One way of coping is to come up with non-traditional methods for students to find jobs; columnist David Smart '09 outlined good suggestions for Career Services to introduce Princetonians to jobs with non-profits last week. Indeed, the bank failures are an opportunity for people to explore career paths that they might never have thought of otherwise.
In addition to affecting job prospects in the coming months, there's another, broader and potentially positive side-effect to the current economic situation. The bank failure might just be the eye-opener our generation needs.
Most of us undergrads grew up in the prosperous 90s and came of age during the housing boom of the past decade. Despite a brief dip in the economy following the dot.com bubble burst, we still had enough time to get used to a land of plenty. Our generation (Y, Millenials, Echo Boomers - take your pick) was addicted to "The O.C." and now "Gossip Girl" because our class consciousness favored a view from the top. Though we were not the first generation to live through a boom cycle, ours was a long period of astronomical growth. After all, the U.S. economy grew as we did. In 1987, the year I was born, a year at Princeton cost just over $16,000. Now it costs nearly three times that. Those of us who grew up in affluent suburbs - by which I mean many Princetonians - got used to having our arugula and eating it too, even if it required driving to the local Whole Foods in a large SUV.
Somewhere between all O.C. watching, we learned that these lifestyles didn't just fall out of the sky. People tended to earn them from firms with names like Bear Stearns or Merrill Lynch. Never mind that we weren't clear on what exactly an investment banker or consultant did; any Wall Street job would suffice.
On my first day of class, my freshman seminar professor warned her fourteen students to avoid "downward mobility" by going to law school instead of the Peace Corps. But many of us were already more cynical. It was on Outdoor Action, a week before classes had started, when a fellow freshman had already informed me of the prestige and salary packages of McKinsey, a so-called "management consulting firm." (Four years later, I'm still waiting for a good explanation of what they do...)
Thousands of recruiting advertisements, hundreds of emails from investment banks, and dozens of fliers slipped under doors later, it's no surprise that in recent years as many as 25 percent of all seniors choose finance or consulting. Last year, 160 members of the Class of 2008 went into financial services. As bankers' pay grew while everyone else's stagnated, the opportunity cost of not going into these fields was just too great to pass them up.
Now, even as the financial industry faces uncertainty, seniors are reluctant to let go of these careers. People dressed in suits every day attend the remaining information sessions. But the bank failure may also change the way non-finance types think about their own careers.
During the boom of the 90s, graduates of elite universities knew that they were making a financial sacrifice when they eschewed finance to enter the government, non-profits, or academia. David Brooks put it best in "Bobos in Paradise" when he pointed out that those in the public sector often asserted their moral superiority while secretly harboring a resentment of their peers on Wall Street. Even those who eschewed banking were still part of that world, if only through the contrasts they constantly drew.
Today, as banking jobs become scarce, those who originally planned to work in finance will look elsewhere. This may have the effect of increasing competition for secure government jobs, graduate school programs, and international fellowships. But before we start panicking, there's another way to see this instead added stress. It's also an equalizer of opportunity. Sure, jobs will always have varying salaries, but with the opportunity cost of not taking a lucrative job lowered, we will be able to free ourselves from the entrenched markers of success - be they money or the bragging rights that come with sacrifice. Instead of following prestige or money, we can follow our passions.
Cindy Hong is a Wilson School major from Princeton, N.J. She can be reached at cindyh@princeton.edu.
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