Does Wall Street still loom as the destination of choice for graduates of Ivy League schools?

As you might imagine, there are fewer people taking these sorts of jobs these days than in years past. One columnist notes that as of 2011, finance was the most popular career for Harvard graduates, as 17 percent of the graduating class took a job of this nature. That's down from 28 percent in 2008. At Yale, 14 percent of the 2010 graduating class took such jobs, down from 26 percent. At Princeton, the lure of the Street remains strong, as 36 percent took such jobs in 2011. (It's unclear how that has changed since 2008.)

You do get the feeling that if the industry ever recovers, the numbers will go right back up. It's hard to compete with the kind of salaries the top firms offer younger people. The Bloomberg columnist speculates about other reasons the lure is powerful.

"Wall Street is promising to give graduates the skills their university education didn't. It's providing a practical graduate school that pays students handsomely to attend. Sometimes, the enrollees end up liking their job in finance, or liking the lifestyle that it affords them, so they stick around. Sometimes, they don't. Either way, Wall Street is filling a need that our educational system should be filling. So it seems universities have been looking at the problem backward. The issue isn't that so many of their well-educated students want to go to Wall Street rather than make another sort of contribution. It's that so many of their students end up feeling so poorly prepared that they go to Wall Street because they're not sure what other contribution they can make."

Do you agree? Is it the schools' fault?

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