No, I meant it.
The triumph of marketing “prestige” in the higher-ed sector to a segment of the population that has economic reasons to focus on the importance of higher education is a direct feeder into intense zero-sum thinking about resource availability, which is the basis for a lot of the things you’re probably thinking of as being way more toxic.
So no, I haven’t been really lucky, I’m just a social scientist who’s been trained to look for motivations underlying behavior.
Some things ARE resource constrained. There aren’t enough dentists practicing in the places where people who have terrible oral hygiene (diet, tobacco, meth to name three) really need them. How is this tied to prestige-obsession among the middle class? There aren’t enough specialists practicing in our VA hospitals. You could argue that this is because young physicians need to be doing plastic surgery in Beverly Hills to pay off their med school loans, and not doing reconstructive surgery at a VA hospital… but that’s actually not tied to prestige- it’s tied to wacky policy making at all levels of health care, including DOD which is NOT a prestige oriented branch of government in the way you are describing it.
I won’t keep going. I’m not a social scientist, but I live in the real world, and there are toxic elements of our society and resource distribution all around us. And yes- a few of them fit into your model. But many of them do not. And I don’t want to get political here so the thread doesn’t close…
You are arguing that my argument is invalid because it does not account for the cause of every problem.
I never made that claim, however—look at my original framing of it, in fact, where I explicitly limit it (I just double checked). Please do not strawman me by presenting arguments that suggest otherwise, no matter how much you are convinced that I am wrong.
Let’s bring the focus back to the main discussion. If you’ve laid out your argument and defended it once, there’s no need to keep going in circles—it’s okay to let it rest.
The result of economic growth not trickling down to the bottom 90% over the last few decades?
Thanks for posting @OctoberKate and @dramakid2.
Burger flippers are making $20/hr in Washington and California. Seattle’s Minimum Wage Hit $21.30. Is This the Breaking Point - Or Just the Breaking Feeling? - Poached
And so?
Let’s make this completely topical for this thread: One of my kids just turned down a job in the DC area because even though it was in the field they want to work in, the offer was for $21.50/hour in Washington DC, and when they ran the numbers it was clear that given the cost of living there it simply wasn’t going to work.
Pointing to hourly wages that start with a 2 doesn’t counter @ucbalumnus’s point. As we get older we remember what it took for us to get by, but we tend to forget to adjust for inflation—and overall economic growth isn’t helping improve wages for the bottom 90% unless what’s improving is real wages, not just nominal ones.
And salaried workers inc $72k.
My son told me his company had to raise the supply chain and Ergonomics people who rotated there during the 2 year program. If they were at $68k, their 10% target bonus aligns to that but they get a cost of living offset.
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This may be off base since it’s not finance or Comp Eng but my Aero son was selected for a graduate assistant research position as a MechE grad student at his school which was a full time 40 hr/week position, school sponsored his clearance with the govt working with defense contractors, salary enough to pay for an apartment/food across from engineering complex (walked to work/school) and free tuition (and he was oos) for all Masters classes, must get your thesis to graduate. You just work extra hour or two at night or weekend to make up for those classes that interrupted your work day. Also, his employers since graduating have recognized the 3 years as a paid grad assist (was working on a project so stayed with it to closing) as “work experience” when plotting his starting salaries. Best deal in the world if you can get it at your school.
Too much hype for an industry that is brutal on the kids.
Bloomberg article.
by Misha Manjuran Oberoi and Jo Constanz of Bloomberg News
Summary:
Investment banking is more competitive than ever, with total compensation exceeding $180,000 for first-year analysts and internship acceptance rates dropping to less than 1% at companies like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
The path to Wall Street starts soon after college freshmen arrive on campus, with students competing for spots in student-run finance and investing clubs and drilling themselves on accounting and corporate-valuation methodologies.
The grueling recruiting process involves submitting dozens of applications, networking with bankers, and preparing for interviews, with some students seeking help from private coaches and interview-prep services that can cost from $4,000 to more than $50,000.
If you’re a college sophomore with investment banking ambitions and you haven’t started preparing for the job market, you’re already behind.
Investment banking is more competitive than ever. Total compensation can exceed $180,000 for first-year analysts, leading to a career that delivers prestige and pay that can reach into the millions. An internship is the golden ticket to an entry-level job. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. say their internship acceptance rates have dropped to less than 1% in recent years, as hundreds of thousands of applicants vie for spots in programs that typically lead to full-time job offers. A growing number of students are pursuing a career in the industry, according to data from entry-level job site Handshake, with investment banking internships drawing more than three times as many applications on the platform than the typical internship. As banks jockey to have first pick, recruiting timelines have crept earlier, pushing students to master an elaborate playbook to break into the industry.
Last week, Evercore Inc. became one of the first banks to open applications for their 2028 summer internships, months earlier than many students had anticipated.
JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York City. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Getty Images
The path to Wall Street starts soon after college freshmen arrive on campus, with fierce competition for crucial spots in student-run finance and investing clubs. By the fall of their sophomore year they’re drilling themselves on the fundamentals of accounting and corporate-valuation methodologies, and networking with bankers via LinkedIn and email before applications open for internships that take place after junior year — almost 20 months in the future. By winter of sophomore year, many will have submitted dozens of applications, each with a personalized cover letter, hoping to get at least one interview. Throughout the process they fear the slightest misstep will prove disqualifying, according to students who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek and asked not to be identified to protect their career prospects.
“From an employer’s perspective, you want to get to the best talent as early as you can. So you’re trying to think of ways to engage people earlier,” says Nicola Hancock, an executive at AMS, a recruitment company that works with banks on entry-level hiring. “How do we get early access?”
The shift presents a dilemma for university career offices. Kelly McSergi, director of employer relations at Yale University, says banks are seeking to hold informational sessions on campus as early as the spring of freshman year, reaching students before the recruiting cycle starts in the fall of sophomore year.
“We’re always kind of balancing ‘getting in front of the students too early’ with ‘they really do need this information,’” McSergi says.
The Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. Photographer: Craig Warga/Bloomberg
Sofia Jiang, a former investment banking analyst at Morgan Stanley , says she wishes recruitment hadn’t occurred so early. She was a Georgetown University sophomore when she secured a Morgan Stanley investment banking internship for the summer after her junior year. It eventually led to a full-time role, but Jiang left the firm after a few months, in November 2025, to build her own clothing brand.
“It makes no sense to me why people are fighting to be recruited literally two years before they even start the internship,” she says.
The grueling recruiting process aside, the path offers college students certainty in a challenging job market, Jiang says. “Investment banking attracts people who are really ambitious but also want a traditionally prestigious career. To be able to guarantee that [in] your second year of college is a really enticing opportunity for a lot of people,” she says.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.
Illustration: Tim Enthoven for Bloomberg Businessweek
Students fret about whom to reach out to, in what order, what to say, what’s too casual. One rising junior who secured an internship offer at a global investment bank starting next summer says the process has been all-consuming.
“The worst part of this process is there’s no validation or sign of success until you get the offer. And so you’re always paranoid — am I doing enough?” he says. “My entire sophomore year up until I got that offer, I was always working, always thinking about it.”
For some applicants the process begins by applying to a so-called target college where banks tend to recruit, such as Harvard University or the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn almost 34% of 2025 graduates went into the financial-services industry, a more than 6-percentage-point increase from four years earlier, according to Penn Career Services.
Some state schools have developed in-house programs to rival those of the Ivy League by vetting and intensively preparing students for the application process. Xavier Sztejnberg, a former investment banker who started a program at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business, selects 75 undergraduate students out of about 500 applications.
“They need to check the box on almost everything,” Sztejnberg says. “And they have to look the part. They have to be polished. Polish is very important for me — being very well spoken.”
Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business runs a similar program called the Investment Banking Workshop. More than 500 undergraduate students enter an initial pre-workshop before roughly 140 are selected. Sridhar Arcot, co-director of the program, says the cutthroat nature of the process has made emotional support a de facto part of his role.
“I like to joke that, as the directors of the Investment Banking Workshop, we are almost like therapists or counselors,” Arcot says. The students “get rejections, and possibly that’s the first time in their life that’s happened.”
Hodge Hall at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. Courtesy: Indiana University Kelley School of Business
Student-run finance and investing clubs can rival the selectivity of their schools’ admissions office with acceptance rates in the low single digits. The clubs offer technical tutoring, alumni connections and valuable intel from upperclassmen who’ve made it through the process.
Much of students’ time during their first year and a half in college is spent learning technical material that’s not taught in early business courses, including interpreting income statements, balance sheets and cash-flow statements.
Students and career coaches say that paying for help isn’t a requirement, but there’s a burgeoning industry of private coaches and interview-prep services as the Wall Street recruiting process starts earlier and gets more competitive — and parents are eager to pay. Packages can include tutoring on financial concepts, mock interviews and networking advice. Prices range from $4,000 to more than $50,000 for highly personalized coaching sessions as frequently as twice a day. Some companies, such as Wall Street Oasis and CareerXL, offer refunds if students don’t land offers.
“All of my clients at some point in time have a major meltdown when they’re going through the process. The parents will call and say, ‘Is this really worth it?’” says Lesley Mitler, founder of career-coaching company Priority Candidates.
The preparation itself is a sort of endurance test for the job to come: Junior analysts often put in 80 to 100 hours a week building financial models in Excel, perfecting slide decks for client presentations and fielding all manner of urgent requests from senior staff.
David Solomon , chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, said on the Long Strange Trip podcast in December that being smart isn’t enough to succeed at the firm. “You have to be smart enough, but the smartest person in the world without a whole package of other things [is] not going to navigate Goldman Sachs well,” he said. Among the qualities important to him, he said, are “the human elements: the ability to connect, resilience, determination, striving for excellence — things that matter everywhere.”
