Elite universities ask: Are there aims besides Wall Street?

[flashl]

A prominent education professor at Harvard has begun leading "reflection" seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their educations and aspirations.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

"Is this what a Harvard education is for?" asked Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. "Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?"

Although others have expressed similar concerns in recent years, his views have gained support on the Harvard campus with students, faculty and even the new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who made the topic the cornerstone of her address to seniors during commencement week. Faust noted that in the past year, whenever she has met with students, their first question has always been the same: "Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?"

IHT

Well, sending 'our' brain trust to Wallstreet worked so good for the collective USA didn't it?

Maybe, today's LBN post by UpInArms, Citi poised to fire thousands (6,500 jobs) - Report, is the cause for the 'reflection'? This is just one of hundreds of 'reports' about thousands of job purges in the financial sector since August 2007.

The pathway to success or the 'American bootstrap Dream' of "a good education + years of student debt = a better life one day" scenario is increasingly a tough sell.

This makes you wonder, what type of retraining will the 'investment/financial alchemy types' from Wallstreet will be receiving?

Retraining is the catchphrase when an industry evaporates or a bubble economy burst, which, in turn, leave thousands without jobs, a safety net, or a future.

[Wapsie B]

1. Seems to me it might be time to do away with the Ivy League-Wall Street connection.

Couldn't do any worse with the Big 10 or ACC grads running the investment banks. Hell,why not the Missouri Valley for that matter?

[jakem]

2. is the % really that high to begin with?

i went to a non-ivy but certainly 'elite' university, and i don't know anyone who went into finance.

of course i might just have been hanging out with the wrong people!

:evilgrin:

[Cassandra]

3. I recommend reading The Trap:...

Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook.
"From Publishers Weekly
Twenty-something journalist Brook sees the best minds of his generation scrivening away as corporate lawyers and accountants, and he's furious about it. His fresh and striking pay-gap polemic laments the plight of "educated, idealistic young people" who must choose whether "to be a sellout or a saint"—that is, whether to take a lucrative corporate job or to eke out a pauper's existence in creative or nonprofit work. "The new economic realities," Brook writes, "are shaping people's lives, closing off certain career and lifestyle options. They are reducing freedom." Brook marshals facts and interviews to make his case for "more egalitarian economic policies." Decrying recent economic shifts that have widened the chasm between private and public sector employment, he skewers centrist "New Democrats" as well as usual-suspects such as William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Brook preaches too narrowly to the choir (proclaiming that "as is plain to see, the conservative philosophy is wrong"), and his solutions are limited to calling for "truly progressive taxation" and insisting that "the public sector should pay its professionals more." Still, many readers will wince in recognition of their work/life compromises. "Corporate America is riddled with secret dissenters," Brook notes; he does a real service asking why it must be this way."

[applegrove]

4. That a good question. I read last year in the Economist that MBA courses

changed in the early 1990s to be about treating everyone like your competator: government, employees, customers. People have been taught for the last 20 years to treat anything outside of the corporation in a ruthless manner.