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<p>Definitely not everybody who goes to an Ivy League school has a family income of over $200k. I would like to see some statistics about the income distributions there if you have them.</p>
<p>But I’m not sure what other capability students have for “saving the world.” Going into the Peace Corps is nice, but obviously not a permanent job. And I hardly think working at TFA qualifies as “saving the world” either. I’d like to hear some of your ideas.</p>
<p>“Definitely not everybody who goes to an Ivy League school has a family income of over $200k. I would like to see some statistics about the income distributions there if you have them.”</p>
<p>As I said in an earlier post, this one is an easy one. Roughly 50% of students pay full full-freight. The cutoff is roughly $200k, give or take. Within that 50%, the average family income is much, much higher.</p>
<p>Go to Africa or Central America or Peru and work on clean water systems and community sanitation. DON’T do it with the Peace Corps - use that brain and those connections to raise the money yourself. If you need to know how, contact me privately and I will - personally - set it up (I’m in a position to do just that.) </p>
<p>Refuse to take any NGO job that pays - on principle. Raise your own funds. Go work with Paul Farmer in Haiti. Use all those fabulous connections and learn to become a professional fundraiser. Get some training and volunteer yourself as a videographer for groups that need them. Go work in an AIDS orphanage in Kenya or Zimbabwe, and start a blog. Apply what you know about economics to set up better supply chains to get food to local and regional foodbanks. Build houses. If you were an English major, learn to write and publish about what really matters.</p>
<p>Before you know it, you will have a permanent job. Actually, a life.</p>
<p>(I’ve known many, many people who’ve taken this path. And I think the main reason it doesn’t happen more often is fear. And miseducation. And, P.S., if you decide saving the world isn’t for you, you can always come back and mess it up. ;))</p>
<p>From what sources, pray tell, will these altruistic Ivy grads locate funds for their private fundraising campaigns? Hmm, from their disdained investment banking classmates maybe? People love to argue that the best and brightest are lost to the soul-less world of i-banking, where they don’t actually create a physical product that betters humanity. These same people should be be honest enough to admit that professional fundraisers aren’t making any real products either. They’re parasites. Benevolent, compassionate parasites, but still parasites.</p>
<p>No - on the contrary. They should absolutely make use of the their NON-DISDAINED investment banking classmates, and their parents, and their friends.</p>
<p>Money is just stored-up human energy. You can help direct a little of it to where you think it should go - that’s all. And if it can help you do the work you think needs to be done, and can convince others that it needs doing - and you are willing to do it, so much the better.</p>
<p>Give the I-bankers a chance to redeem themselves vicariously. As I suggested, I don’t think most 21-year-olds go into finance because they’re greedy, or bad people, or anything like that. I do think many are fearful, and don’t know what else they could be doing. Some might not have a lot in the way of social imagination - which is not surprising, given their education. And some do. They can do the finance people a favor.</p>
<p>Do you think their education is stifling their “social imagination?”</p>
<p>It’s been my experience that the career education in undergrads (including Ivy League undergrads) is bad.</p>
<p>I go to an Ivy as a PhD student and about half the undergraduates I interact with are pre-med. I don’t know why so many of them want to be physicians. No physicians assistants, or nurses and nurse practitioners, or physical therapists, occupational therapists; very few psychologists, and no dentists. No, they all want to be doctors, even though all of the other healthcare positions I listed allow for a very comfortable lifestyle and much less debt. I have engineering majors that are pre-med. I don’t think it’s so much the salary as it is 1) the prestige and 2) the fact that they are unfamiliar with anything else, really.</p>
<p>It’s simply because no one’s exposed them to anything else. And THAT’S because career education in undergrad sucks. No one from the career office comes to talk to you until you are a second-semester junior at best. The soul-searching needs to happen BEFORE that - before they begin to commit hundreds of thousands of dollars to graduate programs they won’t be happy with, or spend several years trying to escape careers they hate, or even before they pick a major that’s going to put them out of the running for what they really want to do.</p>
<p>Why doesn’t career services come in and do a “what color is your parachute” type exercise with the freshman during NSOP? Why don’t the career counselors encourage the new freshman to start thinking about their classes to register for in terms of what kinds of skills they want to develop for the workforce? Why don’t they do job workshops for sophomores to teach them how to job search, workshop a resume, prepare for an interview? Why don’t they more widely disseminate information? (In both my undergrad and the undergrads at my grad uni, the student had to go explicitly searching for internship and career-related information). Why do they wait until the last minute - senior year - to connect the seniors up with career services?</p>
