Welcome friends!
Did you ever wonder where all those Wall Street types actually come from? Seems a sociologist named Lauren Rivera looked into it recently and concluded that getting hired by the big financial firms is mostly a matter of going to a handful of prestigious schools. Apparently how you got there, and what you did while there (if, indeed, you did anything at all) didn’t seem to matter too much, except for playing certain preppy sports (that would be lacrosse, squash, crew, and hockey; more plebeian pursuits like football, basketball, and soccer weren’t really relevant). What, you think you can learn whatever they’ve learned someplace else for a lot cheaper and with a lot less attitude? You’re barking up the wrong tree, buddy! What’s going on here is what is known as credentialism, not education as most people understand it. At least for these firms, it doesn’t really matter what you know when you finally emerge or how you performed while you were there; it matters mostly whether you managed to get into one of these particular elite (i.e. expensive) institutions and whether you share some cultural characteristics with the establishment types that do the actual hiring.
I found that story pretty entertaining because if you’ve been following the news at all you know that while most sectors of the economy are in a lot of trouble right now the financial sector continues to make money hand over fist, if recent news reports are any indication mostly by taking long shot bets with other people’s money, engaging in insider trading, concocting arcane financial instruments to hide risk, lying to their own clients, and basically trying to make a buck any way they can... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website. All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee. Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right? If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then. Thank you my friends!
