How Elite Colleges Still Feed Wall Street’s Recruiting Machine

Richard Drew/Associated PressThe financial industry continues to lure many graduates of elite universities.

Three and a half years have passed since the onset of the financial crisis, and the public hasn’t changed the way it talks about Wall Street and its future. Journalists, politicians and even the Occupy movement have shaped our discussion by analyzing — and often attacking — the bankers at the helm.

Again and again we read about the forces driving the industry today, when we should be looking to the people who will lead Wall Street tomorrow.

Though recent media reports suggest that elite students are growing disillusioned by Wall Street, the numbers are unconvincing. Among the class of 2011, the financial industry was the top employer of graduates of Harvard, Duke, Columbia and even the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school.

To claim the infatuation with Wall Street has come to an end is to disregard the forces underlying this phenomenon. Until we address what is drawing students to investment banking — and what is driving them once they get there — the brain drain to Wall Street won’t change, and Wall Street won’t, either.

Two years ago, I graduated from Duke, one of many elite colleges that function as a farm team for Wall Street. Four years before then, I had never heard of Goldman Sachs. A bank had always been that one-story building across from a gas station where my mom deposited checks and I took more lollipops than I was supposed to. But at Duke, I was quickly seduced by a Wall Street recruiting machine that is reshaping the culture of higher education and diverting the career paths of our best and brightest.

My generation has come of age in a society that tells its youth that we can do or be anything, but never mentions the suffocating price tag attached to our dreams. Like many of my peers, I entered college with unbridled ambition, only to confront a harsh economic reality: undergraduate loans, costly post-graduate degrees and high unemployment. In 2010, the average college student graduated with $25,000 in loans, the highest tally on record. Student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. No wonder our priorities are skewed.

The financial pressures manifest themselves in different ways on different campuses, but at the country’s most-esteemed schools, the economy has precipitated Wall Street’s recruiting supremacy. When a six-figure income, including bonus, is dangled in front of a 22-year-old’s nose, it’s tough to stomach the thought of taking on the average $158,000 debt-load of today’s medical student, or shelling out $50,000 a year for a master’s degree.

So we head to Wall Street, rationalizing that we will stay for “just a year or two.” Once there, it’s tough to leave. A 2011 Bloomberg article reported that a banker with 10 years’ experience specializing in mergers will earn $2 million a year — more than 10 times the salary of an equally experienced cancer researcher or aerospace engineer.

But to attribute the industry’s appeal solely to our financial predicament is simplistic. We’ve been deemed the “Me Generation” for good reason. And Wall Street recruiters are more than happy to cater to our sense of entitlement.

They and their Ivy-pedigreed employees bombard campuses for weeks to shower us with fancy dinners, lavish trips to Manhattan and promises of a challenging, rewarding career. They tap into our competitiveness, so their internship programs begin recruiting us as sophomores, knowing that if we are offered opportunities to build our résumés, we won’t just apply, but we’ll commit ourselves so fully that we’ll mistake our desire to win the race with a desire for what it is we’re chasing.

I navigated a salacious recruiting process. I watched ruthless and cunning peers excel, and the more good-hearted crumble. I saw that being popular, good-looking and able to drink hard seemed to matter more than being smart. And as I began my internship search in the midst of the financial crisis, while the industry and our economy crumbled around us, not a single banker I met acknowledged blame on Wall Street’s part.

In the end, I landed a coveted offer, then turned it down because I had grown disillusioned by a toxic culture. Yet my classmates flocked to finance in astounding numbers, and continue to do so — not because they expect the industry to change but because they hope it will not.

It’s time to stop talking about Lloyd Blankfein, Greg Smith and Jamie Dimon. Instead of criticizing the decisions made in the executive suite, we need to focus on reforming the training grounds.

Unless universities re-examine their role in enabling Wall Street’s recruiting dominance, the next generation will be just like mine — primed for success, but lacking purpose. And unless our policy makers provide incentives to students to pursue more productive careers, Wall Street’s cachet will continue to highlight one of society’s ills: we charge heftily for an education, and then foolishly expect the educated to use their diplomas for the benefit of society.

Laura Newland, a 2010 graduate of Duke University, is a management consultant in Philadelphia. She is writing a book about college life and the influence of Wall Street on today’s campuses.

Source & Image : New York Times