What this article doesn't mention is the burgeoning Yale Entrepreneurial community, which has been experience a great boom as of late.
25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
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Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#12I don't regret going to management consulting after college. In my opinion, it's the best possible career choice for people who don't know what they want to do. In my time in consulting, I was exposed to people in every corporate function possible, and had the chance to see what their jobs were like. I worked for tech companies, PE firms, corporations, and government-regulated entities. I spent 6 months in growth equ…
I agree with you. I just recently quit my consulting gig and I would tell my 21 year old self to work for a company that creates "real value."
But the experience I gained during my 2 1/2 years exposed me to multiple industries and I starting thinking much more "strategically" when analyzing businesses. Also, I worked with probably some of the smartest people you could assemble (less a few "odd" ones).
Also, the expense account was nice and fed me well.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#13I was actually discussing this with a fellow Yale student over dinner tonight. We both came to the same, largely negative, conclusion as the professors interviewed in the article: "it’s an unproductive use of Yalies’ time."
These students are given opportunities most people only dream of. We are exposed to leaders in our fields every day. We are blessed with a $20 billion endowment that enables nearly anything we can envision. Many of us receive tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial aid. The fact that so many choose to go on to careers that do so little to give back is, in my opinion, shameful.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#14What this article doesn't mention is the burgeoning Yale Entrepreneurial community, which has been experience a great boom as of late.
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Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#15What this article doesn't mention is the burgeoning Yale Entrepreneurial community, which has been experience a great boom as of late.
This is true. Both the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and the Yale Entrepreneurial Society are doing great things. In fact, two businesses opened in downtown New Haven this fall that were the direct result of YEI's programs. The fact that the upcoming "HackYale" web entrepreneurship course attracted 600 interested students is also comforting.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#16I mean, if you had the opportunity to earn six figures at graduation, wouldn't you go into these fields too?
75% of Yalies are normal people (the other 25% come from money). They're the children of working professionals, federal government employees, etc. They have had comfortable upbringings, but their families don't have "fuck you" money.
They've been pushed and prodded all their life by parents who, like everyone else without "fuck you" money, are desperately afraid of falling out of the middle class. Most of the kids don't know it yet, and maybe the parents don't consciously acknowledge it, but it's a major force underlying the thinking of every parent who sends his kid to an SAT prep class so he can get a high score and go to Yale.
At the same time, regular jobs suck. Thanks to the consultants, they're overly structured, have shitty benefits, and workers are managed by PHB's who don't know jack-shit about the jobs that the workers do. Upward mobility is curtailed, because many F500's prefer to hire managers from the ranks of consultants, instead of promoting people from within. The risk in potentially more interesting jobs is high: fail to make it big, and you could be stuck in a job where you get yelled at for punching in a couple of minutes late and to the extent that you're lucky enough to get health insurance, it'll be on a shitty plan. Thankfully science/tech is mercifully insulated from this phenomenon (so far), but many students don't have the particular aptitude or desire for those fields.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#17That is shocking.
I am amazed that Yale places so poorly.
I know that Harvard, Princeton and Oxford place much better, around the 40% mark.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#18I almost went the consulting route. It seemed so appealing. Good pay, lots of variety in projects. In the end I didn't. As a result, I've gotten real experience working at real jobs. I didn't consult on how to improve sales. I sold stuff. And now, I don't consult on how to implement sharepoint at megacorp. I make software.
The salaries are still higher in banking and consulting. But they aren't high enough to compensate for the utter lack of value I'd be providing to society.
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#19I'm very surprised it's that low. From talking to guys here you'd think it's more like half.
Original source that they don't link to: http://www.yale.edu/oir/open/pdf_public/YC%2010%20Sr%20Study...
If you look at the original source, you'll find that 1) it's only 25% if you don't count Yalies who went to grad school, about a quarter of the class, and 2) there was a HUGE (50%) falloff from 2008 to 2010 due to the crash, so in 2010 it was more like 12-15%, not 25%.
(Yale senior here)
Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance
#20That's all? At Princeton I'm pretty sure it was closer to 50%.
haha. I don't think it's that high. But I do think it's higher than 25%.
This isn't an apples to apples comparison, but according to the Prince, 41.5% of the graduating seniors my year (2008) "who had accepted full-time employment offers by graduation" were employed in the "financial sector" (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/03/08/25465/).
Not an apples to apples comparison with the Yale article, but my reaction is still surprised that the number is that small at Yale.