<p>And it’s my strong belief (as a PhD student) that not enough professors are thinking about the future utility of their classes to their students. I am a psychology PhD student. Psychology is immensely useful for people going into a variety of fields (business, medicine, law, education). Our department doesn’t market itself that way. We have one applied scientist out of 24 faculty members in our department. It’s about psychology for psychology’s sake. I love psychology but I don’t believe in that. There’s a purpose, there’s a use, and I want my students to know that. Whenever I had personal conversations with my statistics students, I told them how much I was getting paid for stats consulting. I told them that not only could they take it to PhD programs but that statisticians are in high demand in industry.</p>
<p>Departments often like to pretend that all of their students are just so passionate about the field that they want to study it for the love and universities like to pretend their students are living the life of the mind. The model needs to change if we expect students to diversify their career interests.</p>
<p>CALVIN TRILLINs article (#22) hits the problem on the head, I think, and I have been saying pretty much the same thing for a long time. Traditionally, the folks running investment banking are the scions of the American aristocracy. They are children of bankers, as one poster alludes to, get into an elite through holistic admission, and study history and sociology as another poster noted.</p>
<p>To make really big money, they hired super smart quants to work on derivatives and calculate arbitrage odds. The problem is that these legacies simply do not have what it takes to understand the math, and are too proud to admit it (I call it the emperors new cloth syndrome). IOW, it is not that they hire smart people for investment banking, but that the folks running these banks are not smart enough for their position of responsibilities that is the real problem.</p>
<p>Here is an example of a quant:</p>
<p>[Meet</a> the man whose big idea felled Wall Street - thestar.com](<a href=“http://www.thestar.com/business/article/604033]Meet”>http://www.thestar.com/business/article/604033)</p>
<p>He learned French in 4 months, and left Wall Street before the whole kettle blew up. Smart, very smart.</p>
<p>Just curious, anyone here understand that equation? It is all Greek to me.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is a big mystery. And the author is largely but partially right.</p>
<p>Here’s what I think the author is missing: Parts of Wall Street really value high IQ (often combined with math ability). Few other entry level jobs so clearly target high IQ – a few management consulting do and maybe Google/Microsoft (but they probably want you to be able to code also). The elite schools select in large part for kids with high IQ (often, but not always combined with social skills or leadership) combined with the ability to jump successfully through whatever silly hoops you put up for them.</p>
<p>Second, if you are looking for a job in business in the US, we’ve pretty much emptied out our companies. We don’t do tons of manufacturing here. My general impression is that many firms don’t want to hire and train kids. They want the kids to be trained, whereas in years gone by, though would expect to train. So, there’s not that much else unless you have specialized in something that is immediately marketable. The Ivies and most LACs do not strive to train their students to be immediately marketable (“we do not try to provide vocational training”).</p>
<p>My experience in business is a bit limited – started as a business school professor, worked as an investment banker, then for a wealthy family’s family office, then started a boutique consulting firm and helped start an investment firm. So, the higher end tier. The investment firm hired undergraduates. In this limited experience, the kids who were more vocationally trained (BA in business, for example) were on average much weaker than math/econ/psych BA’s we hired from elite schools. [As an aside, the absolute best kid I hired was a math/econ major from UMass Amherst, better than the kids from HYPMS. Undoubtedly the best employee I’ve hired in any firm. But he didn’t have any more vocational training than the other strong kids.]</p>
<p>"Do you think their education is stifling their “social imagination?” </p>
<p>Yes. (Upbringing often doesn’t help.)</p>
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<p>Looks like something a math or statistics major (or someone else who took more advanced math courses than a typical business major) would understand.</p>
<p>[Copula</a> (probability theory) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(probability_theory)]Copula”>Copula (probability theory) - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>Were the business graduates in this comparison from elite or other high-selectivity schools, or were they from lower-selectivity schools where majoring in business is more common?</p>
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<p>There does appear to be a higher bar for success as a math major than for many other majors: <a href=“http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0663[/url]”>http://arxiv.org/pdf/1011.0663</a></p>
<p>Well that makes sense: in order to succeed as a math major, you have to come in with a basic baseline knowledge of mathematics and an already developed strength in the area. That kind of baseline doesn’t necessarily need to exist for a history major or sociology major. I also think that students who are frustrated as math majors are more likely to change majors (I know that I dropped my math minor after being frustrated with the amount of time it was taking me to do problem sets. It wasn’t that I was having any particular kind of trouble with them, I just didn’t like the amount of time that it took, because I was 18 and it was spring time and I wanted to “enjoy college.” It’s my biggest regret from college; I wish someone had told me that it’s SUPPOSED to take hours and that I needed to keep working at it). Students frustrated with sociology or history may not be as likely to switch. Plus, I know that I was rarely frustrated with my psychology major - it was easy to me.</p>
