Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gifted Students and the Elite Job Market

And I think it is interesting that the hardest undergrad program to enter is the business program at MIT.

And MBA progams were getting specialized more than 20 years ago.

Consulting is arduous for anyone entering right out of school. It is like being an entry level lawyer and you work for 80 hours a week until you burn out.

you need to get the business

The view from the inside is different, but maybe we're touching different parts of the proverbial elephant. (I will caveat this statement with a disclaimer that I don't practice a finance profession, but have graduate degrees in economics and business.)

The fields are generally moving more quant-heavy, yes, but that doesn't imply that all non-traditional backgrounds are of equal value in a professional context. (Not PC, I know, but true.) Wren makes a good point about finance now recruiting heavily from math disciplines. Economics PhDs are also now prioritizing math majors. The interdisciplinary applicability of the quant skills allows for easier transitions between professions.

However, transferable skills do not equal domain-specific knowledge, and the candidates I see without graduate training in more than one field don't cut it when they try to straddle disciplines. The people who really carve out new domains and make a name for themselves are "generally specialists", to put it goofily - multi-domain specialists. So quant becomes a necessary, but not sufficient, qualifier. In other domains I'm not close to, I'm sure there's a new hybrid ideal.


To a very limited degree.

In Canada, which is my experience, strategy consulting and investment banking only recruit for analyst roles from a handful of schools, all with heavy quant and applied learning components embedded within the programming. Outside those programs, pathways into the professions are extremely limited, short of an impressive publishing record, military service, or entrepreneurship. Ditto MBAs to associate roles. Strategy consultancies recruit very few experienced professionals outside the field, save for senior leaders moving firm-side from industry. Operational consultancies do tend to have a more open arms approach where they cover technical implementation.

The US is a little different at the undergrad level, since it doesn't have commerce programs, so it draws from a broader spectrum of fields, increasingly concentrated in quant domains (eng, CS, economics, math, etc.) At the MBA level, the recruitment is pretty uniform across countries, with some joint Phd/MBA, MD/MBA, JD/MBA programs. The firm that I worked at had a similar philosophy of recruiting only from select Ivies in the US.

So even if there is a large pool of candidates seeking access, it translates well below 1-1 into jobs in the field. Make sense?


The reality is that these professions are incubators for talent that then migrates into the general market in 2-5 years, with far more exposure than conventional candidates have to a variety of cultures and problem solving approaches. The lifestyle is punishing and can't be sustained long-term for most who enter. So I would say there is a societal interest in graduates cutting their teeth in challenging environments and applying that rigor and discipline to future work. I'd say the same about military service. A high tide raises all boats.


Bar none, the people working at MBB, PE funds, and ibanks are all whip smart. However, I would argue there is a shortage of exceptionally original candidates in those fields, as evidenced by the proliferation of wickedly hard problems in the world that go unsolved, and cookie cutter decks I saw flying around. It's high-skilled grinding, much like a thoracic surgeon who can perform the same 3 procedures flawlessly day in and day out, but who doesn't pioneer new methods.

I'd love to see business training extended to more joint degree program candidates, as described above, so their discovery/research is carried out with commercialization in mind from the get-go. And if there were an appetite for it, I'd be thrilled to see social work programs combined with commerce undergrads in an expedited format, because the intersection between people and resources is key to so many of our biggest humanitarian challenges.

Either way, really interesting to share perspectives! Thanks so much for pushing back and sharing your thinking. Now your turn - I've talked too much! - which roles do you think we need to expand, Philly?

They simply face the same limiting factor that every field faces, the relative lack of exceptionally original people, period. And in that sense, it is a zero sum game. If the EOP's are directed to finance, there will be less of them for chemistry or physics. If they're directed towards physics, there will be less of them for finance, English or medicine.

Sure, but maybe we're conceiving of that set differently, or I made it sound too rarefied.

I think you're giving humanity too much credit here in your belief that these fields can trade off zero-sum, particularly across such disparate domains. It seems more likely that these interests are additive, not mutually exclusive.

Conceptually spitballing here: what's the critical mass of any one field, in terms of new idea generation, realistically? That's distributed tightly at the top, maybe top 3%, where you're less likely to see inter-disciplinary shifts. Other than a few Da Vincis, I'd bet that astrophysicists are in the field because they love astrophysics, chemists love chemistry, etc. It's not like a behaviouralist nudge will have them catch religion on enterprise risk management or run off with a backpack of Proust. At any rate, far better to grow the population who has access to these professions than to worry about distributional effects between them.

(Agreed 100% on trades, but I think it's probably not what the OP was thinking, either.)

And, like you, I prefer an invisible hand approach, where possible. But because these professions have such outsized impacts on networks and access to capital, IMO it's important that these fields be prioritized for minorities / low SES students precisely because of the spill-over effects they'd carry in other professions. Maybe after a couple of generational cycles, once the field is more level, the consultants and financiers can go the way of the lawyers. :p

Nice chatting! Rest well.

Here’s a revolutionary idea: A top private university like Princeton or Yale (or perhaps a renowned college like Amherst or Swarthmore) should open a new campus.

“We’d like to diversify, but we can’t find enough qualified applicants,” top-ranked universities lament. But that shopworn excuse has been demolished by the recently published results of a program that enrolled more than 300 juniors and seniors from high-poverty high schools in credit-bearing college courses.

Eighty-nine percent of students who completed the course passed a Harvard class that is identical — same paper assignments, same final exam — to the Harvard Yard version. Nearly two-thirds received an A or B. Although the students who earned those A’s and B’s would probably flourish at an Ivy League school, few of them will get the chance.

“I learned how to push myself, and work and think, in ways I never had to before...and I learned that I can
do college-level work. Teachers had told me that, but now I see it and believe it and want more. In that way, this class probably changed my life.”

Ignorance will not, of course, prevent me from tossing in my two cents. wink