<p>JHS:</p>
<p>dunno about your neck of the woods, but Starbucks pays more than minimum wage in my backyard. Of course, your D’s hourly pay likely converts into a lot less than ~$20/hour. (Teacher’s work hard and put in a long day.)</p>
<p>From the same newspaper:</p>
<p>By CALVIN TRILLIN
Published: October 13, 2009
“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”</p>
<p>Illustrations by Enid Noten
The statement came from a man sitting three or four stools away from me in a sparsely populated Midtown bar, where I was waiting for a friend. “But I have to buy you a drink to hear it?” I asked.</p>
<p>“Absolutely not,” he said. “I can buy my own drinks. My 401(k) is intact. I got out of the market 8 or 10 years ago, when I saw what was happening.”</p>
<p>He did indeed look capable of buying his own drinks — one of which, a dry martini, straight up, was on the bar in front of him. He was a well-preserved, gray-haired man of about retirement age, dressed in the same sort of clothes he must have worn on some Ivy League campus in the late ’50s or early ’60s — a tweed jacket, gray pants, a blue button-down shirt and a club tie that, seen from a distance, seemed adorned with tiny brussels sprouts.</p>
<p>“O.K.,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”</p>
<p>“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” He took a sip of his martini, and stared straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now over.</p>
<p>“But weren’t there smart guys on Wall Street in the first place?” I asked.</p>
<p>He looked at me the way a mathematics teacher might look at a child who, despite heroic efforts by the teacher, seemed incapable of learning the most rudimentary principles of long division. “You are either a lot younger than you look or you don’t have much of a memory,” he said. “One of the speakers at my 25th reunion said that, according to a survey he had done of those attending, income was now precisely in inverse proportion to academic standing in the class, and that was partly because everyone in the lower third of the class had become a Wall Street millionaire.”</p>
<p>I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.</p>
<p>“That actually sounds more or less accurate,” I said.</p>
<p>“Of course it’s accurate,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong: the guys from the lower third of the class who went to Wall Street had a lot of nice qualities. Most of them were pleasant enough. They made a good impression. And now we realize that by the standards that came later, they weren’t really greedy. They just wanted a nice house in Greenwich and maybe a sailboat. A lot of them were from families that had always been on Wall Street, so they were accustomed to nice houses in Greenwich. They didn’t feel the need to leverage the entire business so they could make the sort of money that easily supports the second oceangoing yacht.”</p>
<p>“So what happened?”</p>
<p>“I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street.”</p>
<p>“Why?”</p>
<p>“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, making a practiced gesture with his eyebrows that caused the bartender to get started mixing another martini.</p>
<p>“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”</p>
<p>“But you still haven’t told me how that brought on the financial crisis.”</p>
<p>“Did you ever hear the word ‘derivatives’?” he said. “Do you think our guys could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t have done the math.”</p>
<p>“Why do I get the feeling that there’s one more step in this scenario?” I said.</p>
<p>“Because there is,” he said. “When the smart guys started this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place, who was running the firms they worked for? Our guys! The lower third of the class! Guys who didn’t have the foggiest notion of what a credit default swap was. All our guys knew was that they were getting disgustingly rich, and they had gotten to like that. All of that easy money had eaten away at their sense of enoughness.”</p>
<p>“So having smart guys there almost caused Wall Street to collapse.”</p>
<p>“You got it,” he said. “It took you awhile, but you got it.”</p>
<p>The theory sounded too simple to be true, but right offhand I couldn’t find any flaws in it. I found myself contemplating the sort of havoc a horde of smart guys could wreak in other industries. I saw those industries falling one by one, done in by superior intelligence. “I think I need a drink,” I said.</p>
<p>He nodded at my glass and made another one of those eyebrow gestures to the bartender. “Please,” he said. “Allow me.”</p>
<p>The author’s premise isn’t that Harvard students are unprepared for employment. It is that Harvard students are beautifully prepared for employment, just not any specific employment, and that many of them have no idea what they want to do, and many employers have no idea what to do with them. And Wall St. has a proven track record of knowing what to do with them to make them profitable, and knowing how to get them in the door. TFA, too. So, between them, they hire a huge chunk of the Harvard kids who aren’t going directly to graduate or professional school.</p>
<p>Love Calvin Trillen, and I think there’s more than a germ of truth there. I do think it’s a bit of a chicken or egg problem that will only be solved if the Ivies select more of the altruistic guys, but why would they do that? They’ve got a vested interest in creating future donors. </p>
<p>FWIW I didn’t know a single person in my class who went to Wall Street, and I knew several Econ majors, and lots of Comp Sci and Math guys. But they were all from the top of the class. :)</p>
<p>so they can pay off their student loans? :-)</p>
<p>Katwkittens has it right and so glad to hear that your kids and their circle of friends are finding success.</p>
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<p>How many make longterm careers in finance industry after joining Wall st? How many make longterm careers in public education?</p>
<p>mathmom, during my brief Wall St. stint I worked with a Harvard football captain from the class of '74 or '75. He was a trainee in municipal bond trading and underwriting at Morgan Guaranty. Great guy.</p>
