Study Havard and Ivy League schools to work in Wall Street?

...is it just for that cushy Wall St job?
Wed, Jun 25, 2008
The Straits Times

NEW YORK - A PROMINENT education professor at Harvard has started leading 'reflection' seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their education and aspirations.

Dr 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 Dr 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 other people have expressed similar concerns in recent years, his views have gained support on the Harvard campus with students, faculty and even the new president, Dr Drew Gilpin Faust, who made the topic the cornerstone of her address to seniors during commencement week.

She noted that in the past year, whenever she met students, their first question had always been the same: 'Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?'

On other campuses as well, officials are questioning with new vigour whether too many top students who might otherwise turn their talents to a broader array of fields are being lured by high-paying corporate jobs, and whether colleges should do more to encourage students to consider other careers, especially public service.

As Mr Adam Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it: 'A lot of students have been asking the question, 'We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we are leaving to become investment bankers - why is this?''

In her speech, Dr Faust acknowledged the appeal of the jobs - the money, the promise of stimulating work, the security for students of knowing they will be working alongside their friends, a commitment of only two or three years.

She urged the students to search for measures of personal success beyond financial security despite 'the all-but-irresistible recruiting juggernaut'.

In his commencement speech last month at Wesleyan University, Mr Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voiced a similar theme when he sounded an impassioned call to public service, and warned that the pursuit of narrow self-interest - 'the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy...betrays a poverty of ambition'.

Universities are so concerned about this issue that some - Amherst, Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, for example - have expanded public service fellowships and internships.

'We are in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,' said Dr Anthony Marx, Amherst's president. 'That is what justifies the expense of the education.'

This year, Tufts announced that it would pay off college loans for graduates who chose public service jobs.

And officials at Harvard, Penn, Amherst and a number of other colleges say one reason they have begun emphasising grants instead of loans in financial aid is so students do not feel pressured by their debts to pursue lucrative careers.

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