Op-Ed
Vindicated — But Jobless
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Agree to Disagree
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It was six months ago — my how the time flies! — that I first went public with my anti-finance tirades. In calling out the “finance types” here among us, I aroused the ire of my investment banking-leaning peers, who ridiculed my entreaties to do something more valuable with their Ivy League degrees than crunch numbers for $125k-plus bonus as some pinko yackety-yak best left unread.
Yet here we are half a year later, the economy crashing down around us, and I can’t help but say I told you so, having written in November that “I wouldn’t be feeling very optimistic at the moment” if I, too, was heading from Goldwin Smith to Goldman Sachs.
Indeed, with the bear (Stearns?) market bringing down bulwarks of the financial sector, it’s now en vogue among financistas to bemoan Wall Street’s brain drain of the Ivy League, and to hint that the best jobs will soon be found elsewhere.
As David Wessel wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently, the sorry state of things now suggests that “some of the brainpower drawn to Wall Street would have been more productively employed elsewhere in the economy.”
And as he snidely concluded, “It looks like many of those folks will get the chance to find out if that is so.”
The great irony is that all those left jobless in my cohort by the economy’s implosion have no one to blame but their predecessors. As jobs in the financial sector start to disappear, we can blame only our Ivy League alums who laid the groundwork for the current crisis.
With the “belated realization that some of those Ph.D.-wielding, computer-enhanced geniuses were overconfident in the extreme,” as Wessel writes, comes the realization that it was people like you, dear investment-bank-bound-college-student reader, who caused millions of Americans to lose their homes.
Yet vindicated as I may be by these turn of events, they have done naught to help me — as I remain jobless for the coming year.
While my present state of gainful unemployment is not the poisoned fruit of financial timber, I do hold the industry partially responsible for my idleness.
You see, the effect of finance was not only to offer a single career path with rewards of comically large proportions — two Harvard economists found recently that Harvard grads in finance earn 195 percent more than their peers — but also to turn the whole postgraduate experience on its head.
When college grads sought riches in the past, there were a host of prestigious and lucrative opportunities to be had. Yet once the finance behemoth reared its ugly head, these “falling-down professions,” as the New York Times aptly termed them, were all but eclipsed.
In these once-renowned careers, the Times reports, “The pay is still good (sometimes very good), and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers, and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of ‘success.’”
Let’s face it: going into pediatric medicine or contract law won’t exactly earn you baller status these days.
To that end, applications to law schools fell 6.7 percent between 2005 and 2006, and 5.2 percent the year before, while med school apps dropped from 46,000 in 1997 to 42,000 last year.
Back in the day, the best and the brightest went to NASA (or at least played competitive chess), but then a funny thing happened: lured by huge paychecks, all the little prodigies used their beautiful minds to create a mess of structured financial products that were lucrative in the short-term, but catastrophic once they unraveled.
As the Harvard professors found, 15 percent of men who graduated from Harvard around 1990 were working in finance 15 years after graduation, compared with only 5 percent of graduates in 1970.
You needn’t put together a financial derivative to explain this phenomenon. As any student here will tell you — and as I have written in previous columns — the financial sector has successfully positioned itself as the natural consummation of an elite education.
“Investment banking and consulting firms have a huge presence; they’re barging in from before first day of classes. The messages they convey appeals to every undergraduate fantasy: this is a continuation of prestige education, this is the only valuable way to finish your education. You’ll work with the smartest people and the most exciting, high-profile clients,” one Harvard student told the Times.
As the Masters of the Universe fall back down to earth, I can’t claim that my personal stock has been affected. But in devaluing everything in its path, the great finance industry has undoubtedly debased the aspirations of students like me.
As Gatsby’s green light dims on the horizon, it’s the financial folks who will fade into the twilight, but so too will the rest of us — the spectators on the dock — falter in its shadow.
Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appears Tuesdays.