When Ivy Grads Pick Teaching Over Wall Street

According to Bloomberg’s William D Cohan We are witnessing the decline and fall of the investment-banking profession as we have known it for the past 40 years.
The evidence is everywhere. The increasing regulations on Wall Street -- as required by the Dodd-Frank law and still being written by the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and others agencies in the U.S. and Europe -- will require the remaining companies to increase their capital, curb their risk- taking and reduce their principal investing.

“….The most reliable leading indicator of Wall Street’s future prospects is the way recent graduates of Harvard, Princeton and Yale -- supposedly our best and brightest -- choose to spend their time after graduating. For years, hordes of graduates from those schools beat a fast path to Wall Street. Now the road is far more difficult to travel. For those who choose to make the journey, there is the prospect of incurring the wrath and scorn of fellow students who make up the various Occupy Wall Street movements -- a fact not likely to deter many -- and then there are dimmer prospects for a job on Wall Street generally, what with the slowdown in business.
According to a Dec. 21 article in New York Times, whereas in 2006 some 46 percent of Princeton graduates who had jobs lined up after graduation went to Wall Street, four years later that number had fallen to 36 percent. At Harvard, in 2006, a quarter of the class got jobs in finance; by 2011, that number had fallen to 17 percent. At Yale, in 2006, 24 percent of the graduates had jobs in finance and on Wall Street, while in 2010, the number of graduates going to Wall Street had fallen to 14 percent.
The word around Goldman Sachs, I’m told, is that even those offered a still highly coveted entry-level job at the firm are having second thoughts about taking it. More and more, banks are losing talent to Teach for America, a fact that may turn out to be one of the most heartening consequences of the financial crisis….

Read more at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-27/ivy-grads-choose-teaching-over-wall-street-commentary-by-william-d-cohan.html