In an "After the Recession" interview with the New York Times, today, President Obama slammed the quality of education at U.S. colleges in the age of grade inflation, naked parties, and IvyGate.
The somewhat convoluted criticism outlines the difference between the high school education his grandmother used to ascend to corporate vice presidency and the college education most kids are currently using to ascend the stairs of the local unemployment office. And he trashes the letter-writing skills of University of Chicago Law School students!
She went to work as a secretary. But she was able to become a vice president at a bank partly because her high-school education was rigorous enough that she could communicate and analyze information in a way that, frankly, a bunch of college kids in many parts of the country can’t. She could write —
Today, you mean?
THE PRESIDENT: Today. She could write a better letter than many of my — I won’t say “many,” but a number of my former students at the University of Chicago Law School.
So you're probably thinking where's the Ivy? Who needs to know how to write a letter when some can pull in six figures for kissing great ass? Excellent question, Watson! No matter what the name of the school is, the recession is slapping the meaning of employability across its status-obsessed face. And even Obama's Columbia-Harvard one-two doesn't mean a thing if you have no real abilities.
After the jump watch some Wharton students wipe their noses on the cuffs of their Thomas Pink shirts.
Penn grad DJ Lubel '05 popped back into the spotlight this weekend with his video about the Ivy League swill in Murray Hill. The video references to "Jew geography" and Lehman Bros emeriti in that elevated piece of Manhattan in the 30s on the East Side. Cool, but it's worth watching for the dood-bros mooning the camera in front of the stretch Hummer at Joshua Tree.
The song's audio has actually been floating around the Internet since last year or so. NYMag nailed it when they summed up the point:
We all go to temple but we worship the dough We've got more Japs than all of Tokyo Pour me a Grey Goose and Red Bull As I take this Adderal pill Tonight I'm blacking out up on Murray Hill
Recent Dartmouth graduate and current investment banker Ursula Grisham published a piece in the latest '08 Class newsletter that is unconsciously emblematic of the Ivy League’s blithe, proud role in this recession.
The letter, a warm smile towards the mirror, recounts Grisham's time as an investment banker in Europe. Reveling in her “ambitious, if not whimsical” career choice, she delves into the “aesthetic” dimensions of her experience—thus running like hell from every imaginable real-people consequence of having played house with the global financial system.
After comparing the walk home from her bank to walking home from a frat party, she pulls the blinders tighter:
“One could argue that if there ever were a good time to be in finance, it's now. There's no way to learn like being thrown into the middle of a raging storm.”
And the ideal of the liberal arts turned over in its grave. So as not to totally berate Ms. Grisham, there's a pretty well documented (and perhaps problematic) trend in the appeals of an Ivy-fueled finance career. As so many decorated coeds haven't learned in the career services office, i-banking on the brink is not about the welfare of billions but about massaging one's skill set into greater earning potential. Ivy Leaguers are among the only people at no risk of real hardship these days, and here we are, looking for the benefit.
What benefit? Check after the jump. It involves cash and Sarah Palin.
Remember how students were gearing up for i-banking internship interviews this time last year? Well, an Ivy grad banker working at a bulge bracket firm thinks they may as well start studying for the LSATs. Below, an exclusive interview with this still-employed financial services professional:
IvyGate: What's going to happen to students applying for internships this year?
Banker: They're done. They need to say goodbye to their Wall Street dreams. It's not going to happen.
IvyGate: What do you think they should do instead?
Banker: I don't know. They've gotta figure that out.
After the jump, this anonymous banker tells us what he thinks of Obama's dream team and why the recession is about to get worse. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you ever have great ideas for future businesses? Me too! But while I'm trying to settle on a name for my 2.0 erotic literature site, guys like Jordan Goldman are actually starting real companies. Goldman, Wesleyan '04, just launched Unigo, a site that's kind of like CollegeHumor without the boobs or jokes. The website, which Goldman considers more a "national grassroots movement" than a website, is essentially an online student guidebook: it contains brief staff-generated descriptions of the colleges and a growing amount of student commentary. That's right: students are logging onto this site and reviewing their colleges (and posting pictures and videos). Let's see what they're saying:
Columbia social life is what you make of it. At a glance it is incredibly lame, but if you meet the right people and can make your own fun it is a great time. The Greek life seems to be run but neonazi's as there is basically no such thing as a frat party anymore. There seems to be a war on fun at our school and I hear people complaining all the time. There are ways around it and as I said if you know the right people and put yourself out there, a good time can be had.
War? Nazis? Frat parties? Columbia exactly.
After the jump, Lamonster laments the exodus of Harvard grads into i-banking (I think this was posted before September). Read the rest of this entry »
Whartonites worried that the recent i-bank apocalypse will spoil their plans to bathe nightly in a sea of money, fear not! There's always the lottery, an institution weirdly remniscient of Ivy League admissions, anyway. (Fill out bubbles in #2 pencil, wait anxiously, be disappointed 99.9% of the time.) In an article titled "RICH GET RICHER IN LUCKY $CRATCH," the Post reports that the first-ever winner of the "$1 million a year for life" lotto is a dispassionate i-banking Whartonite:
Keenan Altunis, 33, a banker raised on Long Island and now living in London, accepted his prize with a smug shrug, noting he's already a multimillionaire.
"Is it going to materially change my life? No," he told The Post. "I have been a very blessed and fortunate person."
And if that isn't an argument for spreading the wealth around, how about this: Since he lives in Britain, Altunis, an executive at the European banking firm Unicredit, will have to pay New York but not federal taxes on his winnings, which means he'll net $931,500 a year for the rest of his life.
Irony Gods, are you serious?
