How are Ivy League graduates taking our jobs if there are no business/finance/accounting majors? WTF

I don't get it, most of the Ivy leagues do not offer business/finance/accounting majors unless you get an MBA. How is Wall Street filled with these Ivy League graduates who did not graduate in a related field?

 

business/finance/accounting are easy to learn and can be learned on the fly. Also, you're generally not applying business/finance/accounting theories at work when you start. You're doing relatively brainless tasks a lot of time and they want the smartest people they can get and if you went to IVY, you've already been vetted as 'smart' so it's less of a gamble vs. hiring someone from State U w/ an accounting degree.

 
Best Response

Because most of these jobs (excepting maybe accounting) actually don't require all that much technical skill. What technical skill there is can often be learned on the job (almost every IB puts their analyst class through ~3 months of training). Therefore, what they're really looking for are a) people who will keep their heads down and work very hard and b) smart people. The Ivy League (and schools like Duke, MIT, etc that are equivalent) filter for exactly those two qualities. State School X does to a much lesser degree. It's harder to observe intelligence and work ethic in a few interviews than it is to observe technical skills. Therefore firms are looking for additional information on work ethic/intelligence, information they get from the fact that student X is at MIT while student Y is at UMass. They are confident they can teach technical skills to anyone who is smart/motivated enough, but you can't teach intelligence to someone who has technical skills. Remember, firms want to hire people they can imagine being the leaders of the company some day. The higher you move up in a company, the more intelligence and social skills matter and the less that technical skills matter.

 

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