In Recruiting Game, Wall Street Still Competes

Despite the refrain that the financial crisis has discouraged students from pursuing jobs in finance, the number of elite students who continue to seek lucrative positions at financial firms indicates that Wall Street has not yet lost its luster.

As this year’s recruiting season begins, some students say they view finance positions as springboards for later careers, while others are are drawn to the challenge and fast-paced environment. Still others are, naturally, motivated by the high salaries that Wall Street offers.

But perhaps, some say, Wall Street’s allure is fueled by the colleges themselves, which allow recruiters to hold sway on these students.

“Wall Street’s influence has led to a situation where students are more likely to become bankers than doctors,” said Laura Newland, who self-published a book this month called “Chasing Zeroes: The Rise of Student Debt, the Fall of the College Ideal, and One Overachiever’s Misguided Pursuit of Success.” “I think the college experience has morphed into something that my parent’s generation probably wouldn’t recognize.”

For Ms. Newland, who is from a small town in Alabama, part of the appeal of a liberal arts college was that she thought she would have time to explore what she wanted to do after graduation. Instead, what she found during her first year at Duke in 2006 was a “gravitational pull” toward jobs in the financial sector and first-year students who attended career fairs with the hopes of impressing the right person early. But unlike most students who aggressively pursue a career in finance, Ms. Newland, who graduated in 2010, realized during her junior year that the Wall Street internship she had been coveting for so long was not, in the end, what she wanted. She is now a management consultant.

Ms. Newland is only one of many students who find themselves seduced by Wall Street by the time they are juniors and seniors despite having no previous aspirations to work in finance.

And many of these students are like Ms. Newland. Attracted by the idea of a high pay and often faced with a pile of debt, students flock to career fairs, attend daylong interviews known as “super days” and anxiously await a phone call announcing an offer.

While Ms. Newland’s book rebukes elite schools for allowing Wall Street recruiters to prey on naive students, it is unlikely to change the high-stakes game of pursuing an offer to join the financial elite.

Jobs in the financial services are still among the top career choices for graduating seniors at elite colleges despite Wall Street’s battered reputation, even if the numbers are somewhat depressed since the financial crisis. Harvard reported that 12 percent of its class of 2013 went into financial services, up from 11 percent in 2012. At Yale, 14.8 percent of the 2013 graduating class joined financial services. Of the 865 Brown students who started working right after graduation in 2012, 15 percent went into finance and banking, with 19 graduates going to Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. Brown’s 2013 numbers will be released in the spring.

“These are industries that have very structured kinds of recruiting processes,” said Andrew Simmons, the director of Brown’s career development center. “They tend to, for that reason, have a high level of visibility among the students.” Brown, like many prestigious universities, sponsors information sessions for summer internships and full-time positions led by a number of finance groups, including Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Citigroup, which all continue to draw a significant number of students, he said.

For one, many first-year Wall Street jobs pay at least $70,000 a year in salary, not including a yearly bonus. And securing a job when peers are contemplating their future is attractive â€" offers for junior-year internships are often doled out before March, and for full-time jobs, by October of the senior year. It’s almost impossible to say no to a tangible job at the beginning of senior year when the alternative is to wait and see whether something else with guaranteed less pay will materialize. Other opportunities do exist, but it’s sometimes hard to figure out how to find them.

“We certainly have the Wall Street and consulting recruiters hanging around, but we also have a lot of other options,” Mr. Simmons said. “The real things that students gravitate towards is things that seem clear cut.”

For her part, Ms. Newland, the author, agreed.  “Bankers are very present,” she said. “It seems like they’re everywhere all the time.”