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<p>I wouldn’t attempt to try to explain it, I’m not a mathematician by any means. I’ll just say that it seems like the left hand side is the probability of all the underlying assets in the CDO going to heck at once, and the righthand side is basically the marginal probabilities of them going to heck separately and some hocus pocus that correlates it together. I think for the sake of simplicity the version shown is just for two underlying assets.</p>
<p>Anyway, Li’s paper seems to explain it fairly well even for someone really rusty in all this. In fact, he explains it so matter-of-factly (if you skip some of the equations :)) it’s no wonder many people fell for it.</p>
<p><a href=“http://stevereads.com/papers_to_read/on_default_correlation-_a_copula_function_approach.pdf[/url]”>http://stevereads.com/papers_to_read/on_default_correlation-_a_copula_function_approach.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thanks for posting this, it gives me something to bust my head over for a while until I give up.</p>
<p>One of the problems is that, the distributions of real-life events such as the financial markets, are often leptokurtic, i.e. sharper peaks and fatter tails, when compared with a Gaussian distribution. So when the more-frequently-available data around the means, are fitted with Gaussian models, the probabilities of the outliers become underestimated. A compromise is to retain the Gaussian models in the middle 4 SD and try to custom model (guesstimate, because data for outliers, are almost by default, rare) the outliers with, for example, Chebyshev’s inequality. These are actually known on the practical level since the early days of options trading. But somehow, apparently one after another, Niederhoffer, LTCM, CDS, etc., still suffered from this phenomenon in one way or another…</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, the business majors were not from elite schools. On the east coast, the elite schools typically do not have undergraduate business majors. All but one of the non-business kids did math or comp sci – the other was an anthropology(?) major (using quantitative methods in part) who knew programming but whose adviser said he was the brightest student he’d had in several years at one of HYP.</p>
<p>“Why doesn’t career services come in and do a “what color is your parachute” type exercise with the freshman during NSOP? Why don’t the career counselors encourage the new freshman to start thinking about their classes to register for in terms of what kinds of skills they want to develop for the workforce? Why don’t they do job workshops for sophomores to teach them how to job search, workshop a resume, prepare for an interview? Why don’t they more widely disseminate information? (In both my undergrad and the undergrads at my grad uni, the student had to go explicitly searching for internship and career-related information). Why do they wait until the last minute - senior year - to connect the seniors up with career services?”</p>
<p>At my younger d’s school (American), they did all of this, and more. If you tell them the day before an interview that you have one the next day, they will schedule a practice interview in the evening. They even had a session in how to EAT at a luncheon interview. They were way over the top. (I attribute part of my d’s success in beating out scores of Ivy applicants for both internships and jobs to the extraordinary support she received.) </p>
<p>For my older d., the advising services at Smith were equally extraordinary, and they will go over every word in your resume, your cover letter, and in your graduate school applications multiple times. We were impressed! She is now a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton, and teaches undergrads, and her impressions of students there (and the lack of services) are similar to yours.</p>
<p>Re: post 44. Why are i-bankers in need of redemption any more than engineers, lawyers, chefs, or garbage collectors? Plenty of people of every stripe mind their own selfish business and no nothing to help others. Only the very upper echelon of the banking industry, hand in hand with politicians, had any responsiblity for the economic ills–and certainly not the young analysts working 120 hour weeks that you are maligning along with them.</p>
<p>There is evil and selfishness in every social, ethnic and employment group. We need to stop demonizing occupations. We heard of a young Ivy graduate who skateboarded across the US to raise a paltry couple of thousand dollars. It required a lot of time and energy for a sum that was 1/6 of what my analyst son donated to charity the same year. But wow, didn’t look so compassionate and wonderful! But couldn’t we turn the tables and accuse him of an inefficient selfish publicity stunt to make himself a hero? Just like the teenagers with no construction experience who go to Third World countries to build houses when it would be cheaper and more helpful to the people there to use their plane fare, and housing and food expenses to hire local workers to do the job. So many of these community service things are all about assuaging our consciences and giving people a feel-good opportunity rather than determing the best and most rational way to help others.</p>
