Finance recruitment stays strong despite Occupy movement

Late October begins the traditional season of well-tailored suits, resumes and PowerPoint presentations as prestigious finance institutions like J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs — all of which held networking events on campus last week — launch their sweeping undergraduate recruiting efforts in the Ivy League.

“A little part of me cried,” said one sophomore who attended a Goldman Sachs recruiting event and asked to remain anonymous. “I don’t think people come to Princeton wanting to be an investment banker.”

While most students agree that there is “nothing inherently bad” about the finance industry, controversy surrounding financial careers has soared recently, with public discussion about the industry becoming increasingly antagonistic in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York City, and many students at peer academic institutions aligning with the anti-corporate sentiments that emerged out of the 2008 bank bailouts.

The Stanford Daily, The Harvard Crimson, The Dartmouth and the Yale Daily News have each published op-eds or articles recently criticizing the large contingent of students from academically elite universities entering typical “Wall Street” jobs instead of exploring careers in public service, civic activism, journalism or other less lucrative, more service-oriented fields.

These sentiments have often manifested themselves in on-campus Occupy Wall Street protests, such as Brown’s “Occupy College Hill” and “Occupy Harvard.” Stanford is co-sponsoring one petition movement, “Stop the Brain Drain,” with the nonprofit Our Time, to criticize talent poaching from top academic institutions by the finance sector. But this backlash has not yet materialized on Princeton’s campus.

Financial services remains the second most popular field for Princeton graduates, behind the broadly defined “nonprofit” work — which covers the education, health and social services sectors — according to the most recent annual report from Career Services, which surveyed the post-graduation plans of recent alumni.

For the Classes of 2008, 2009 and 2010, an average of 140 graduates immediately entered financial careers out of college each year, ranging from 9.9 percent of the entire senior class in 2009 to as much as 14.8 percent in 2008. Of the 395 students of the Class of 2010 and of the 332 from the Class of 2009 who accepted full employment, 35.9 percent and 33.4 percent, respectively, entered the finance sector

The “glamorous” high visibility of finance recruiting on campus — one recruiter offered a paid off-campus dinner to a student whose past career experience has been in non-profit education — and Princeton students’ general drive for prestige often make banking “the path of least resistance” or the “default option,” as several students phrased it.

That prestige is often equated with finance’s lucrative benefits compared to other industries. The average salary of those entry-level positions for Princeton graduates was about $69,900, with a range from $47,500 to $110,000. By contrast, the average government salary for Princeton graduates was about $44,000 with a range from $26,000 to $59,000.

“Their emails and statements emphasize that they only want the best,” said Megan Lui ’14, who has interned at a private bank, an asset management firm and the private equities group of a top investment bank over the past three summers. “You want to prove you’re the best.”

Other students highlighted a form of peer pressure caused by seeing friends enter finance or enjoying internships in New York City. That pressure is sustained by a strong alumni presence in those fields, which facilitates networking, the explained.

“So many people from so many disciplines converge to one place,” said Akshay Kumar ’13, an operations research and financial engineering concentrator who is currently searching for a finance internship. “Either a lot of Princeton students are delusional, or finance isn’t really that bad. So many smart people can’t be that wrong.”

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Given that sort of peer pressure, pursuing a finance career path often becomes difficult to stray from, especially when seniors are offered full-time jobs from their summer employers and have the chance to attain career security before their peers. Such students are often labeled sellouts.

“These kids show up in September with a bonus and a job offer,” said ORFE professor Alain Kornhauser GS ’71, who also serves as director of undergraduate studies for the department. Kornhauser emphasized that a typical salary for an intern in finance is cheap by banking standards, especially for “number one draft choices” like the intelligent, qualified students found at Ivy League institutions.

As one current ORFE major and a former intern at a top investment bank, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “The average Princeton student is probably as good as the very best of the state schools.”

While noting that Princeton is “so blessed” to have so much recruiting interest, Kornhauser said he sometimes advises seniors to not sign on the dotted line immediately so that they can explore their interests extensively in the last quarter of their undergraduate education before making a decision.

“These kids are getting preyed on,” he said. “And they come back with golden handcuffs.”

Servicing Misperceptions

The Office of Career Services is a significant presence on campus, with many students using its resources to develop their job search skills. Over 53 percent of the surveyed Class of 2010 cited Career Services as the primary means through which they gained employment and over 5,263 students visited the Career Services office in the 2009-10 academic year for career counseling appointments, according to Career Services’ annual report.

Many students, however, urged the office to increase the visibility of alternative career options, particularly in nonprofits, the arts and public service. Several students noted that they perceived a disproportionate percentage of the Career Services’ efforts as being geared towards helping students gain finance jobs, which, they said, might be contributing to a campus culture that encourages Wall Street careers.

When asked to estimate the percentage of recruiters representing finance institutions that were present at the annual General Interest career fair held in Dillon Gymnasium each September, students estimated that the number was between 60 percent and 90 percent. They said they felt this perceived lack of diversity — which one student called “ridiculous” — set a poor standard.

By stark contrast, however, Career Services reported that only 18 of the 117 registered employers at this year’s recent career fair were finance organizations and that 25 nonprofit and 12 education organizations were represented. Career Services Director Beverly Hamilton-Chandler also pointed to the annual Nonprofit Career Fair as an example of non-finance career services offered by her office. The fair hosted 36 nonprofit and public sector employers last spring and is free of charge to participating organizations.

“Our office does not attempt to direct students toward or away from any particular industry or career path.” Hamilton-Chandler said in an email, citing the fact that the majority of graduates pursue careers in areas other than finance. She added that over 40 other industries are represented though on-campus recruiting and the TigerTracks jobs and internship posting system.

