Posted on 02/18/2012 1:12:55 PM PST by SeekAndFind
It's reasonable to fret that Wall Street is vacuuming up all the best talent from our top colleges. But why? Ezra Klein argues in the Washington Post that investment banking recruiters are filling a psychic void left by liberal education itself. His column is welcome, though it's running a bit late. The proportion of employed new Harvard graduates in finance, for example, dropped from 28 percent to 17 percent between 2008 and 2011. But the number may yet bounce back, so the interesting question is why it was ever so high.
It's not the salaries or peer encouragement. It's that
. . . Wall Street -- like law, management consulting and Teach for America -- is taking advantage of the weakness in 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, an incredible work ethic 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Because Ms. Walls lets them?
In order to pay half-a-million in college loans.
What is this - amateur hour?
Ivy grads are driven, hard working, and like $.
If that is you - and you aren’t going to med school - BY FAR the best place to go is Wall St. These guys bust their ass - and get paid $$$$$ to do it = with an upside of $$$$$$$$ -
Three Ivys -
I’m an engineer - MBA - still sort of upper mid class.
Sister - Phd - Bio Chemistry - can’t find work.
Sister 2 - Wall St - Can buy and sell us multiple times over.
The engineer and the Phd beat the Wall St girl on SAT. She could barely get a job - caught on with fidelity - and ..... multi millionaire.
This article is - literally - ridiculous.
The modern kids = can see EXACTLY what is going on in this society - even the Drs from my generation - surgeons and cardiologists - are smarter, sacrificed more, and work harder for their $ - than Wall Streeters.
Actually we should be grateful. If Wall Street doesn't soak up this refuse, they will inflict their educated stupidity on the rest of us, in ways that could really count.
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