College Students: Don’t Work on Wall Street

Review of Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation by Tom McGrath (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)

Last year, more graduates of my alma mater, Georgetown University, reportedly went to work in investment banking than any other industry. Combined with financial services, it made up nearly a quarter of new Georgetown graduates entering the workforce. Even among graduates of the School of Foreign Service, investment banking was second only to management consulting — hardly foreign nor service, let alone foreign service, as many fellow alumni often note sardonically.

Georgetown is certainly not the only elite university churning out investment bankers. The Harvard Crimson’s 2023 senior survey put finance at the top of the graduate career placement list, with over 22 percent of 2023 graduates entering the workforce. Princeton University’s data likewise indicates that 20 percent of reported employment outcomes for graduates between 2016 and 2023 were in finance.

But just because going into finance is normalized doesn’t mean it’s normal. Finance has both epitomized and accelerated economic inequality in the United States for decades, redistributing money upward while undermining the common good. Finance may be a popular career choice for graduates from the nation’s top schools, but there’s nothing inevitable about it.

To explain how we got here, we must go back to 1980. That pivotal year, Ronald Reagan was elected president, poised to unleash a slew of economic…