhat lesser extent, a Fortune 500 company, Yale’s Office of Career Services had plenty of opportunities. For journalism, pretty much zip. And I’d been writing for a student magazine while at Yale, something relatively pre-professional. What of all my fellow history majors who didn’t have at least that? Hello, Goldman!
15 Responses
2/16/2012 10:11 am
Richard,
These are troubling statistics but “the failure of the liberal arts” is the wrong headline. Liberal arts aren’t designed to *prepare* anyone for anything. Period.
If there’s a story here it’s about a failure in college career-services offices, or in the professions themselves that are not doing enough to attract talent. Teach for America, whatever its value in the public schools it serves, has proven that industries in need of Ivy League talent can create processes that catch the interest (and harness the competitiveness) of these students.
It’s possible that career-services offices are under-resourced, but other than that I think liberal-arts schools should not worry about this too much. It’s simply not part of the mission.
Harry will rightly point out that inculcating non-Wall-Street values IS part of the mission, and I agree. But I think these numbers would only speak to that concern if they reflected how many Ivy League grads STAY on Wall Street for more than three or four years.
SE
2/16/2012 10:13 am
A decade of ski-bumming, in my case!
Yale’89
2/16/2012 10:26 am
SE-
I think you’re right that the liberal arts aren’t intended to prepare one for anything, but they probably should be-at least to prepare one to be an active, thoughtful, responsible citizen.
But more to the point, your point goes to the tension inherent in this discussion, which is: With Harvard et al costing 50k a year, and a time of high unemployment, especially among young people, is the university failing in some way by not doing more to prepare its students for the pragmatic realities of post-collegiate life?
I don’t actually think there’s anything inherently wrong with going to Wall Street; what I think needs to happen is to really spur students to think about *why* they’re going to Wall Street, to get them thinking about ethics and values and honor and responsibility.
(Old-fashioned terms, I know, but that’s me.)
We need Wall Street for many things, and one wouldn’t want to simply abdicate from participating in finance (just as, Harry Lewis has often pointed out, we don’t want Ivy League kids to bail on military service).
But we do need to really encourage young people to think about the culture and values of the financial industry before they are completely sucked into it….
2/16/2012 10:27 am
Yale ’89-serious question-how did you pull that off?
2/16/2012 11:30 am
I was a clueless history major graduating magna cum laude with no idea what to do. I remember going to the career office and flipping through binders of gallery assistant jobs in NYC, things like that, paying almost no money. I think I really expected someone to tap me on the shoulder - wasn’t this Yale? - and recruit me for CIA, State, the New Yorker, something. (I’d become a columnist at the YDN in my senior year, for the little that’s worth.)
So, with my family already living in Europe, I made it to the Alps, not immediately but soon enough (there was a small, almost useless detour in Washington DC). And because I liked skiing, and the scenery, and had the time for a lot of reading and writing, that determined the next decade. I don’t recommend it for most people. The absence of what might be called ‘career formation,’ in that period, is something I’m still paying for now.
(E Weinberger)
2/16/2012 11:40 am
“is the university failing in some way by not doing more to prepare its students for the pragmatic realities of post-collegiate life?”
Nope.
Should it teach students to “think about the culture and values of the financial industry”?
Yes.
2/16/2012 6:00 pm
Coming in late here. The problem is not with the career services offices; unless they decided to keep willing employers away from willing future employees, they are always going to seem to give more access to employers who are better able to afford the recruiting trips to the Ivy campuses. The problem is not that Yale doesn’t accommodate lower paying employers, it’s that lower paying employers can’t afford to send people to campus to do the recruiting. (And of course even if it were right to interfere with the labor market by throwing the finance firms off campus, it would backfire; they would just set up camp in a hotel and start making exploding offers and so on, abuses that the university can to a degree control in exchange for access to the campus venue.)
And directly taking on Wall Street or the consulting firms as though they were the enemy would be silly. Students are too smart for that. The real fix here is to dignify the discussion of what life is about all through the four years of college, so that when they are seniors students will ask themselves the right questions about whatever choices they make next. Especially at places like Harvard and Yale, which are almost fully residential, it is ridiculous to think we can’t move students’ moral compass a bit against the tides of materialism. We just have to want to do it.
2/16/2012 6:38 pm
Harry is spot on!
