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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Undergrad prestige does NOT matter. At all. It’s been empirically proven. Smart kids do well anywhere, whether they’re at UMD or Stanford.

Dale and Kruger. Dale and Kruger. Dale and Kruger!!![/quote]
Yes, smart kids do well anywhere, and my kid is smart and hard-working enough to do well anywhere. That being said, [b]they want to work on Wall Street[/b], and the path there is much easier coming from a specific smaller set of schools.[/quote]
Does that make you feel like you've failed as a parent? At least a bit? Honestly.[/quote]
Honestly, no -- my husband works (and I worked -- now a SAHM) on Wall Street. We found it satisfying.[/quote]
Have either of you ever contributed anything meaningful through that work? (To borrow from Rocky, the great bulk of finance careers always have struck be as both a great living and a waste of life.)[/quote]
NP.  Their tax dollars are probably funding the research you are doing, or the companies they're raising money for are employing the systems you are developing, or the VCs they are backing are desigining the climate solutions you are advocating policy for.  Without that funding, the high-minded God's work you are doing wouldn't get out of your own head... [/quote]
The argument that it's important to have a well-functioning system of financing worthwhile projects is easy and obviously correct. That's not, though, what the vast majority of "Wall Street" jobs do. The vast majority of Wall Streeters work in the secondary markets, not the primary ones, and the vast majority of roles in secondary markets are focused entirely on value distribution rather than value creation--they add literally nothing even as they parasitically extract riches (on which some of them pay some taxes, sure, but so would have the otherwise-holders of that extracted wealth). You surely can do well on Wall Street but you're unlikely to do good. Don't kid yourself. And don't bother going after strawmen. Want to take the other side of the argument? Explain what a high-frequency trader adds to society.[/quote]

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