Brian Drain (aka Gordon Gekko Lives!)

This is the second time in the past few months I've seen this topic broached in our newspapers in the past year, but it seems more relevant now than it did back in February:

In his February 20 column, Steve Pearlstein of the Post railed against how the Finanical Industry operates at the top:

Wall Street's hypocrisy on this topic is nothing less than breathtaking. When times are good, its champions will claim that their brilliance and hard work account for the spectacular returns. But when markets turn and investors lose their shirts, these same brilliant managers are sent off with golden parachutes and invariably scooped up by rival firms that are only too willing to chalk up their mistakes to bad luck.

It would be bad enough if the consequences of this excessive pay were confined to Wall Street. Unfortunately, it has not worked out that way. For the prospect of earning untold wealth also has attracted an enormous amount of young talent that could have been more productively used in science, engineering, medicine, teaching, public service and businesses that generate genuine long-term value.

Is it not fair to ask whether the United States can remain the world's most prosperous and innovative economy when half of the seniors at the most prestigious colleges and universities now aspire to become "i-bankers" at Goldman Sachs?

Now Roger Cohen visits this same territory in his Wednesday column in the New York Times:

When I taught a journalism course at Princeton a couple of years ago, I was captivated by the bright, curious minds in my class. But when I asked students what they wanted to do, the overwhelming answer was: “Oh, I guess I’ll end up in i-banking.”

It was not that they loved investment banking, or thought their purring brains would be best deployed on Wall Street poring over a balance sheet, it was the money and the fact everyone else was doing it.

I called one of my former students, Bianca Bosker, who graduated this summer and has taken a job with The Monitor Group, a management consultancy firm (she’s also writing a book). I asked her about the mood among her peers.

“Well, I have several friends who took summer internships at Lehman that they expected to lead to full-time job, so this is a huge issue,” she said. “You can’t believe how intensely companies like Merrill would recruit at Ivy League schools. I mean, when I was a sophomore, if you could spell your name, you were guaranteed a job.”

But why do freshmen bursting to change the world morph into investment bankers?

“I guess the bottom line is the money. You could be going to grad school and paying for it, or earning six figures. And knowing nothing about money, you get to move hundreds of millions around! No wonder we’re in this mess: turns out the best and the brightest make the biggest and the worst.”

According to the Harvard Crimson, 39 percent of work-force-bound Harvard seniors this year are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies (or were in June). That’s down from 47 percent — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007.

These numbers mirror a skewed culture. The best and the brightest should think again. Barack Obama put the issue this way at Wesleyan University in May: beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”

39% of Harvard seniors going into the financial sector, down from 47%? I don't know what's more depressing, that some of the very best and brightest only want to make money, or that they're doing such a poor job of it. Sure, there's no guarantee that, had any of these people gone into medicine or engineering, they would have found a cure for cancer or developed a car that could be powered by mayonnaise. Who knows, maybe they'd be making weapons for our massive war machine (there's plenty of money there, too) or inventing less-weighty items. But I'd sure like our odds for a better world if they had chosen those careers. Too bad that it's just about the (obscene amounts of) money.