A simple thought-the percentage of graduates from elite colleges going into high finance is too high- has spurred a variety of articles addressing the intranational "brain drain" of the highly educated into the financial sector. A quarter of Yale's 2010 graduates headed to Wall Street, Cornell sent a third, and Harvard and UPenn each had around half of their graduates start their careers in finance. Here in Madison, the business school sent 41% of 2009-'10 graduates into consulting or finance/accounting. This adds up to a miniscule percentage of the entire student body. The intense recruitment process at east-coast elite schools has been targeted as the cause of the disproportionately high amount of alumni at Wall Street.
The recruiters start early, and they sell themselves and the "earning potential" of their field. Firms foster relationships with universities that send graduates their way. The big banks keep their offices staffed; Those recruited make some money, and the universities get more alumni donations, on top of the money already spent by recruiters. This way, everyone wins and the moral grayness of the situation is washed away in green.
It is not in society's best interest to keep letting Wall Street gorge itself on America. The anti-bank sentiment that exploded with the financial collapse has materialized in the years since. Admittedly, some of this sentiment has gotten out of hand. I am not suggesting that the entire financial sector is parasitic, but I do think it has expanded beyond sustainability. The availability of credit has enabled a huge amount of business, but the largest banks do only a small portion of their work in the type of capital investments that are always used to defend high finance. The financial sector needs to shrink, and it won't be painless. But trying to limit the sector's ability to market itself to students is backwards. If you have an issue with half of Harvard's graduates going into high finance, then your problem is with high finance, not the details of recruiting.
If we can accept that human capital shouldn't be conglomerating at Wall Street, then we should also examine the universities cultivating that human capital. The doubts raised about the financial district should already exist in graduates' minds. When so many people are joining a field that is seen as non-productive for society, the mechanism that should be shaping them as citizens, the university, is open to criticism. The influence of money in recruitment at universities is beyond the scope of this article, but what is immediately concerning is the fact that some of the most highly touted thinkers in this country are deliberately entering fields that don't add to society.
There's no practical way to scrutinize entering high finance as a personal decision. Our culture values financial self-centeredness and I am intimately aware of too many pro athlete contract negotiations to think otherwise. Combating the financial sector through their recruitment process is misguided, but also reveals a new trend in America. People are starting to change from an item-to-item based view of politics to a more integrated approach. Instead of focusing on just issues, people are now examining the system. This new examination is exactly the type of positive citizenship that universities should be cultivating. Instead of protesting recruiters, young "occupiers" should stay focused on legislation and spreading the message of the movement. Those trying to change where graduates go after their commencement speeches should encourage universities to include more liberal studies in their graduation requirements. By encouraging liberal studies to play a larger role in every undergraduate career, this debate over "brain-drain" can move to where it belongs: the brains of undergraduates considering a career in finance.
The most recent jobs report has shown that the financial sector is shrinking. More recent reports of graduates taking to Wall Street show more restrained numbers. However, this issue should remain relevant as long as America is in the crater left by the housing bubble.
David Ruiz is a senior majoring in English. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
