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25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

yaledailynews.com

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Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#31

I 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…

FB and Amazon turned out just fine without your help, the only reason you wish you had worked there was in order to extract and benefit from the great pool of wealth and prestige. Your value to society is nil for as long as you spend more mental energy consuming more than you create. Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only b…

Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only by sacrifice and discomfort.

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but assuming you're not, why do the highly educated have any greater responsibility than the less educated?

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#32

Honestly, should the consulting thing confuse or worry anyone? First, my understanding is that the term "consultant" has become so broad that it basically just means "contractor" for intellectual jobs; it covers coding, management, business strategy, and a million other things. Second, even if we stick to a slightly more narrow definition, consulting essentially boils down to smart people going around to existing bus…

>Honestly, should the consulting thing confuse or worry anyone?

I think the author did a pretty good job of explaining why she is worried, and while your two points are compelling, neither really addresses that explanation. You've got people who wanted to be artists, or public servants, or writers, or filmmakers, or non-profit workers, giving up their dreams for the sake of the security offered seductively by professional recruiters. That's a trade off for them, and perhaps liable to elicit a general shrug, but it's hardly a radical position to view so many making that trade off as potentially a loss for society or, say, humanity. Maybe the Shakespeares of this world always end up being Shakespeares. But maybe every once in a while they end up in finance or consultancy. I think it's fine that they have to freedom to do that. I think it's a shame that so much of the risk is on the side of "I'm going to be the next Shakespeare."

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#33
post #13

I 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…

Maybe Yale should use that endowment to pay people to give back to society? In the end, people don't become bankers or consultants because they are looking for the easiest way to be a drain on society. They do it because society gives them a lot of money for doing it, and they have to pay off their $100,000 student loans and raise a family.

> "and they have to pay off their $100,000 student loans and raise a family."

With credit to Thank You For Smoking - that's the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense. Not saying that consulting/finance is like being a merchant of death, but it's really a poor justification for most things, and my eyelids twitch every time I hear it used.

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#34

I 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…

FB and Amazon turned out just fine without your help, the only reason you wish you had worked there was in order to extract and benefit from the great pool of wealth and prestige. Your value to society is nil for as long as you spend more mental energy consuming more than you create. Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only b…

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Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#35

I 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…

FB and Amazon turned out just fine without your help, the only reason you wish you had worked there was in order to extract and benefit from the great pool of wealth and prestige. Your value to society is nil for as long as you spend more mental energy consuming more than you create. Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only b…

[deleted]

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#36
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB and Amazon turned out just fine without your help, the only reason you wish you had worked there was in order to extract and benefit from the great pool of wealth and prestige. Your value to society is nil for as long as you spend more mental energy consuming more than you create. Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only b…

Remember that all highly educated people bear a responsibility much greater than ourselves, and this responsibility is fulfilled only by sacrifice and discomfort. I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but assuming you're not, why do the highly educated have any greater responsibility than the less educated?

You can be sure that I was not kidding. Any form of education, combined with intellect and curiosity is a privilege that (believe it or not) a lot of people don't have. Some possess this virtue without the means of attaining it, while others bear the Fortune without the virtue. To be educated and intelligent is to possess a great tool which can serve many if put to good use.

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#37

Honestly, should the consulting thing confuse or worry anyone? First, my understanding is that the term "consultant" has become so broad that it basically just means "contractor" for intellectual jobs; it covers coding, management, business strategy, and a million other things. Second, even if we stick to a slightly more narrow definition, consulting essentially boils down to smart people going around to existing bus…

> Honestly, should the consulting thing confuse or worry anyone? I think the author did a pretty good job of explaining why she is worried, and while your two points are compelling, neither really addresses that explanation. You've got people who wanted to be artists, or public servants, or writers, or filmmakers, or non-profit workers, giving up their dreams for the sake of the security offered seductively by profes…

This is so rarely the case. At my firm the percentage of people in consulting who wanted to be artists, public servants, writers, or filmmakers is less than 10%. The way you've described it makes it sound like all these Yalie beatniks are selling out for the prospect of a stable paycheck.

Many of my colleagues weren't lifelong consultants, but they were lifelong businesspeople. The ones who left went on to start tech companies, open restaurants, work in VC, work for non-profits, etc.

No one quit and started writing plays.

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#38
On a vaguely related note, the latest Planet Money podcast, "How Money Got Weird," was interesting. Satyajit Das talked about how a large airline was essentially turned into a bank by ever more creative accounting and finance practices. It gets into the rise of finance in traditionally unrelated fields.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#39
One of the things I love about being in CS is that there is much less pressure to go into management consulting or finance--straight out of college, tech companies offer similar stability and pay (perhaps more stability and less pay, but it's close) coupled with very nice working conditions and actual, nontrivial engineering problems.

For me and my EE/CS friends there are three options that come before finance (I don't think anybody even considers management consulting): grad school, FB/Google/MSFT...etc or a start up. I only know one person eager to enter finance, compared to many people interested in, and usually already working towards, either an academic path, a stable programming career or founding their own company.

That said, there is some very serious selection bias in my group of friends, so this is probably not indicative of my university at large. Particularly, almost everybody I know is in some sort of engineering, and the school I'm at is particularly strong in engineering (especially EE/CS). I suspect if I had more friends from the business school I would have a very different picture.

Re: 25% of Yale goes to Consulting, Finance

#40
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yuck. I know you meant that with the best intentions but your comment came out really snobby. Are finance and consulting valuable fields or should they just be abolished altogether? Given how some of these people are paid, one can at least say that it is valuable from a monetary point of view. If these fields are indeed valuable, then who should fill the positions if not Yalies? Should state school students fill thos…

I am not implying that there is a standard for Yalies that doesn't apply to others. I am saying that there is a standard that all of us should aspire to, and that the good fortune that Yalies have been blessed with better positions us to reach it. When it comes down to it, there is more to assessing a position's value than the income figures on your tax returns. There are the products you produced, the innovations yo…

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