To find those employees, recruiters flooded the campuses of America’s elite universities. In 1976, less than 5 percent of surveyed seniors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School were headed to Wall Street for investment banking. By 1987, it was one in three. At Yale, 40 percent of the entire graduating class of 1986 applied to work at the investment bank First Boston. At Princeton, hopeful students waited all night to secure a spot on recruiters’ schedules. In his book “Liar’s Poker,” Michael Lewis describes trying to get an interview with Lehman Brothers in the early ’80s: “I had stood in six inches of snow with about 50 other students, awaiting the opening of the Princeton University career services office.”
The number of WASPy white men at elite schools was simply too small to keep up with the torrent of financial deal-making. Chasing rapid growth, banks and law firms began to hire all sorts of graduates — first Jewish and Irish and Italian men, then, as the women’s and civil rights movements diversified the university-bound population, a growing number of white women and Black, Latino and Asian men and women. In an age of ruthless competition, identity mattered less than workers’ credentials and willingness to work grueling hours.
Robert Jen, who grew up in a Chinese immigrant family in New York, was one of those new hires. As a student at Columbia, Mr. Jen saw John Gutfreund, the chief executive of Salomon Brothers, speak at an event. Even though Mr. Jen had had no background — or even much interest — in finance when he arrived at Columbia, he accepted an offer from Drexel Burnham Lambert’s New York office, where by 1981 he was working long hours as a junk-bond trader. “That’s how I came to the Street,” he said later. “It was basically by accident.”
Once they were hired, aspiring yuppies were expected to work more hours, often on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework. They were also given less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner. As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work. This was no accident: The legal and financial bosses who were commanding these diverse armies of young professionals sought to extract maximum value out of their labor.
This early wave of yuppies contains the origins of our present-day meritocratic competition, which turned college admissions into something akin to “The Hunger Games.” As top universities became the key credentialing institutions for lucrative professional careers, parents and children fought multiyear battles for a finite number of precious spots. In an era of inequality, families of all backgrounds found themselves pitted against one another in zero-sum competition for a place in the upper-middle-class elect.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
