A friend of mine has a son attending the Business School at Manhattan University where he is a rising sophomore majoring in Accounting. Manhattan is not an especially selective college but it’s been around for a long time and has a good alumni network in the business community in New York. It also draws a lot of its faculty - especially the adjuncts - from the business community in NYC.
Well, my friend tells me that the business students at Manhattan have been advised against majoring in Finance because the jobs in that field are drying up - or so they’ve been told. With NYC being the financial capital of the world, I’m thinking that they should be well positioned to get a read on the status of that field.
I’m posting this because we get a lot of parents and students posting here with an interest in Finance. I’m wondering if anyone else here - especially people who work in this field - have any insights on the state of this industry, or if anyone is hearing anything similar to this, or if anyone can contradict this comment. This is really third hand information that I’ve received, so I don’t even know how reliable it is. Just thinking that I’d put my finger to the wind and see what anyone else is hearing.
But what subarea of finance? I.e. “investment banking”, “hedge funds”, or “private equity” (which is what people tend to think of when “NYC” and “finance” are mentioned together) versus the finance roles in many ordinary companies?
Yes, I was thinking the same thing. But regardless of the specialties in the field, the college is specifically discouraging Finance as a major, which is one of 7 majors available in their Business School. The other 6 are Accounting, Business Analytics, CIS, Economics, Management, and Marketing.
Finance is a major that is oriented towards high prestige aware career paths like IB, VC, PE, etc. Manhattan is not considered a prestigious or target school. Certainly a respected school but not elite.
Consequently, Manhattan’s dissuading students from majoring in Finance makes sense given the peculiarities of their circumstance and the likely inability of their alum to place in certain fields. Finance majors from schools such as Stern or Wharton however remain highly sought after by the aforementioned prestige aware employers.
Take this for what it is worth, but I have heard several times now people expressing some variation on the thought that the more quant jobs may get scarcer and scarcer, with more of the remainder requiring really advanced qualifications like PhDs. But the more traditional/relational jobs may prove more resistant.
I’m not in finance but both my daughters are (one is 8 years into the industry and works in CIB, the other is graduating and has a job lined up in corporate properties - both at top 5 banks).
I applaud Manhattan for being realistic with its students about a very competitive field, one that is destined to be filled by graduates from elite colleges and universities. I don’t necessarily think that Manhattan should dissuade students from the entire field of finance however, because there are many opportunities that aren’t Wall Street and aren’t in NYC (although I know there are many freshmen who have those aspirations but aren’t aware of their chances of getting there). Also, some of the other business major choices that Manhattan offers could also be impacted by the job market - I wonder if they are instructing students on those fields.
There’s a fine line between being honest and realistic with students about career prospects and turning them off from the college and its program altogether (resulting in transfers or turning down offers of admission). They need to have confidence in Manhattan’s ability to position them for the job market, no matter what it looks like.
It is unrealistic for students to assume that their college is “positioning” them for the job market. I see this a lot- “I graduated from Dartmouth- why should I have to hustle?”
Students need to position THEMSELVES. Taking the highest rigor they can handle in whatever discipline they are studying/majoring in. Not blowing off a professor’s offer to edit a journal article because it’s more important to plan the frat formal. Not missing deadlines for fellowship applications because the kid was in Cancun on Spring Break and the internet at the hotel died the day of the deadline. Making sure they’ve submitted their resume to career services and edited it based on the suggestions; taking advantage of the practice interviews and practice Zooms. Students need to hear “don’t wear jangly jewelry for a virtual interview- it’s distracting” or “It’s ok to wear grungy socks and sweatpants on a Zoom but your top needs to be professional-looking and you need to comb your hair.”
Etc. There are no downsides to rigor, especially if it means gaining access to academic and intellectual and artistic opportunities that go to the hard-worker/hustlers.
Agree that students who think they’re destined for Wall Street need to pivot and consider a much broader range of employment opportunities. But it won’t be Manhattan’s fault if a kid can’t launch.
They should major in the area of business they find the most interesting. Any business degree, regardless of major, is just a starting foundation for a career. The real expertise is learned on the job not in school. I tell people to focus on what you are good at. There is always a need for people good at what they do.
As long as money is an important part of our world there will be a need for people with business acumen, knowledge of finance, accounting, marketing, etc. The tools they use and exact nature of their jobs may change but as long as they have a good foundation and ability to adapt they will be fine.
I agree - but when a 17-18 y.o. is choosing a college, that’s not what they are thinking (and there’s probably a fair number of parents who aren’t thinking that way either, especially if they have to write a 5-figure tuition check twice a year). Hopefully they eventually come to that realization, but they probably won’t choose a program at all if the messaging is, “You’re not going to make in finance, so pick something else.”
If Manhattan doesn’t believe that Wall Street is a possibility with a degree from their finance program, they should be pivoting to all the other finance positions that are possible, while supporting and empowering students to, as you stated above, position themselves for these jobs.
Nobody wants to educate themselves on how the labor markets work and what the on-ramps look like. It’s a shame. The same people (parents and kids) who spend hours researching when the athletic center is open, spend hundreds decorating a kid’s dorm room, and complain on Facebook that there is no mesclun on the salad bar at XYZ school can’t be bothered doing basic research (except for Payscale and similar to get wildly misleading numbers). I get it- people invest time in what they care about, and the assumption is that the college will do the heavy lifting to get the kid launched.
Read the threads on CC about the kids who graduated in December 2024, are graduating next week, last June who still haven’t found a job. “Everyone knows career services at my kid’s school is terrible”. Does your kid even know where it’s located?