<p>Two of my son’s growing-up friends took jobs with a big management consulting firm, which is right next to investment banking on the Spectrum of Evil. I can promise you that neither of them went to college with the idea that he would be doing anything like that, and I would be surprised if either of them believes, today, that he will make a career of it. One was a history major, with the equivalent of a minor in painting; he won a significant university prize for his senior thesis. The other was a sociology major who was editor-in-chief of his college’s newspaper. I have only talked to one of them about his job choice, but I would be surprised if the other’s reasons were very different: it was flattering to be recruited, it was a ton of money and a great place to live, it got resolved in the fall long before anyone else had a job lined up, it impressed girls, you got to learn things and work with really smart people, you could take nice vacations, and maybe it would help you figure out what you really wanted to do with your life. Both went to college more or less intending to be academics, but at least one (the one I talked to) is disillusioned with that and no longer is considering it.</p>
<p>Dozens of my wealthier classmates from my time at Williams went into finance and banking (as their parents had before them). Often, if it wasn’t daddy’s bank, it was an uncle’s, and if it wasn’t an uncle’s, it was the uncle’s friend, or the uncle’s friend who had a friend, etc. I don’t remember a single one of my less wealthy classmates going into finance or banking (oh, wait, there was one, who came out of academia, and ended up in Australia.) (And, yes, Trillin describes my class very well. Some of those who became very wealthy Ibankers had brains in their pennyloafers, taped up with white adhesive tape.)</p>
<p>There were fewer banking and finance jobs in those days, I think. </p>
<p>As for TFA, I wish schools could afford real teachers rather than people who play at them (altruistically or otherwise). And as for top-tier schools, where else are you going to find student bodies with 50% or more from families making at least $200k (the average being MUCH higher) and who fear they won’t be able to live in a lifestyle to which they have become accustomed? (Fear, and the accompanying need for safety, are very great motivators, probably more so for most than pure greed.)</p>
<p>How many of them consider this before deciding to go into investment banking?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1289562-hazard-trade-bankers-health.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parent-cafe/1289562-hazard-trade-bankers-health.html</a>
[Warning:</a> Banking May Be Hazardous to Your Health - WSJ.com](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204062704577223623824944472.html]Warning:”>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204062704577223623824944472.html)</p>
<p>Making a lot of money might not be as helpful as one thinks if one has no time outside of work, or if it is needed for medical care to deal with the various health issues from too much and too stressful work.</p>
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<p>In my daughter’s graduation two years ago, the individual houses handed out the diplomas along with an announcement of what the students were going to do after graduation. I estimated that > 60% seemed to be going into some type of finance job - either investment banking or hedge funds.</p>
<p>I would say what a waste of a good education. But, if Klein is correct, maybe not. That’s what they are best cut-out and trained for. Hey, somebody’s gotta do it, right?</p>
<p>I’m not sure what people would rather have them do instead. I don’t think very many people want to go to an Ivy League school and then end up at a regular entry-level job.</p>
<ol>
<li> Prestige</li>
<li> Pay</li>
<li> “Peer Pressure”</li>
<li> Wall Street (IB/Consulting) does a wonderful job selling themselves during on-campus interviews</li>
<li> Excellent Exit Opps</li>
</ol>
<p>Its a well trodden path, I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t do it. What’s the alternative other than grad school? A F500 LDP that you could have gotten into from your state school that pays half as much?</p>
<p>The bankrobber, Willie Sutton, was asked “why do you rob banks”</p>
<p>His answer was, “that’s where the money is”</p>
<p>People major in finance because can be a lucrative field.</p>
<p>You can make a lot more money helping to analyze whether Exxon should buy Chevron than helping someone do their tax return.</p>
<p>Don’t you also need an accounting license if you want to do other people’s tax returns? I’m pretty sure most Ivy League colleges don’t even offer those kinds of classes to begin with.</p>
<p>If it’s true that all these grads go into finance it’s sort of ironic. We constantly hear how these schools look for kids with unique qualities and passions to holisitically assemble a class, then when push comes to shove they all end up pursuing the same vocation.</p>
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<p>The IRS allows attorneys, CPAs, and [enrolled</a> agents](<a href=“http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/agents/article/0,,id=100710,00.html]enrolled”>http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/agents/article/0,,id=100710,00.html) to represent taxpayers to the IRS.</p>
<p>In 2005, at my son’s graduation from Amherst College, a very prescient student speaker addressed his classmates, roughly paraphrased here: “I’m looking at a class full of graduates ready to make their fortune on Wall Street. Sitting alongside them are those who’ll become their prosecuting attorneys.”</p>
<p>“I’m not sure what people would rather have them do instead. I don’t think very many people want to go to an Ivy League school and then end up at a regular entry-level job.”</p>
<p>How about using some of that privilege that comes with growing up in a family with a very minimum $200k income and using those brains to save the world? (And, no, I’m not being sarcastic. They will always have access to a job.)</p>