There’s a certain and not so subtle irony, watching the moneyed troves of Ivy Leaguers so deeply engaged in obsequious prattle with the Goldman Sachs recruiters. It’s the Career Fair at Barton Hall last week, and with each forced smile and practiced but firm handshake, you can see the gap widening in America between the haves and the have-nots.
Here we have the elite institutions of America — the very same that recruit from urban ghettos and enlarge endowments to boost financial aid packages, hailing education as the antidote to poverty — making the key introductions that will ensure that the rich become richer.
Consider the soaring wealth inequality in our country. The problem lies not with the lower or middle classes, but with the wealthiest of the wealthy, who, according to the Christian Science Monitor, enjoyed a 497 percent gain in wages and salaries since 1979. In that same period, middle class income increased only 15 percent, and earnings for the bottom one-fifth of society rose a mere 4 percent.
So try as we might to level it, the playing field is increasingly lopsided. For even as colleges and universities have expanded opportunity through financial aid and affirmative action, income inequality has worsened.
At the same time that Cornell and other schools employ “bottom-up” corrective initiatives — that is, granting admission to disadvantaged candidates in the hope of upward mobility — perhaps we should look into “top-down” strategies to redirect the ambitions of the already-rich-but-seeking-lots-more crowd.
We’re targeting the finance types — the card-carrying AKPsi members, who swear by Gordon Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good,” and are rarely seen without a copy of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho in hand.
It’s not that finance hasn’t always seduced college grads; as the New York Times reported recently, “what sets the new crowd apart is the need for speed and a thirst for instant riches.”
So what to do with these Ayn Rand worshippers — the future 1/1,000th percentile? How do we take “negative” action against an alarmingly skewed society?
It’s important to realize, first off, that conceptions of success are formulated in, and often facilitated by, colleges.
If you attended the Career Fair last week, for instance, you would have seen the vast majority of recruiters coming from investment banks and management consulting firms. Mega-wealthy institutions, like Goldman or Merrill Lynch, which are often two-year introductions to über-wealthy hedge funds or private equity firms, are dominating the postgraduate scene with their polished recruitment routines.
Cornell’s most recent Postgraduate Report, published by Career Services for the Class of 2006, showed that of the 10 employers hiring the most Cornellians, six were: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and IBM Business Consulting. The top three sectors that hired Cornell grads were Financial Services (21.1 percent), Consulting (14 percent) and General Business (12.1 percent) compared to 6.4 percent in Government jobs and less than 1 percent in Labor.
And it’s not just Cornell. At Harvard, 58 percent of men and 43 percent of women entering the workforce in the Class of 2007 took jobs in finance, with more than a fifth of Harvard men working in investment banking, according to a report in The Crimson.
Here at Cornell, however, we’ve developed the Applied Economics and Management major, which, incongruously wedged into the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, caters to aspiring financiers. This i-bank feeder of a major often leaves Econ majors in the Arts school bristling with discontent.
In the hedge fund era, the desirable professions of yesteryear, such as doctors and lawyers, and even those of yesterday — the dot com entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley technocrats — cannot compete with the seven-figure paydays available in the finance world.
And while Cornell cannot undo that unfortunate reality, it can put a more diverse catalogue of careers on display for aspiring employees. If finance wasn’t your bag at the career fair (or if you weren’t an engineer), you might have resigned yourself to enlisting in the Peace Corps or selling Johnson & Johnson lotions.
In the same way that universities circumvent a rigid meritocracy by favoring impoverished or underrepresented admissions candidates, they should guide promising students to careers that benefit society — and not just savings accounts. Some of these options, like the Peace Corps or Teach For America, are already on display — but even they must market their one- or two-year programs as stepping-stones to law school or investment banking.
It was at a commencement address at Howard University in 1965 that Lyndon Johnson said, “Equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.” 50 years ago, Johnson committed our colleges and universities to the idealistic vision of affirmative action, so that the least well off might start the race to the top on equal footing.
Now, as we near that mark, it’s up to elite institutions like Cornell to define an ideal finishing point — a reasonable measure of success equal to the economic disparities endemic in our new Gilded Age.
Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rfishman@cornellsun.com [1]. Agree to Disagree appears Tuesdays.
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[1] mailto:rfishman@cornellsun.com