Artículo completo: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... _page=true
Destaco alguna cita:
Ten years ago, we graduated into a country where the Twin Towers were still standing, Webvan was a going concern, and the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. Many of us headed to New York or other cities to become what Tom Wolfe, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, called “the Masters of the Universe”—the financiers who can earn lottery-size sums on a single deal.
When my class matriculated in 1999, ads for a firm called Discover Brokerage featured a tow-truck driver whose passenger notices in the cab a picture of the home—an island—that the driver has purchased with his fabulous online-trading profits. The passenger looks taken aback while the driver muses, “Technically, it’s a country.”
What’s even more amazing than the fact that this ad was ever made is that this sort of triple-distilled balderdash could intoxicate a large group of very smart people at one of the nation’s top finance schools.
And they were laid off in droves, along with the consultants and aspiring dot-com employees; during my first year or two in New York, my recollection is that at least half my classmates there lost their jobs.
We paid for our naïveté, though. A surprising number of my classmates acknowledge that if it hadn’t been for the 2001 recession (or the even bigger one in 2008), their careers would probably look very different. Multiple studies indicate the same thing: when you graduate really matters. Graduate into a bull market and you’re more likely to get a job, and to get a job that pays well. Graduate into a bear market and you’ll end up with less choice and a lower salary.
....
Unemployment can affect your earnings anytime, but according to another study of undergraduates, the earlier it happens, the worse it is, with the most-serious impact on people who suffered an “employment shock” during that critical first year,
[In 1999] “Forty-one percent of your class went into banking,” Morton told me [Morton is the associate dean for career services at Booth]. That’s an astonishing proportion, though it didn’t seem so at the time.
...
[Now] Only about 25 percent of last year’s class went into banking, which is a little lower than is now normal. More of today’s new M.B.A.s are doing what our finance classes should have taught us to do: diversifying. So a contraction in the finance sector is terrible for that 25 percent, but it doesn’t devastate an entire class stuffed with bankers, consultants, and dot-commers.
when employment in the securities industry was near its peak and the banks were so flush that Merrill Lynch flew us to Nantucket on a private jet for a recruiting event.
Indeed, if Booth is any indication, the complaint that “the best and the brightest” are being siphoned off into consulting and finance is less true today. One of the four “distinguished alumni” honored that weekend was Pat Basu, Class of 2005, an M.D./M.B.A. who became a White House fellow in the Obama administration, where he worked on health care. Morton told me that current classes don’t talk as much as mine did about money; they talk about the things they want to make and do.
The most remarkable thing about my business-school reunion was, in fact, how little people talked about money or jobs. They talked about family, friends, the trips they took, and the houses they were turning into homes. According to the behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, they were talking about what is really important: “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that happiness is the experience of spending time with people you love and who love you.” Now, that’s a universe worth mastering.
)