<p>And lastly, we already have a plethora of non-profit organizations in existence which need resources and help. Why should Ivy grads use their brains merely to create for themselves a middleman’s job in yet another new non-profit organization in order to play Robin Hood? Didn’t they already do that stuff to get accepted to college? Surely they can do better.</p>
<p>“Just like the teenagers with no construction experience who go to Third World countries to build houses when it would be cheaper and more helpful to the people there to use their plane fare, and housing and food expenses to hire local workers to do the job. So many of these community service things are all about assuaging our consciences and giving people a feel-good opportunity rather than determing the best and most rational way to help others”</p>
<p>Let them use that extraordinary education and their access to resources to determine the best and most rational way to help others. I think that would be a wonderful use of an Ivy education. If they need training to do what it is they determine needs doing - whether it be building houses or improving water supplies, I am sure they can obtain it. Hey, these are Ivy League graduates! Our best and brightest!</p>
<p>My best example of “best and brightest” improving the world is Ralf Hotchkiss. </p>
<p>Following a college-age summer accident that left him paraplegic, he reinvented his own wheelchair for greater mobility. His college classmates cheered as he rolled UP the steps of college buildings, like an army tank. </p>
<p>He went on to revamp wheelchair design to roll over very rough terrain, as found in Third-world nations. With wartime and landmine accidents, there are countless people who need wheelchairs. These new chairs were a huge departure from the Chinese-built wheelchairs made for concrete hallways in U.S. hospitals, and useless in those countries with unpaved roads. </p>
<p>With the all-terrain wheelchair technology figured out, he went into economic development mode. Now these chairs are built in 20 different developing nations. This benefits those local economies as well as the end-users of the product.</p>
<p>Caveats:
Ralf went to Oberlin, not an Ivy.
I don’t think he ever worked on Wall Street.
The article’s author is Ralph Nader, but I overlooked that because the biography is told succinctly, so makes a better link for CC. </p>
<p>[Ralf</a> Hotchkiss & His Whirlwind Wheelchairs](<a href=“http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1224-02.htm]Ralf”>http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1224-02.htm)</p>
<p>To me, Ralf Hotchkiss defines “Social Imagination.”</p>
<p>Life seems a little more complex than sometimes painted. We need people who are (per mini) intelligently and efficiently trying to transform the world and make it a better place for people. </p>
<p>But, we also need lots of people creating, building and managing businesses and allocating capital so that people are employed in life-enhancing jobs. In the last year, my travels have taken among many places to India and Brazil. In India, there is a middle class of 250 MM people (roughly the same size as the US) that didn’t exist 25 years ago. These are people whose living standards and life expectancy have improved dramatically. From poverty, they have food, cars or motorcycles, decent jobs (hard – long working hours, etc.) and a reason to see that their lives are better off. Same with Brazil, although the numbers are undoubtedly smaller. But, I was talking with a Brazilian executive who told me that when he finished university, there were only two choices for employment (as an engineer): a family business with no prospects for rising if you weren’t family or a multinational. He chose the latter. Ten years ago or more, one could start working for major Brazilian companies. Being an entrepreneur was not that advisable an approach. But, that has changed an now, his son is an entrepreneur, starting up a company that serves the growing middle class. Many millions have risen from relative poverty to middle class existence in a generation. The cause of this miraculous and wonderful ascent was not fueled by do-gooding students or western NGOs. A large part of what has made this possible is work by academics and entrepreneurs who increased the capacity for computing and decreased the cost of long-distance communication – to take a few at random, Intel, the US Defense Department (for entrepreneurially investing in Arpanet), Tim Berners-Lee, Cisco, Google, Akamai, Bell Labs, … . </p>
<p>In that vein, it seems unwise, as theGFG suggests, to castigate whole professions or job categories. In the community in which my wife grew up, the fathers (and a couple of mothers) were largely successful entrepreneurs. In the generation of kids now in their 20’s, almost all of them work for NGOs or are studying, teaching or practicing human rights law. They think corporations are evil and seem to have no awareness of what is needed to generate the wealth that funds the standard of living that can support NGOs. I’ve had in my career the opportunity to advise large corporations, small companies, governments, unions, NGOs, etc. The most venal clients I’ve had were senior officials of labor unions and emerging markets governments and some of the most decent were corporate. But, it varies greatly. I worked for the President of one emerging market country who struck me as fundamentally moral and deeply committed to genuine improvement for his country. And, although incentives have been dramatically skewed in the last two decades, investments bankers and some in the investment community serve an important function in allocating capital to business with greater growth opportunities. Better allocation benefits not just companies but employment (directly and indirectly) and retirement pensions.</p>