The big influx of highly educated workers into finance in the last two decades has been the subject of some national hand-wringing lately. President Obama, college presidents and economists have all worried aloud that Wall Street has hoarded human resources that might otherwise have gone to science, education, medicine or other fields.
Now, new research is suggesting that the shift also brought another cost ”” a cost that fell mainly on the people, especially women, who took jobs in finance. Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.
Another elitist article about ivy league graduates from an elitist newspaper. I’ll probably get a lot of flak from this generalization, but it is my personal subjective observation.
The university where I work can geographically be divided into an upper and lower campus. The upper campus teaches the medical, dental, engineering and science professions. The lower campus has business, law, social science, arts and the humanities. I will sometimes muse with friends that the main difference between the two groups of graduates is that the ones from the upper campus tackle society’s problems at their root cause by coming up with technical solutions. The lower campus focuses on policy, legal or political solutions. This second group is really working toward requiring others to modify their habits to change society. (I will leave the arts out of the discussion.) I believe that these different personal approaches can also enter into family dynamics and the quality of life. You can guess as you like in which group I work. We don’t have a divinity school so I will not stereotype people going into the ministry. I would have to divide the country’s seminaries into two groups to make a similar observation – Save the soul or save the planet.