All it takes is a quick visit to the Yale Meme Facebook page to observe the disdain many students have for finance and consulting. Among dining hall labeling mishaps and digs at Directed Studies, you will find carefully curated memes portraying finance and consulting as industries of conformity, immorality, and elitism.
The Politic reached out to some Yale meme creators to get their take.
“I think a lot of Yalies go into careers like [finance and consulting] without anything approaching a social conscience–they do it because they care about prestige and/or want financial stability and/or see that everyone’s applying for something similar and just go with the herd,” Henry Robinson ’19, the creator of the “scroll of truth” finance meme, wrote to The Politic. “I don’t think memes are meant to be a substitute for actual discourse or conversation. I doubt that anyone who does finance or consulting and saw my meme had their minds changed in any significant way, and that wasn’t really my goal.”
Critics of finance often claim that a culture of pre-professionalism at Yale, evident in the presence of on-campus recruiting and the race to build strong resumes and earn prestigious internships, encourages many Yalies to pursue these fields.
“Students [are turning towards more] straight-forward degree paths such as finance or business versus industries or majors that have less of a direct path like history, for example, or anthropology,” Eli Rami ’19, a former intern at the consulting firm Deloitte, said in an interview with The Politic.
Data from class surveys conducted by the Office of Career Strategies for 2013-2016 show that the top three post-graduation employment industries were education, finance and consulting. Finance and consulting constitute just under 30 percent of post-graduate first destinations, with an average of 16.75 percent of the graduating class going straight into finance and 12.45 percent going to consulting.
This rush towards consulting and finance is not unique to Yale. Between 2006 and 2011, Harvard sent an average of 22.6 percent of its graduates into finance and an average of 14.8 percent into consulting, numbers slightly higher than Yale’s. Princeton, on the other hand, saw a whopping 38 percent of their graduating class go into financial services between 2000 and 2010.
“Compared to our peer schools that have a strong undergraduate specific business programs like the University of Pennsylvania, which has Wharton, they may be putting 30 percent of their class, 40 percent of their class right into finance because that’s what their curriculum is aimed for. Yale doesn’t really do that,” Jeanine Dames, Director of the Office of Career Strategy, told The Politic. “It fluctuates. Finance and education duke it out every year…Consulting usually comes in around number three. There’s this really interesting trend of technology growing and this really interesting trend of healthcare growing.”
Some students suspect that many Yalies choose to work in finance because of the field’s significant compensation, not because of a genuine interest in the work. This possible motivation fuels popular criticisms that those who enter the field have “sold their souls” and given in to corporate greed.
“Certainly there are greedy people in finance, I’ll certainly acknowledge that,” said Michael Pascutti, a professor of Economics who teaches Introduction to Corporate Finance, in an interview with The Politic. “I worked there for a long time. There are greedy people in lots of places in the world though, not just finance. They don’t have a monopoly on greed.”
Dames made a distinction between industry and function. The role students perform at their individual jobs may differ from the stereotypical role associated with a field.
“Even though…12 percent of the class of 2017 went into technology as an industry, when you look at the function, their actual job, less than six percent were actually doing programming,” she told The Politic.
The industry-job distinction adds nuance to the consulting and finance debate. Not all students who decide to go into finance, for example, are working in banking or sales and trading. Some may opt to work in marketing or Human Resources, where they will have a function that they are qualified for and enjoy while meeting their financial needs.
Since the beginning of on-campus recruiting about 25 to 30 years ago, recruiters have been able to draw a sizable portion of Yale undergraduates through their expertly targeted recruiting tactics. They can tap into the anxieties that juniors and seniors feel when faced with the daunting task of determining their immediate futures.
“I think [finance and consulting] locked into that as thinking ‘we could be your gap period opportunity.’ They marketed it well. Whether or not it’s the right gap year opportunity for students, individual students, is a totally different discussion: it’s right for some, it’s definitely not right for others,” Dames explained.
Overwhelmingly negative campus attitudes towards finance and consulting can add anxiety to the already grueling process of choosing a postgraduate path.
“The thing that differentiates us from a school like Wharton, for instance, is that people at Wharton are very open about the fact that, yes, I have these goals, I’m studying economics, I want to go corporate,” Rami said. At Yale, however, “you have to lie, you have to lay down your criticisms of corporate America and then you have to say like, ‘Oh yeah, you know, I feel super conflicted about doing this’ and then you get your corporate job.”
Rami’s observations illustrate how students have a negative perception of the decision to “go corporate.” The fact that it was difficult to find students willing to be interviewed for this piece is a testament to this negative stigma.
Dames emphasized that career paths are not one-size-fits-all. In an effort to diversify the career search while balancing large on-campus recruiting operations, the Yale Office of Career Strategies has been promoting networking events that feature smaller, “boutique,” consulting and finance firms, start-ups, nonprofits and government employers.
“A lot of the reason we started collecting and publishing data was to dispel some of the myths and also for students to realize, you can have a career as a performing artist, there are resources to do it, there are people you can talk to” said Dames.
For now, the debate about the merits of corporate careers continues, both in memes and reality.