I would have thought so many Harvard graduates ended up on Wall Street to continue their path to higher social status – having nothing at all to do with skills. I also was under the impressions that the more recent entries in Wall Street firms were math whizzes who came up with these formulas that led to such bad outcomes – not being base don real life but on theoretical concepts. But what do I know, not being part of that world at all?

We know Harvard certainly doesn’t teach writing skills. Yglesias is proof of that.

I’ve been viewing education as
elementary school teaches the basic skills needed to function
high school teaches more advanced skills, including how to learn
college hands you the materials, and you teach yourself (with help from the instructors/professors)

Regarding why so many Harvard undergraduates end(ed?) up on wall-street I highly recommend Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. The author was trained as an anthropologist and did the field work for her thesis (which became the book) on Wall Street.

The author makes a number of very interesting (and convincing) arguments about the cultural practices of American high finance. In particular, she studies the sheer amount of recruiting these companies would do at places like Harvard and Princeton (the other ivies where much much less recruited). As she documents, essentially every week there would be an event (with free food and often free booze) where various higher ups from these companies would come and tell the Harvard undergraduates how smart they (the undergraduates) were and how if they wanted to be around other important smart people they had better come to Wall Street.

She also discusses why the companies recruited so heavily from Harvard and Princeton (and it it really was remarkably…at the height something like 40% of Harvard graduates were going to work in finance). Roughly speaking she saw it more as reinforcing certain power structures rather than any particular skill.

I highly recommend the book if you are interested in understanding what the hell has happened in the last decade (at least).

Craig Murray’s 2007 Rectorial Speech at Dundee University in Scotland, on the purpose of universities, when he was under the gun:

A university must be a place of stimulating intellectual debate across not only the myriad topics of academia, but on the issues of the day affecting society as a whole. The best minds must clash and spark, and students must be fully and intellectually engaged. A university must constitute a vast whirring machinery of the mind, reacting to and operating on the wider society of which it forms an integral part. It must be a place of the liveliest and best informed debate, where no subject is out of bounds, or over-respected, or immune from the heat of debate. A university must be a democratic discussion. If it is not that, it is not a university.

We must be unapologetic that a University is about much, much more than training to get a job. The over-emphasis of vocational training bedevils higher education. Of course your career is important; but you have the entire rest of your life to be a slave to it. You don’t have to start now. The student who concentrates purely on his future career leaves here equipped for only a small part of life. I learnt vastly more in discussions with people of other academic, social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds in bars and kitchens, and from private reading, than I ever did in the lecture theatre. In my formal university learning I acquired skills of logic, analysis, ordering and debate. A University Education must teach you to think, not just to stack widgets. And that is true across every one of our disciplines ?” as relevant to nurses and dentists as to lawyers.

Was good.

I wonder how all those reading skills learned at Harvard prepared Yglesias to support the Iraq War ? Of course despite being a young adult he didn’t comsider joining the war effort other than entering into the punditry brigade where now he is an expert on everything from foreign policy, transportation, basketball, global economics (including Japanese economics), etc etc

Yglesias is a pundit extraordinaire

Having been a student at a small liberal arts school, as well as a large state university, it seems to me that one of the key problems is that too many faculty have limited backgrounds. By the time they get tenure, they’re uber-focused on their specialties. That creates a whole other set of problems.

I suspect that we live in a culture where too many kids have so much structure in their lives that they flail when left to their own devices.

I’ve always thought Steve Jobs’ comment about Gates — that he’d have been better off to have dropped out and gone traveling — was spot on. And Steve Jobs dropped out of (a very solid liberal arts) college, and IIRC, went off Walkabout in India for a spell. If he learned nothing else, Jobs probably realized he could manage to feed himself and function. That’s not a small thing on the cusp of adulthood. But that took guts, and too few people have that kind of chutzpah.

Having also dropped out and Gone Walkabout in that period of the 70s, I’m convinced that my genuine education occurred along byways and walking trails, in campgrounds and museums.

There are good colleges doing good things, but a formal education can be a limiting thing. The best schools, it seems to me, broaden the experiences of their students. And the best students are avid readers; people who don’t read can’t begin to write well.

I found it both interesting and delightful that the man who has chronicled the rise and fall of Wall Street — Michael Lewis — was an Art History major at Princeton. He is clearly and independent, analytical thinker, and picking that major probably took a mixture of dumb luck and chutzpah. But it taught him to LOOK at things and portray them in detail, and the world is better for it. Judging from his narrative style, Lewis is probably a prolific reader.