Does herd mentality play a role in the popularity of banking?

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It's hard to provide an intelligible answer to a question as vacuous as "is competition **artificially** inflated". What could possibly be the meaning of "artificial" in this context? What is a "natural" level of competitiveness, if not the level that organically emerges?

And then your follow up questions are so exaggerated that they're unanswerable. "Is banking truly the best thing you can do?", "Can someone not go the banking route and still do 'as great'?" - how do you address questions like that? The best thing? Is there such a thing? How can this possibly be appraised?

That said, I'll try to address the crux of your musings here: does herd mentality play a role in the popularity of banking?

The problem with this question is that social psychology plays a role in the reputation of any career, artist, politician, etc. You can't disentangle "empirically justified" acclaim and "artificial" admiration; they are mutually reinforcing, and they both have concrete effects on the real world. It's likely the same reason you decided to go to a "target" school: because everyone held the college in high esteem, and that social esteem in turn affects the opportunities with which you are presented upon graduation. It's why you're even able to Ponder these questions in the first place - most schools have no IB recruiting to speak of! Every human value judgment is, in some abstract sense, necessarily arbitrary, but it's unclear why that's relevant ex ante.

Pluralistic ignorance / the Abilene paradox is, perhaps, a maddening aspect of social dynamics; but it's a thing, and fighting it doesn't seem very sensible. Every day, people endorse opinions that they deplore simply because they erroneously believe that their peers favor it. A number of surveys have suggested that gay-bashing by conservative youth, racial segregation in the American South, honor killings of unchaste women in Islamic societies and the prevalence of binge drinking on college campuses may owe their longevity to spirals of silence. The supporters of each phenomenon did not think it was a good idea when questioned privately so much as they thought that everyone else thought it was a good idea. And so turns the Earth.

In a classic experiment, a group of sociologists told study participants that they would be partaking in a wine tasting. Participants were seated round-table with five "confederates" of the experimenter. After sampling three cups of wine, they would grade each on bouquet, flavor, aftertaste, robustness and overall quality. They would then evaluate one another's wine-judging abilities. Unbeknownst to the participants, the three cups had been poured from the same bottle, and one was spiked with vinegar. The participants, before being asked for their own judgments, witnessed the judgments of four confederates who rated the vinegary sample higher than one of the unadulterated samples, and rated the other one best of all. Unsurprisingly, about half the participants defied their own taste buds and went with the consensus. Then the last confederate rated the wines accurately (evaluating the two pure samples even and the vinegary sample as inferior). When the participants were later asked to evaluate the wine-tasting abilities of the confederates privately, they respected the accuracy of the honest confederate and gave him high marks, even if they themselves had been browbeaten into conforming. But those who had to offer their ratings publicly compounded their hypocrisy by downgrading the honest rater.

The benefit of pre-vetted paths like IB is that the outcomes are identifiable ahead of time. Uncertainty is minimized, the downside is mitigated and the universe of readily available future options is clear. There are, of course, plenty of IB analysts who go down different paths other than PE or HF; but there is comfort in knowing that you have that optionality. If those careers are what you're shooting for or if you value limited risks, then IB is an excellent path. The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people do not commence their careers in IB, and a non-zero percentage of them end up doing "as great". Proportions are different, paths are less established and the competition is less concentrated. Whether that makes it a "better" option is a question I'm unqualified to answer - and, frankly, it's a value judgment that each individual must make for himself based on his own preferences and proclivities.