The houses were designed to be multi-generational intellectual communities - living in the Quincy House that I knew as an undergraduate were the chairs of two departments (Celtic and Philosophy), the Dean (and a future Dean) of the Kennedy School, the general editor of the Pelican Shakespeare, and young scholars in a wide variety of disciplines. The Senior Common Room included such luminaries as David Riesman, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Leon Kirchner, and Stuart Hughes - all of whom I met at a Quincy House meal. The guest suite was occupied during my junior year by the president of the University of Toronto, on leave at Harvard. My contact with them all, as well as with the graduate students who were house tutors, was a significant part of my Harvard experience.
These days most Houses are populated only by undergraduates and graduate students (not just from GSAS, but from the professional schools, too), with little or no FAS faculty involvement. The decline of Harvard’s residential houses into dormitories is a tragedy brought about in part by the failure of Harvard’s faculty and administration to support the house system. Harvard has stopped trying to make the house system work.
2/16/2012 9:08 pm
I agree passionately with Mr. Levy about the House system and the College’s failure to focus on that system’s purposes. But I don’t agree that the multigenerational academic community of a House should serve as *professional* role models to students. The vast majority of students will not and should not be academics.
Harry, what do you think about Harvard subsidizing public-service employers to come to campus? It would require a definition of ‘public service,’ but then it could be a simple reimbursement of expenses plus a hefty opportunity-cost per diem for recruiters.
Dicy to implement but could be a great signal.
SE
2/17/2012 7:26 am
SE, you are attacking the problem in the wrong place, as I said. Sounds like silly symbolism.
Take a look at the list of different career fairs at Harvard. It’s not like there’s nothing but recruiters and bankers coming to town recruiting or that Harvard career services does nothing to highlight alternative career paths.
Questions like the one you ask are meaningless unless posed with an answer to “instead of what?” Budgets are pretty tight around here these days, if you look at what is happening in the libraries for example. On the other hand if it were instead of paying for the Digital Harvard in Austin at SXSW, maybe!
2/17/2012 9:56 am
By the way, the student Klein quotes for a local perspective on this was not exactly picked at random. “Taking a job at Goldman Sachs is immoral.” Occupy Recruiting
2/17/2012 9:57 am
Occupy Recruiting
2/17/2012 10:55 am
Instead of campuswide festivals.
Also, make faculty meetings BYOO (bring your own Oreos).
You know I agree with you about the moral-reasoning thing, I trust.
2/18/2012 1:30 am
I’m very interested in these debates. We will likely be exploring these questions at my institution (Brown) in 2012, asking What is the Value of Liberal Education? (Harry, SE, Richard, come speak?) It will be a pilot event, with colleagues at about 10 other R1 universities (Yale, Stanford, UWashington, UCal Berkeley, UMichican, etc) interested in following suit with similar events, all with the aim of starting a national conversation about this topic.
I’m working with our career services (now named CareerLAB, ie Life After Brown) and we hope to capitalize on the work done in the dean of the college office in creating Focal Point, where you can select various interests )Law, Management) and see what concentrations/majors have connected with that career goal in the last ten years. It is something of a performative tool (click on English, Life After Brown, and you’ll see our survey of graduates of the last 10 years, from law, medicine, consulting, to journalism and more), far from perfect. It’s the need of the tool that still amazes me: that there is a need for “Mom, Dad, I’m an English major . . ” narratives telling us that “it gets better.”
It’s worth noting that whereas Brown’s biggest employer a number of years ago was Lehman Brothers, it is now Teach for America (see SE’s post above!). In my estimation, students seem now more goal oriented even when they are choosing their major, yet they are certainly swayed by the prestige of Teach for America.
Students at a place like Brown-with it’s open curriculum-may seem to be a population convinced of the values of a liberal curriculum. But I’ve found even here-where a liberal education may be of its most value (that is to say, that I acknowledge that not all students at all institutions may want a liberal education)-students are increasingly professionally driven. That is to say, far before they get to a career fair-of the type Harry points out-they are designing their studies around a professional goal.
2/20/2012 9:20 pm
I blogged about Jeremy Lin over on my own site, and quoted this wonderful aspiration for Harvard, which is relevant to this thread too: that it might be “a college in which not all the students have looked on school just as preparation for college, college as preparation for graduate school and graduate school as preparation for they know not what.” The author was the dean of admissions — W. Bender, writing on the occasion of his retirement in 1960!