“The career development process is one that involves education, self-reflection and exploration,” she said.

Yet, Hamilton-Chandler added, perhaps misinformation or the high-name recognition of finance recruiters has helped spread the “myth” that Career Services’ programming is skewed. However, she noted, “this is totally unsubstantiated by fact.”

Different Paths

Daniel Condronimpuno ’12 started the Princeton Corporate Finance Club in March in an effort to bridge the gap between students interested in finance and professional alumni through mentorships and to help students share information more easily with each other about job searches and their experiences.

In addition to running practice interview workshops between friends, PCFC organizes a speaker series, most recently hosting Joshua Rosenbaum, managing director at UBS.

Condronimpuno said he hopes PCFC can dispel the prestigious aura surrounding banking jobs and help students consider whether banking is the right choice by exposing them to industry professionals.

But despite his summer analyst internships in Singapore at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Condronimpuno recently accepted an offer from Boston Consulting Group. While he acknowledged that the stigma attached to investment banking had motivated his decision to not return to the industry “to a very small extent,” he emphasized that he does not think public opinion should affect seniors’ job choices.

“No matter how righteous you are, there will always be someone who doesn’t like you,” he said. “The focus should be on where you think you will learn the most.”

Several people also noted that a background in finance can translate well into later work for nonprofits and in other sectors. Kornhauser said that the ORFE department — which sent the most students into finance out of the 17 departments who graduated seniors into the industry last year — encourages students to enter the regulatory side of the field, as opposed to the “capitalistic” or “industrial” half.

“The people who need the best analytics are those that are trying to oversee what everyone else is doing,” he said, stressing that a liberal arts engineering education teaches the ethics associated with finance tools.

For some students, finance and corporate experience in general often is a necessary step towards a larger public service-oriented career track. One senior ORFE major, who interned at a top investment bank, said she plans to pursue graduate degrees in urban planning and economic development. Haley White ’12, who was recently awarded the Truman Scholarship to pursue public service work, was advised on the merits of a consulting background for her interest in development issues and is considering both public and private sector options.

White is also a former columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

“We treat the decision to go into the public or private sectors as a very binary choice, and not as a fluid choice,” she said. “You can have a very corrupt public institution and a private institution that makes huge returns in terms of social benefit.”

Starting a dialogue about that perceived binary, White suggested, could begin by emphasizing the unpredictable nature of future career paths. According to Hamilton-Chandler, Career Services has discussed a potential study of alumni 10 years out of college, which could provide a more representative depiction of Princeton career paths.

Occupy Princeton

Yet the perceived “banking culture” and Princeton’s conspicuous lack of engagement with anti-Wall Street sentiments has created a tension in public discourse outside the Orange Bubble, especially as students at peer institutions are confronting the finance sector head-on, even with the epicenter of the Occupy phenomenon less than 60 miles away.

At Harvard, for example, about 70 students walked out of an introductory economics lecture by Professor Greg Mankiw ’80, a former adviser to George W. Bush, earlier this month in protest of biased teaching, and a smaller group has Occupied Harvard Yard.

Several Princeton undergrads said that, while there is some sympathy with the conceptual complaints of the Occupy movements against income inequality across campus, active engagement and participation is lagging among students.

Politics professor Mark Beissinger, whose work focuses on social movements, noted that the University’s history of apathy towards disruptive activism has become the campus norm.

“Students at Princeton are very career-minded, ambitious, very intelligent, but also very busy,” he said. “So students at other places might be a bit more risk taking.”

Jess Brooks ’13, president of Sustained Dialogue, suggested that students might be hesitant to join the protests because they identify so strongly, whether consciously or unconsciously, with their future finance careers, or at least with a sense of privilege.

“It’s hard to identify with the 99 percent, especially sitting in Princeton with these beautiful buildings around you,” she said.

Apart from the efforts in New York, activism on campus and around Princeton also has limited undergraduate participation. A local community group called “Occupy the Streets,” which has around 50 likes on its official Facebook page but had zero earlier this week, stages weekly bike rides around Princeton protesting on behalf of the “99 percent.”

Another group, “Occupy Princeton,” holds weekly teach-ins open to the public at Campus Club with regular attendance by graduate students and community members, but fewer undergraduates, organizers said.

While many of the group’s efforts have pushed for engagement with the New York demonstrations, Occupy Princeton has been planning a General Assembly, modeled after the Occupy movement’s signature form of community governance, today on the North Lawn of Frist Campus Center.

“Given the really low level of campus activism that we’re starting with, it’s important to have an identifiable type of action,” Seongcheol Kim ’14, who was involved in planning the event, said. He added that he hopes engaging in the sort of democratic horizontal discussion touted by the Occupy movement will leave more of a positive impression than other forms of action such as protesting.

Off-campus activism in the movement, on the other hand, has found a more consistent, committed, self-selecting minority of students. Some students have visited the central movement in New York casually by themselves or with groups. The Pace Council for Civic Values sponsored a trip for its members to the Zuccotti Park protests in late October.

“Students tell themselves they can wait to become civically active until after they graduate,” Pace Council member Shirley Gao ’13. “But four years is a really long time to keep away from civic engagement.”

Still, students said, they feel campus dialogue about civic engagement must assert itself in “the Orange Bubble” before sympathy for Occupy movements materialize as protests.

“There are a lot of people who really love Princeton, and we don’t necessarily see a need to change our own personal institution,” Tessa Maurer ’13, a member of Occupy Princeton, said. “If you don’t even engage in critiquing your own institution, why would you see a need to critique the larger structures?”