Prospective Bankers Undeterred by Wall Street Crisis

New York, NY, October 15, 2008 --(PR.com)-- Investment-banking jobs have long been among the most highly sought after by college students. With the ongoing crisis in the financial industry, one might expect current undergraduates to gravitate away from the erstwhile lucrative field. However, many are still eager to head into the promised land of spreadsheets and money.

This is not to say that the current crisis isn’t creating some uncertainty among would-be bankers. On WallStreetOasis.com, an online forum where finance professionals and wannabes consort, threads with titles like “Is now a good time to enter Investment Banking?” are becoming increasingly common. One poster, a senior at Vanderbilt who goes by the alias Bowser, states: “The lack of job security is frightening.” Monito, a student at Wharton, adds, “I know that a lot of people at my school have outright not applied to investment banks and are not showing up to their events.”

Nonetheless, the consensus among prospective bankers seems to be that it is best to get in now, while the industry is at a bottom. Oasising, a senior actively seeking banking jobs, states, “I think this is actually a really good time to enter Investment Banking. Once the economy gets better 2-3 years down the road, there will be less people competing for a greater amount of [deals].” Another poster adds, “All this talk of a rough market will not discourage me from pursuing a career in I-banking,” and even Bowser concedes, “I guess you have to understand that this is a cyclical industry.”

It seems that neither bear-markets nor credit-crisis nor fear of unemployment will deter future bankers from their goals. Never mind that since mid-2007 banks have taken hundreds of billions in losses and laid off over a hundred thousand employees. Forget that three of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms are gone, and the last two major independent broker-dealers have converted into more regulated- and less sexy- bank holding companies. Undergraduates remain bullish on high-finance.

What would it take to dampen the decidedly irrational exuberance for finance among undergrads? Forums on Wall Street Oasis with titles like “I guess [it’s] bye-bye to high banking salaries” give a hint. Many students are drawn into banking by the prospects of high six-or-seven figure salaries as senior bankers or after leveraging the banking experience into ever-popular hedge fund and private equity jobs. Convenience Software, a senior at Babson College, posted “…without that ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ what is going to convince analysts to come on board and work 100 hours per week? Without that compensation, nobody is going to do it.”

For now, optimism trumps uncertainty. Despite defections among the Wharton crowd, drastic measures are not needed to shore up confidence among undergrads. Banks can depend on stories about the record breaking bonus pools of 2006, and on their accumulated cache. Prestige is a lagging indicator, and although surviving banks will come out of the crunch with their brands muddied, it would take many years of dismal performance to take the green sheen off the industry.

###