Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Free tuition at US public Universities?

course in instruction in what? What are you qualified to do? That is the question employers are asking. If you want a job, what skill set are you bringing to the table?

You come out of computer science, you can write code. You come out of materials engineering, you can work on new materials.

Newly minted university graduates who have landed coveted jobs on Wall Street may have impressive résumés and sought-after references. But often, nuts-and-bolts skills like spreadsheet building and database extraction are not part of university curriculums.

When millions of dollars can be won or lost on one calculation, firms are finding it essential that their new hires can tell the difference between a pivot table and a header row.

Enter specialized boot camps where — for fees that sometimes exceed $1,000 a day — would-be masters of the universe can perfect Excel modeling techniques and financial analysis. Each year, tens of thousands of students at the nation’s top business schools, and scores of new hires at financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group, now take courses run by companies like Training the Street and Wall Street Prep.

Graduates say the classes give them a new appreciation for the heart of financial analysis. An eight-hour crash course on leveraged buyouts from Training the Street was so intensive that it “kind of makes you want to slit your wrists,” said Michael Rojas, who graduated from Columbia Business School this month.

But over all, Mr. Rojas said, the training was thorough. “This is the stuff you really need to know, and that you don’t learn in business school,” he said. “They have a template model, and they walk you through page by page.”

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The training does not come cheap. Business schools pay Training the Street as much as $1,300 a student for a course. Wall Street Prep, also used by most top business schools and more than 150 banks and financial firms, charges corporate clients as much as $1,499 per student for a three-day course.

Darin Oduyoye, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said that the bank uses both companies for things like basic training for new associates and helping analysts prepare for licensing exams. “We also obviously augment these training and development opportunities with our own in-house programs,” Mr. Oduyoye said.

In June, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil, and banks involved in the energy business, will send about 15 new or recent hires to a three-day course in New York run by Wall Street Prep on valuing oil and gas companies.

These programs are also courting ever-younger students, and their parents’ wallets. In June, Training the Street will start a four-day Undergraduate Wall Street Boot Camp in New York and will charge students $3,000 (not including accommodations) to learn the basics of financial modeling, valuation and analysis. Wall Street Prep, widely viewed as more intensive on analytics, sells CD-ROMs for $39, for a basic Excel course, and as much as $499 for a “premium package” detailing financial modeling.