2021 PE Offer Security

"italian" Or if anyone has insights into what happened to those in the above situation during the prior recession that would be great too

I actually do have some insights. I recruited for PE associate roles leading into the last recession (interviewing in 2008 for 2009 start). The timing was a bit different which may have had an impact. Generally speaking, very few private equity jobs for a 2008 start were rescinded. I didn’t have a single classmate in my analyst class that lost their PE job in 2008, which was right before things got really bad. However, recruiting for 2009 was brutal. My firm used to place nearly 100% of analysts into middle market PE roles up until 2009. I think it was something like ~30% of my analyst class landed in PE. Most offers did not get rescinded (that I’m aware of), but many offers just simply weren’t given out to begin with. A handful of people ended up accepting 3rd year offers, some went to corporate development gigs, others dropped out of the “high finance” industry in general for other pursuits. Looking at the “where are they now?” for my former analyst class, those that didn’t go into PE right out of banking never ended up doing PE. This is probably largely due to the fact that they never recruited for such positions other than as IB analysts.