Banks Will Stop Hiring So Early

When I was in college, I am not sure that it ever really occurred to me that one could line up a post-graduation job before, like, March of one’s senior year. I am well aware of what a fantastic and vanished privilege that ignorance was, by the way; the late ’90s were a magical time. Anyway, I did not go work at Goldman Sachs after graduation — I went to go teach high-school Latin — but lots of other humanities majors did. Working at Goldman Sachs was the sort of thing that a smart person with a fancy degree could stumble into without too much preparation, a typical stop on the course of elite education rather than a consciously chosen career open to people with specific interests and aptitudes.

Eventually I did go work at Goldman Sachs. But the late ’00s and early ’10s were a less magical time, and when I went back to my alma mater to do recruiting, I met with a steady stream of applied math and economics majors who had interned in the financial industry the previous summer and all seemed to be presidents of the investing club. The world had gotten more specialized, and young people’s lives more structured and competitive, but the declining popularity of the financial industry after the crisis also probably had a lot to do with it. If you had been preparing to work in investment banking your whole life, you still went to work in investment banking. But if you were just an aimless smart person, that choice had lost its appeal. It was no longer a standard post-graduate form of finishing school; it was just a job for the sorts of people who might want that sort of job.