September 25, 2014

Occupational Hazards of Working on Wall Street

A few times in the past several decades it has sounded as if big Wall Street banks were losing their hold on the graduates of the world’s most selective universities: the early 1990s, the dot-com boom and the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis (Teach for America!). Each time the graduating class of Harvard and Yale looked as if it might decide, en masse, that it wanted to do something with its life other than work for Morgan Stanley.

Each time it turned out that it didn’t.

Silicon Valley is once again bubbling, and, in response, big Wall Street banks are raising starting salaries, and reducing the work hours of new recruits. But it’s hard to see why this time should be any different from the others.

Technology entrepreneurship will never have the power to displace big Wall Street banks in the central nervous system of America’s youth, in part because tech entrepreneurship requires the practitioner to have an original idea, or at least to know something about computers, but also because entrepreneurship doesn’t offer the sort of people who wind up at elite universities what a lot of them obviously crave: status certainty.

Read the entire column by Lewis here:

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