This past week I witnessed multiple students, clad in full business attire, walk silently out of the room in the middle of class. At first I was confused (was there some mid-day ball I was missing?) but then remembered abruptly what week it was; so did the two men sitting behind me as a second student left the room. One whispered to the other, “that’s our competition.”
Getting a job in finance is certainly competitive. Goldman Sachs is purported to extend job offers to only 3 percent of its applicants, a steeper “acceptance rate” than any of the Ivies. With the Center for Careers and Internships (CCI) reporting that, on average, 16 percent of Midd graduates go on to jobs in finance, however, the odds seemed to be stacked in our favor.
The source of our advantage is actually not a huge mystery. On top of the privilege that many students carry with them to campus, Middlebury alumni at Goldman spend the greater part of a week on campus every year recruiting like hell. Students, like the two men leaving class in suits, swoon for the chance at a private preparatory interview.
I myself participated in the Goldman pomp last year and even traveled to New York with a friend to participate in the CCI’s annual fall break finance extravaganza in which we, along with many other Middlebury students, were shepherded around to the top firms.
As a member, and now Co-President, of the Socially Responsible Investment Club (SRI) and a partner in last year’s charge to revive the “Divestment from Fossil Fuels” movement, my purpose for attending the fall break event and my interest in a career in finance was grounded in a larger theory of change. That is, the idea that one is most powerful as a change-agent reforming a system from within. I thought that by working at Goldman or another top financial institution I could acquire the master’s tools and use them to reform the global economic system to be more just and sustainable.
Over the past year, personal reflection on my interests and talents and further study of what it means to make change has compelled me to withdraw from the race to Goldman and instead attempt to reform the system from the outside. My goal here is not to impose my decision on others or judge those who choose to go into finance but merely to present my own thought process in the hopes that it will allow others to engage and critically analyze their own. I do so with the assumption that people want to use whatever path they choose to make the world a better place.
A significant driver of my past finance ambitions was the promise of access into an elite and complex world whose malpractices I could expose and thus force to change. Writer Bethany McLean began working at Goldman immediately after her graduation from Williams College in the summer of 1992 and has since gone on to write books, such as All the Devils are Here, which contended that banks understood the consequences of their unethical practices before the financial crisis but continued anyway. McLean has said that her experience was anything but enjoyable but insists that, “if your long term goal is to fight the financial system, a lack of fear and a little knowledge will increase your odds of success.”
Author Michael Lewis, best known for Moneyball, took a similar route working first for Salomon Brothers before leaving to write Liar’s Poker, a ruthless exposé of the exploitative mortgage bond industry that made the firm wealthy and the culture of lavish greed that characterized Wall Street in the 1980’s.
On a different note, Adam Braun translated the “business acumen” he gained from working at a hedge fund to philanthropy. In 2008 Braun founded Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit that has built more than 150 schools across Africa, Asia and Latin America for children living in poverty. Alexandra Peterson Cart ’08 left the nonprofit sector for work in finance and then, in 2012, combined the knowledge she gained from both experiences to co-found Madeira Global, an impact investing firm. Money is power and, at this critical point in time when we face a global climate crisis, any tactic that channels capital towards renewable energy development and other such efforts to build a more sustainable world, as Cart is doing, should be aggressively employed.
But I began to harbor doubts as to the necessity of paying my dues at a major bank in order to have a meaningful impact on the world when many of my peers are already having positive and profound experiences without ever gracing Wall Street. As an organizer for the campaign to divest Middlebury’s endowment from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies, I have seen firsthand how the student-powered global divestment movement has forced Wall Street to consider the social and political license given to the fossil fuel industry through investment, promoted awareness about climate change and grown support for a paradigm shift towards a more sustainable economy.
This past Friday, a group of students and I concerned about our endowment’s investment practices met with the Chief Investment Officer of Investure, the company that manages Middlebury’s endowment. We suggested that Investure create a fossil-free consortium within the company so that Middlebury and other colleges with hopes of divesting from fossil fuels, such as Barnard, Dickinson and Smith, can combine our resources in a way that truly benefits our campus communities and the global community, as we purport to consider in our mission statements. We’re on the brink of getting Investure to fundamentally change their investment practices and we’re only students. And, for the record, we’ve never worked on Wall Street. In fact, the success of our movement, and really any any movement, depends on collective action, so the fact that we have all worked together outside of the system as opposed to going into the system as individuals means that we have had a greater net impact.
Moreover, throughout the past year I became increasingly attuned to the reality of the monster that is the finance sector. All of the speakers at the Rohatyn Center’s symposium on income inequality mentioned the financialization of our economy as a large driver of inequality over the last several decades. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1993 resulted in a change in commercial banking that, according to Joseph Stiglitz, allowed the “bigger risk” culture of investment banking to “come out on top” and insert itself into every part of the economy, sucking the middle class dry. With this in mind, I don’t find myself sold on the effectiveness of fighting finance with more finance, especially in light of research revealing that in many cases even microfinance does more harm than good — pushing people further into debt and poverty.
To return to the pro-Wall Street jobs position, one could make the argument that the primary reason for a change-maker student to enter finance is to learn about the industry so she can then turn around and do what is most needed — regulate it more effectively. But after working upwards of 100 hours a week with the same people at the same firm you might not want to hurt them. I know it sounds crazy, but so is Stockholm Syndrome.
If you’re at all concerned about needing to go to Wall Street to regulate the industry just look to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who bypassed the Street on her rise up from humble beginnings in Oklahoma and has proven to be the greatest advocate of financial sector regulation. Warren has worked to instigate a resurgence of the middle class by leading the charge to create the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010 and other measures to increase accountability in in the financial sector.
Plus, the notion that a finance job will allow you to unearth some unknown knowledge seems only to reinforce the mystery that surrounds Wall Street, present to keep the average person confused and powerless in the face of exploitation. Just as you don’t need to be a scientist to understand climate change I may be so bold as to venture that you don’t need to be an investment banker to know that the finance sector as it stands serves the 1% at the expense of the 99%.
More and more stories like that of Billy Parish, a Yale dropout who founded a solar power investment company, lead me to the view of black lesbian feminist activist Audre Lorde, who says, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Indeed, if we are to build a new just and sustainable economy it will not be some mutation of Wall Street, but born from the grassroots.
Thus, to avoid extending myself further I’ll conclude with the hope that we may continue the discussion further as a campus community and most importantly, that if you do go to Wall Street, be armed with the information I have relayed and the resolve to stay conscious of the people you’re impacting. If one thing’s for sure, it’s that our world cannot sustain any more Bernie Madoffs.
