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 ...
To the headline: why not?
Hmmmmm, Ivy League grads to to Wall Street.
Wall Street is a seething hive of incompetency and criminality.
Just wondering if.......
Why did Willie Sutton rob banks?
I guess you have to be an intellectual to give a lengthy answer to this mystery.
It’s reasonable to fret that Wall Street is vacuuming up all the best talent from our top colleges.
Given the unethical behaviour and incompetence shown by the banking industry, I hope we run out of that kind of talent soon.
..because you don’t go to Home Depot to buy hard salami.
The old boy network. Same as congress.
All your profs scream, “wealth is bad!” —but they’re GRADING you, so you just shuttup, even though YOU know that wealth is good.
And later these robber guys on WS in the interview say, “wealth is good”, and that sounds MUCH more familiar.
So they go there, and end up becomign little robbers, in the process paying back the Hitlerian snob with the suede patches on his elbows, from years ago.
“..because you don’t go to Home Depot to buy hard salami.”
According to rumor, it can be found in the restrooms;)
Or....because they can
Answer: The well springs of opportunity have dried up!
Because the Ivy League turns them into godless addicted gamblers?
Ivy isn’t about an education. It is about contacts and making friends . Their friends go to Wall Steet so they do.
Can that be correct? I would have guessed that it was a steady 100%.
Precisely, and it was my first thought, as well!
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