"Don't get me wrong, no matter how rich anyone is, a million a year is a lot of money," he said. "But I don't expect this to change my life very much at all."
The family left New York yesterday for a vacation in the Caribbean - one that had already been planned and paid for prior to his winning ticket.
Apparently so.
There is a chance that every single news outlet misspelled Altunis' name (sweet justice?) because the only Keenan Altunis we can find in Penn's records is one Kenan Altunis (Wharton '97), whose sole claim to fame was being in a frat and being quoted in the DP once about beer. IronyGoddammit.
If we have learned one thing from market meltdowns, it's that Wall Street is utterly glutted with the Ivy League's overeducated ilk, from top to (curvaceous) bottom and everywhereinbetween. Now, another wrinkle: An Ivy League university's funds, temporarily frozen and cruising for annihilation at the hands of financiers educated at that same institution.
We are talking, of course, about Penn. According to the DP, Penn keeps a small portion of its coffer at Commonfund Treasury, a $9.3-billion operation specializing in the management of educational cash, helmed by a handful Princeton, Yale, and Wharton grads. Wachovia (a Commonfund trustee), announced today the coming termination of all short-term Commonfund accounts. Something about liquidity and distributing assets? Foreseeing the pandemonium this announcement would cause, Wachovia helpfully froze affected accounts to prevent the First Horse of the Finance Apocalypse: A Bank Run.
Luckily, the entirety of Penn's frozen funds is a measly $100K, which means all they have to do is, like, cash two undergrad tuition checks, and they'll be back in the black. (Although perhaps with a shittier credit rating.)
Amid all the hoopla about the vice presidential debate, you may have noticed that the Dow tanked again yesterday. Wait, you didn't notice? You were too busy picturing Sarah Palin running naked through the Alaskan wilderness? Well, the Dow dropped around 350 points--in other words, we're back to Monday. Things are looking bleak. But believe it or not, not everyone on Wall Street is going to be fired. Ron, a pseudonymous Ivy grad working at Citibank as an analyst explains why he's confident:
No stop it. I'm not the least bit afraid. They would never replace a citi banker with one from WB (Wachovia Bank). Today, during interviews, when they rejected a kid, they joked that he was "a BofA kind of guy." And BofA (Bank of America) is better than WB.
Bank of America is for losers? Tell us something we don't know. But you know who's really going to be losing out? You, if you're applying for a banking job this year. According to Nathan, another pseudonymous Ivy banker working for a boutique i-bank:
The class of 09' is done. They can kiss their banking/trading careers goodbye. Let's just say [unnamed bulge bracket i-bank] analyst class this yr was around 70 kids. In 07, it was around 130 kids. This yr (09') I predict around 30-40 kids at most.
Can three men really put the economy back together? Of course not. But to a large degree, it's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner who are engineering our response to the Market Meltdown™.
But what do we know about these men? Can we find out anything about them from the various newspaper profiles they've appeared in this week?
Um, yeah. We can find out a lot about them. But I'm only going to note their college affiliations: Paulson is Dartmouth 68' and Harvard business '70. Bernanke is Harvard '75 and MIT '79 (econ PhD). Geithner is Dartmouth '83.
I know what you're thinking: "But Harvard's only a lesser Ivy." Not to worry; McCain is pitching in.
In case you haven't been reading the newspaper or watching television, the startled-looking bald man in the above picture is Paulson.
As we near the "big Money Bonfire of 2008," a number of questions weigh heavily on the nation's mind: Should the federal government receive shares in the banks and companies being bailed out? Is $700 billion enough? Can we have another day to think this over, Mr. Paulson? But most of all the nation has been wondering what will happen to current and prospective Ivy League bankers. This is where Ivygate comes in. Last week we ran a feature where worried bankers told you they were "trying to stay positive." This week we bring you...um, more quotes from bankers.
George, an Ivy-educated pseudonymous banker working as an analyst at Merrill Lynch, describes how he found out about Bank of America's buyout of Merrill:
I was shocked. I was screaming.
One of my friends at Bank of America texted me, 'Hey, we might be buying you guys.'
I was in denial. You see, Merrill has a much better repuation than a commercial bank like Bank of America. I was shocked I would be joining a lower-tier commercial bank. There's a feeling, 'I didn't go through this whole interview process to work at a commercial bank.'
Hopefully, Bank of America won't change too much of Merrill's culture.
Jeffrey, a pseudonymous Ivy grad working at JP Morgan, had this to say:
Lots of people will be jobless in the coming months.
I applied for jobs at Lehman. I could have been that guy with the Lehman job. It's very frightening.
After the jump, George returns to tell us why $700 billion isn't enough and why Goldman Sachs's and Morgan Stanley's decision to become "bank holding companies" is the end of i-banking as Ivy League cash bonanza. Read the rest of this entry »
In an "After the Recession" interview with the New York Times, today, President Obama slammed the quality of education at U.S. colleges in the age of grade inflation, naked parties, and IvyGate.
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Recent Dartmouth graduate and current investment banker Ursula Grisham published a piece in the latest '08 Class newsletter that is unconsciously emblematic of the Ivy League’s 
Remember how students were gearing up for i-banking internship interviews this time last year? Well, an Ivy grad banker working at a bulge bracket firm thinks they may as well start studying for the LSATs. Below, an exclusive interview with this still-employed financial services professional:
Amid all the hoopla about the vice presidential debate, you may have noticed that the Dow tanked again yesterday. Wait, you didn't notice? You were too busy picturing Sarah Palin running naked through the Alaskan wilderness? Well, the 
Can three men really put the economy back together? Of course not. But to a large degree, it's Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner who are engineering our response to the Market Meltdown™.
As we near the "
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