My favorite comment is the one suggesting liberal arts majors are today's Michelangelos.

This article seems to suggest that the reason why increasingly growing number of Ivy grads aren't ending up in I-banking analyst gigs is due to self-selection, due to Occupy Wall Street sentiment or whatever. However, I highly doubt that is the case. It is likely due to the simple fact that analyst jobs are much more scarce in this economy compared to before.

And, Ivy grads turning down Goldman IBD analyst job offer for Teach For America? Are you fucking kidding me?? No person in a sane mind would do that. Why the fuck would anyone turn down a 120k per year job for a 30k per year job unless he is retarded? If I happened to know someone who makes such a choice, I would force that individual to get his head examined for sanity. Seriously.

It's like when someone gives you the choice to choose from a Ferrari or Honda Civic, you would be fucking retarded to take Honda Civic just because you are afraid that others will think you are a rich spoiled brat for driving a Ferrari. Teach For America is an absolute garbage gig compared to Goldman IBD. Those two don't belong in the same sentence.

And all that trouble and shame for that glorious 30k per year salary

Wait what? What does your example have to do with the student body at Ivy League colleges?

Let's face it - there are douches anywhere you go, whatever college you go, and there are those 'spoiled rich' brats pretty much at any major college of big size. For example, George Bush's daughter went to U Texas.

Maybe I could agree with your point that there is a bit of higher concentration of wealthy students at Ivy colleges compared to other colleges, but it is absurd to suggest that Ivy League and 'wealthy snobbery' are interchangeable objects.

Dude, I fucking wish I was born just 5 years earlier. Fuck this shit, and fuck this economy...

It will pick up again, don't worry, just do your part and the rest will take care of itself. The fact that some of your classmates are idiots and not taking these jobs is good news for you and everyone here. In fact, I'm not going to state this point again, as I still have family members graduating.

My buddy turned down Greenhill, Evercore, HW and Deloitte S&O for TFA and he is STILL the smartest guy I know. He has 4 interviews with huge name PE and IB shops in the coming weeks for an internship between his first and second year for TFA. So he gets the TFA Bschool bump and the 'high finance' experience.

Fully agree. Several things have happened over the past few years:
1) The amount of hiring in finance has dropped substantially due to the economy
2) Banks have widened their nets to recruit at a wider range of schools. As the poster mentioned above, a 3.2 non-quant major may have sufficed in the past, but when you add 4.0 non-target quant students into the mix, it no longer cuts it.
3) The amount of competition for finance jobs has remained strong despite the economy, since they still offer one of the best paying options out of school.
4) Job security in this business is gone.
Summary: it's not by choice.

Also, in response to the hating on TFA: while most of the people on this board would love nothing more than to do banking at GS, it's not for everyone. That is a really narrow minded way of thinking.

120k means significantly more hours and stress. I'd rather take a 30k job and enjoy my life.

If all the people who wanted to "change" the world by doing TFA took real jobs and donated a large chuck of their first years salary to inner city kids, more benefit would be had. I doubt that transient, non professional teachers, really make a difference in one year.

Go work for Goldman and send 2 kids to private schools or pay for after school tutors for 10 of them or something. How about setting up a scholarship for kids to go to state schools or pay for community college for their parents.

TFA has excellent placement into HSW MBA. I know a lot of ivy kids who can't get top finance or consulting jobs opt for tfa, so they can build their resumes and leverage it into HSW.

Stupid article. They're not passing up on IB for TFA out of the kindness of their hearts. They're doing it because of a lack of jobs. You do TFA when you're not sure what you want to do in life and/or there's few options for you.

I'm not talking about every student at these places. I'm talking about the ones that figured they didn't need a useful major because surely they'll get a job at a BB because they go to Yale and goddamnit they're entitled to one! The article ignores the fact that there's still plenty exceptional people at HYP going into medicine, law, public service, academia, etc. It's the people that didn't prepare for anything else by the time they graduated that have fewer options.

For the record, you can be both very smart and insane. There are some geniuses who are down-right insane and lack common sense or some people actually suffer from schizophrenia. John Nash may be a genius in the academic sense, but he undoubtedly is an insane man.

And, I am afraid your buddy also suffers from insanity. True, he must be pretty smart to have gotten those offers. But choosing TFA over those fine options implies his mental sickness or maybe mild symptoms of schizophrenia.

Please shut the fuck up.

There are very few "altruistic" people at these schools. Look at the top performers, like rhodes and marshall scholars, for instance. They do an insane amount of community service while in college, like setting up non-profits or volunteering in sub-sahara Africa. But then you look at where they end up going, and it's usually law school or finance.

No. Fuck you. And, fuck TFA. And LOL at your statement that TFA gives you better exit options than BB IBD. What a fucking clown.

Actually, during the upcoming grad recruiting cycle, TFA will give VERY good options. For PE/HF, yes, IBD is going to give better options. But for almost everything else, I would not understimate the influence that TFA has on a resume....plus, almost the entire network is from ivies, so right there they have tapped a large body of sympathetic people.

Enrique, when you finish school and get out into the real world, you'll see things a bit differently. Congrats on the good school, but realize that you're talking to people that have been out of school for years and have a little bit better idea of how things really work.

This topic has been covered ad nausea, let's please move along...

Perhaps not compared to H/P, but compared to low-tier ivies, sure.

Not saying they are targeted more heavily, the Ivy League is obviously still the main base of recruiting for Wall Street, and at the end of the day the people with high GPA's from those schools can always get IB jobs, but it seems banks are now placing much more focus on business majors from top public schools and non-Ivy private schools with business programs, and the ones that fall by the wayside are the kids at Ivy's with 3.5ish GPA's and no experience relevant to finance.

As a decent sample I attended a program for Sophomores at a BB last year. Only about a third of the students there were from Ivy League schools. I also know for a fact that this same bank did superdays for 'non-core' students this year prior to their recruiting cycles at Ivy League schools to go ahead and lock in top people from elsewhere early on.

Not if you go to an Ivy League school. But speaking for the school I go to (regional semi-target for banking), options for the people that don't study Business/Engineering seem to range from low-end entry level jobs (ie the jobs people just think of as jobs, not career-launchers) or going to grad school. I know people who have graduated with solid GPA's in liberal arts majors and wound up looking for a job for months and then finally just settled for selling cars. People in less quantitative business majors (like marketing/management) are having trouble too. And it isn't that the school is poor. Accounting majors walk into Big 4 audit jobs and Finance majors don't have much trouble getting something in Banking/Consulting/Corp. Finance.

Majoring in accounting may be the safest and arguably the easiest path towards a middle class, white-collar career track...

My response goes to this comment, http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/less-ivy-league-grads-heading-to-w..., which for some reason WSO isn't letting me quote.

You are making a huge generalization here that all that matters to people is money? It is becoming more and more clear as the years go on that Wall Street isn't the glamorous place that many people are brought up to believe, that even at Goldman Sachs Investment Banking you are not safe and neither are you on the top of the world, and that maybe they generally don't like the assoholic culture/system of many BBs.

It maybe that all you look for your career is how big your paycheck is, but some would rather be happy to settle for the basics and enjoy humanitarian services than slaving their life away for 2-3 years for a majestic promise land just to come to the realization that this promise land isn't exactly what it is hyped up to be.

Not saying I agree that more people are going for TFA over GS but, there is a life outside Goldman Sachs IBD

PS: Pretty sure it's "fewer" not "less". ;)

thanks bud.. good luck in college