In fairness to Manhattan and in the interests of accuracy, that’s not what Manhattan said. As it was told to me, students were advised that jobs in Finance are in decline and that they should therefore consider other majors. There was no mention of Wall St. They are still offering their Finance major, so obviously they are continuing to support students whose who choose Finance as their major.
Finance isn’t going away. Insurance, consumer products, industrials, energy, travel/leisure, aerospace- all these sectors still need finance people even when Wall Street contracts!
I don’t know anything about finance as a career other than what I see at the Wealth Management company which handles my investments. So I’m coming from a place of complete ignorance. However, the various comments here got me curious, so I went to the internet to see what’s out there. Here’s a link to a pretty balanced article looking at the current state of the field and where the author thinks it’s going. The article is 2-3 years old, but since it takes the long view both retrospectively and for the future, the analysis still applies. See what you think:
Does the “business analytics” skill-set overlap with what some jobs in the finance sector will be looking for? Or is that a whole different trajectory?
You didn’t ask me but I’ll throw in some observations.
There is some overlap. How much and how relevant will depend on the program. Some companies hire the “Business Analytics” types for roles in marketing, for example. Big credit card company-- the analytics team in the marketing group is tasked with understanding the customer base, modeling the best way to increase the frequency with which current card holders use their card or modeling the most successful/least costly “activation” offers (i.e. no interest for six months for a new card holder- vs. lots of perks and cashback deals). So a finance class or two for someone interested in these types of roles is fine. It wouldn’t make them a finance guru- but enough to understand the blocking and tackling.
A Hotel company would have the analytics types examining geographic expansion- for example. Costs of new build vs. retrofit. Average revenue per room based on certain assumptions in the business model, desirability of the location, competitive arena. Finance and financing options (i.e. “other people’s money”) would be somewhat more helpful here- interest rates are very important for companies with hard assets and a big physical footprint. But a broader business background is important too.
You can back into an answer by looking at the required courses and the available electives for both degrees. And of course- people get hired for both finance AND analytics roles without those degrees. My best finance hire ever was a geology major. We hired him for a role that required an MBA (which he didn’t have). He was deep and broad and a creative problem-solver, had worked with large datasets, and was a fantastic writer and communicator. It took him under a week to master the cash flow analysis, valuation, etc. skills that are taught in a finance program. And good analytics people are hiding everywhere- psychology and the other social sciences, especially if their statistical training required a lot of programming.
A lot of jobs in finance at companies, not financial institutions, are filled by folks with accounting degrees. Business analytics folks often work in groups that do M&A in those companies, or strategy.
There is a wide range of finance jobs, and it is possible that the college feels it is positioning its grads for careers in them with another if its majors.
blossom gave you a much more authoritative answer. My perspective is very much an outsider one–my wife worked for a bank her whole career, and as it happens my job as an attorney often involves me interviewing finance people of various sorts and asking them about their backgrounds and jobs and such.
That said, I can draw on that background to just reinforce the other answers you got. I do think some working Finance professionals would say something like an accounting background can be the most obviously useful. But at the end of the day, if you are in the Finance department for a corporation, say, your job does involve helping the corporation do its overall business by understanding how that business can best be financed. And high level Finance people may indeed have input on important strategic decisions because of various financial options/implications. Similarly if you are involved in lending to corporations, you might benefit from having a good understanding of the businesses in your industry area.
So I think being good at understanding the business side of things is almost always relevant to people who work in corporate finance.
And these days, that typically involves a lot of business analytics. I think that concern I have heard repeatedly expressed is that a lot of lower-level jobs in something like business analytics are exactly the kind of job a good AI could take over or at least consolidate, such that there might be one human managing analytic processes that used to take more humans to execute. But at least having an understanding of what business analytics involves seems obviously relevant to Finance people to the extent they will very likely be seeing the output of such processes in the course of doing their jobs.
My two cents is where I would be concerned is if you were a kid who really did not like the relational side of things and were hoping you could mostly just work away individually doing analytics. But I really doubt that people who are comfortable with at least understanding such processes will be less valued, there just may be far fewer jobs where that is basically all you do.
@NiceUnparticularMan, I think you make really good points here. I’m reminded that a century ago in the 1920’s and 1930’s there was a job called “computer”. This was a person who did arithmetic - calculations by hand with pencil and paper.
This job was eventually replaced by adding machines. Business machines (IBM), cash registers (National Cash Register) and a wide array of other equipment and machinery created greater efficiency and increased accuracy. The collective effect was a more robust economy, more jobs, and increased employment. I talk to a lot of people these days who fear AI (not you). I think we have to learn how to use it and work with it. It’s a dramatic change, but we have to bring it into our schools and teach kids how to use it.
I recently visited the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse. I was struck by how much the history of transportation parallels progress in other areas. The most efficient form of transportation to replace foot travel (animal as well as human) was travel by water, so there was rapid building of canals, which was an improvement over coastal only travel & shipping. Rail replaced canals, but new canals continued to be built even as rail lines were rapidly developing and expanding. Highways replaced rail, but we still use rail p and some canals. Finally we have air travel today, providing next day delivery almost everywhere. What’s next?
I have never felt that a Finance degree, other than from a target undergrad bschool (e.g. Wharton, Stern, Ross) gave anyone much of a leg up compared to more technical degrees like Accounting, Data Science/Analytics, CIS/MIS. For the Wall Street type jobs, there is extensive analyst training in aspects of finance that are relevant to the job such that they are comfortable targeting students with traditional liberal arts degrees. For Main Street jobs, having an immediately applicable technical skill seems like an easier hire than someone who is more of a generalist.
Rail is still used for efficiency (lower cost) compared to road or air, but both rail and air are supplemented by roads for the last mile. Obviously, that is something that finance people analyze.