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<p>Where are the “significant disparities”? Even within this group, one can say there are “significant disparities”, then? </p>
<p>Please elaborate…</p>
<p>JA,
Has it ever occurred to you that there are scores of jobs and careers that are challenging and exciting? Plenty of folks aren’t about chasing the buck. That is rarely the case with those going into I-banking. Next you’ll be telling me that the I-bankers are all “just doing God’s work.” :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^ LOL – Although I don’t like hawkette, I agree with her #439 and #442 statements.</p>
<p>John Adams is correct, actually. IMO.</p>
<p>Investment banks provide liquidity in the capital markets and facilitate corporate access to capital. If they were not providing services that their corporate clients found valuable the corporations would not retain them. They are quite important to the financial system, which is quite important to the economy, etc. Perhaps their work is not “Gods work”, but it is of greater impact than what lots of other people do. </p>
<p>The work is highly demanding, highly challenging, and has an intensity associated with it that is not often matched elsewhere. Certainly my work when I was in that business was of a totally different dimension and impact than anything I did before, or since.</p>
<p>monydad, hawkette was implying that these careers are NOT for someone who has either high moral values or wants to “do good.” In other words, they help companies invest wisely but they don’t necessarily improve society.</p>
<p>They improve society by facilitating financial transactions which lower corporate financing costs and improve access to capital. Public corporations are owned by “society”, all direct and indirect shareholders/ stakeholders benefit. And the projects, and companies, that can be consequently financed benefit society, or else they will not be profitable.</p>
<p>Most things people do for a living benefit society less.</p>
<p>mony,
I think your view is an outdated one of what goes on in the Wall Street of today. In yesteryear, the Wall Street firms were mostly client-driven businesses, whether it be from the advisory side or from the investment side. That represented the bulk (80-90%+) of profits. </p>
<p>In the last decade, that has morphed with the huge expansion of proprietary trading, much of quantitatively driven and particularly on the debt side. Wall Street is now a highly leveraged world whose main objective is trading profit rather than client advisory. At a place like Goldman, trading profit now dwarfs the advisory business and the ratio of profitability has flipped. This is not providing capital to American and global businesses. This is activity that took our entire financial system to the brink. </p>
<p>I’m not one of those calling for the outlawing of this trading activity, but to characterize the current functioning on Wall Street as adding liquidity for corporate America would IMO be mostly inaccurate. Heck, in many respects, I think one could make an argument that it has had an opposite effect, particularly when you consider the negative trickle-down effects on the regional banking system and their current unwillingness to lend. </p>
<p>tenis,
To be clear, I believe that one can be moral and go to Wall Street and do good things. But over the last decade, a lot of people have lost their compass and stretched mightily to justify their actions and ultimately, through misguided and greedy strategies, put the entire system in jeopardy. It was a unique time and one that I hope we won’t repeat with what is going on now in Greece. </p>
<p>On top of this, the 2009 bonus awards didn’t go very far in eliminating the pervasive sense of entitlement in today’s Wall Street environment. Whether they can sustain this level of compensation and business risk as financial reform passage approaches will be very interesting to watch…with huge consequences for many Americans, including many current college students who want to pursue Wall Street as a career.</p>
<p>Truly elite for undergraduates: Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT. That’s it! There are other great schools but not elite.</p>
<p>They are still doing all the things I described, the impact of this is still substantial, corporations are still retaining them to do it therefore they still find them important, the resulting projects they enable to be financed are still important and yes, beneficial to society if they are to be profitable, and the work is still highly challenging. I don’t think that’s outdated. Many people at investment banks, to this day, are engaged in such activities. they have not stopped doing this business.</p>
<p>Well, I guess I have a bleaker interpretation than you of what is going on. The I-banks may still be performing advisory activities and employing a lot of people in their execution duties, but the I-bank’s profits are mostly elsewhere. This has caused much of the tension as there is soooooo much money being made in the prop trading that the raison d’etre of the institution has evolved. </p>
<p>As for the actual quality of the advice being provided from Wall Street, IMO it varies enormously. The knowledge gap between what Wall Street knows and what the operating business executive knows is probably greater today than at any time in the last several decades. Corporate America still needs Wall Street to help it raise capital via debt/equity sales or provide sourcing ideas for acquisition activity/financing, but my impression is that Wall Street’s strategic advisory value to Corporate America has probably never been lower. They’ll never say that publicly, but if you’re talking to both sides, you hear it constantly.</p>
<p>Top 20 Universities & Top 10 LACs</p>
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<p>Which ranking? Which year?</p>
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How is education even remotely related to this thread? Elite status has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the perceptions of the existing elite.</p>
<p>I don’t know why, but I always thought Georgetown is a huuuuge deal. (Maybe because of “A Girl Next Door”) I don’t know why, but it was always prestigious in my mind with its niche as school for political heavyweights…</p>
<p>I KNOW exactly what you mean, Georgetown seems to have this amazing rep in lay circles and I don’t really know where it comes from. Before I actually applied to law school I always seemed to think that Georgetown was just below Harvard or Yale rather than being a rung below UVA/Penn (all fantastic schools obviously but still)</p>
<p>PimpDaddy, my initial impression on Georgetown came from years of watching the great Georgetown basketball teams.</p>
<p><<< No, it would remain unchanged because the list already contains the Justice’s undergrad colleges as well as law schools. >>>
No, it would change, because “the list” in this thread is of elite schools, and the list of elite universities is different from the list of elite undergrads (Chicago, Berkeley etc. would be added, perhaps Yale removed).</p>
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<p>Says who? (And I do consulting now, after years in a Fortune 500 position)
What’s so more exciting about coming up with the money to market an idea versus being the person who comes up with the idea itself? </p>
<p>The very fact that you think IB and MC jobs are somehow “better” is very narrow.</p>
<p>Here are all the different jobs that grads can take.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ</p>
<p>To take jobs P and W and announce that they are somehow “better” or that how well a college does in placing students into P and W is a measure of how “elite” they are is just laughable. </p>
<p>Really, the only people impressed by IB and MC careers are early twenty-somethings who think they are the masters of the universe. Otherwise, everyone over the age of 25 realizes they are just careers. Like any other. The world needs IB, yes - and it needs the finance people at the companies that they are advising. The world needs MC - and it needs the people at the core companies to manage their products and services. And it needs the engineers, and the marketers, and the R&D folks, and the production folks, and the graphic artists, and pretty much everyone. This single-minded focus on IB/MC as the only jobs worth having, or the jobs that “everyone” supposedly aspires to, or the job that determines a school’s prestige and status, is among the most immature things I’ve read on CC.</p>
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<p>Georgetown IS a huuuuuge deal. Sure, it’s “lopsided” in that its primary strength is in politics / IR / foreign service. MIT and Caltech are just as “lopsided” with math / science / engineering. For some stupid reason, MIT and Caltech get lauded when Gtown doesn’t, even though Gtown’s status in its field = MIT / Caltech’s status in its field.</p>
<p>@Pizzagirl: STEM is a much broader array of programs than IT/politics/foreign service. I definitely agree that Georgetown deserves more attention, but the analogy seems a bit questionable.</p>