Solomon. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Getty Images
Clubs, coaches and school-sponsored workshops will put prospective applicants through hours of mock interviews to ensure they’re ready to perform if they’re invited to a “superday” — the final round of three or more interviews, often back-to-back, with people from the company at varying levels of seniority.
One college junior in New York learned about the industry when his fifth grade teacher told him he’d make a terrific investment banker. Despite his years of experience in finance and investing clubs, he says, the internship recruiting process felt unpredictable and intense. He landed a coveted 2027 internship at Evercore, less than a week after applying on Jan. 1.
“It’s like your entire interview process is 2.5 hours and you spend hundreds of hours prepping for this,” he says. “It’s a pretty big mismatch.” Evercore didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Banks don’t want applicants to lean heavily on artificial intelligence in the interview process, recruiters say. Last year, Goldman Sachs told investment banking candidates to avoid using digital assistance during interviews.
Once they’re hired, however, AI usage becomes commonplace : Most analysts are encouraged to use AI tools for everyday tasks, including parsing financial filings and formatting slide decks.
Applicants also must navigate what many regard as the most daunting part of the process: coffee chats. To have a realistic shot at an offer, applicants aim to network with multiple employees at every company they’re applying to. In all, that means many students connect with anywhere from 50 to 100 bankers.
A student from Western University in Ontario developed a method for small talk that typifies the intensity that successful students learn to keep under wraps (or, at least, carefully calibrate): Keep digging for common ground, he says, even if the banker on the other end of the conversation sounds completely uninterested. The aspiring banker has forged connections over everything from his first-year dorm, nicknamed the “Zoo,” to similar tastes in books. “I will not move on until the five minutes are done,” he says. “You just keep circling, circling in until you can build that connection.”
If students fail to secure a coveted internship spot, well, there’s always management consulting, coaches say. At Penn’s Wharton School, students say it’s become a running joke that you can tell who didn’t get an offer by seeing who shows up to the next McKinsey & Co. information session.
Pretty soon AI won’t just be doing their everyday tasks - it will be doing all their tasks (minus the actual pitch). What then?
Then their work life balance will improve I guess. I don’t think companies will lower what they charge for their services.
pretty much every buy side institution is using AI to trim analyst hiring. here’s a podcast i recently heard that dives into the AI in the investment office topic. IB is primarily sell side so not sure if the dynamics are different.
Not surprising at all. Also, for those quantitative heavy outfits with their “quant jocks” - how long will they need people to construct mathematical models when AI can do it better and faster? AI just solved a mathematical problem that had eluded the top math minds for decades - why would we think it isn’t capable of replacing many “quants”. It’s not going to happen overnight but at some point what is the utility of paying people big salaries to do something AI can do better and faster. And as for the investment angle - as it is most investment managers can’t beat their respective indices (which is why I’ve always wondered why their compensation doesn’t reflect that reality).
In the fullness of time, the robots will take over, none of us will have jobs, and we will all be hooked to machines extracting energy for the matrix.
In the meantime though, people are being paid to use the AI to make money.
Along the way, the firms that don’t have the resources to make these investments into AI will fall by the wayside — even if they consider themselves to be quant in some way.
Looking forward to the “artisanal” investment advice from a guy in Bushwick with a handlebar moustache and man bun!
Not the topic of this thread, but I think it’s important to catch urban legends as they’re being vectored, so: This is presumably talking about all the headlines stating that OpenAI’s agents solved the Navier-Stokes equations. It didn’t. For starters, it cheated by starting with extensive unpublished work that a human mathematician had (stupidly, let us be clear about that here) uploaded to public ChatGPT, and even with that head start it turns out that mathematicians have already found flaws in the claimed “proof”.
So be careful reading press-release-based headlines about so-called AI agents and what they can do.
There have been other claims that AI has solved math problems, but most of them that have succeeded have been disproofs rather than proofs—certainly important, but much easier to do—and have dealt with items mathematicians simply haven’t spent a lot of effort on (e.g., Erdős’s unit distance conjecture), and so it isn’t like it’s doing better than humans, just that it cares about different things.
There is a sea of difference between what I wrote and what you took away from it. There is going to be a ton of boring research, compilation, aggregation tasks that AI is going to help with. One of the people on the podcast talked about how she uses Claude to evaluate fund manager pitches and do mini legal reviews.
The next frontier of AI would be to improve/replace some of the human cognition heavy tasks such as fundamental stock picking. Even there you will still need a ton of people to call management, talk to vendors, survey customers, and get deep into a sector. Now that human may use Claude or some AI to help themselves but the tools themselves are useless without that continuous context layer supplied by the human.
We are a very long way away from AI doing all that quant teams do today but these tools will help teams get smarter and faster. The number of humans in the ecosystem could reduce but these companies have pretty tight hiring to begin with so not a lot of fat to trim.
Finally with incentives, many of the hedge funds operate in a full pass through model where the costs of running the operations is all paid for by the investors. Those LPs care more about getting the best risk adjusted returns not in minimizing cost of human capital.