The 1 percent may be running into difficulty recruiting the next generation of elite financiers. Bloomberg said Tuesday that elite colleges like the Ivy Leagues are increasingly canceling investment bank recruiting events on campus in response to Occupiers and like-minded students. The finance firms are resorting to online recruitment sessions to avoid the controversy.
An organization dubbed Stop the Brain Drain similarly aims to divert top talent away from financial firms and toward entrepreneurship, scientific organizations and the public sector. Stop the Brain Drain is a collaboration of college students and a non-profit network of young adults from the organization OUR TIME.
Here are some facts about these double-whammy challenges to financial sector recruitment:
* Twenty-two percent of Harvard grads in 2011 plan to seek careers in finance and consulting. The percent headed into those fields is down 25 percent since 2007.
* Occupy protesters on campus have interrupted recruitment sessions at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Cornell.
* The student newspapers at Harvard, Dartmouth, Cornell, and Stanford editorialized against big bank employment, according to New York Times Dealb%k.
* The Stanford Daily noted in an Oct. 11 editorial that the Career Development Center gets donations from big banks for providing special recruitment access. In Nov., the CDC defended its Partnership Program in the Stanford Review. It said the program which allows big companies, including financial firms, to buy annual memberships brought order to chaos and provided funding for the career office. The Partners do obtain exclusive benefits for their donations, including a Cardinal recruiting day, high-visibility at career fairs, and special email privileges.
* Stop the Brain Drain says practices such as Stanford's CDC Partnership Program are commonplace.
* Yale Economics Professor Robert J. Shiller compared investment bank recruiting on campus in today's climate to ROTC in the Vietnam era.New York Times Dealb%k interview.
* Protesters at recruitment sessions sport signs with catchy slogans like "take a stance, don't go into finance" and "25 percent is too much talent spent."
* In 2010, Google won the top spot for coveted employment by college grads on Universum's annual list. But the Big 4 accounting firms were right behind it, Businessweek noted. The top 10 choices in 2011's survey, released in Sept., the same month Occupy got started in earnest, were: Google, KPMG, PwC, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble, JP Morgan Chase, Apple, and Goldman Sachs.
* Stop the Brain Drain points to a Kauffman Foundation paper as evidence of the financial industry's suppression of entrepreneurship. The Foundation says the financial sector increasingly recruits new master's and doctorate grads in science, engineering, math, and physics, paying them five times the going wage. It describes the result as a cannibalization of entrepreneurship.
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