academics to wall street: hands off our grads!
Last year, the trust that determines which students become Rhodes Scholars rebuked Wall Street’s recent fetish for luring the best and the brightest to add prestige to its firms, swaying students who could’ve gone on to become engineers, scientists, and public servants over to business careers where salaries can easily be hundreds of times greater than in the fields they originally chose. Now, tech executive Vivek Wadhwa has an op-ed piece on TechCrunch going one step further than merely stating that the financial industry is raiding colleges for talent. According to him, the banks are outright pillaging talented scholars to the detriment of a society which spent a lot of time and effort to educate them, and to add insult to injury, they’re doing it with the taxpayers’ money and profits they made off of lending customers what are essentially their own taxes. Since a very large chunk of banking profits come from complicated applications of algebra and statistics, recent M.S. and PhD level graduates of STEM programs are well suited to the job and can’t turn down six figure salaries offered to them straight out of college while many of their peers struggle to land a gig and pay off the student loans they’ve accumulated along the way.
Now it’s hard to compete with tha financial world’s salaries because there’s no other industry which basically mints its own money and can spread mind-boggling sums of cash from derivatives they make up every cycle of bubbles and busts. And no other industry can request over a trillion dollars in public cash whenever they’ve bet the farm and lost after giving enough lawmakers some scary rhetoric about how the nation will collapse if they don’t get enough cash to liquidate all their bad assets. Scientists, who often have to spend long nights to write grants for tens of thousands of dollars from a budget that’s less than an infinitesimal fraction of the cash spent on rescuing Wall Street from its own mess can’t exactly waive a six figure starting salary in front of grad students and promise them a shot at a seven or eight figure bonus along the way. We can’t blame a student for taking his or her best, and often only chance, at becoming wealthy, but it does raise an important issue. If we invest a lot of resources training new researchers to boost our R&D potential but then don’t reward them for their work in gaining advanced degrees or loose them to the world of finance, why even bother?
