Flocking To Wall Street Analysis

[Fridman contrasts the ideals of the nerd and of American culture by seeing how they stand up at one of the most prestigious academic institutions: Harvard.] Fridman proclaims that even at Harvard “there is a minority of undergraduates for whom pursuing knowledge is the top priority” (lines 15-17). Many Americans see Harvard as the college attended by the best of the brightest and would expect it to have a nerdy atmosphere, however this is not the case. It is a shocking revelation for Americans to learn how the anti-intellectual culture has seeped into every part of an American’s life: from kindergarten to college. Therefore, Fridman manipulates these perplexed and shocked emotions to prompt Americans to agree with him through his statement “enough is enough,” (line 29). Furthermore, he does this to demonstrate how Americans do not want to learn for the sake of learning and only desire to attend college so they can get a better job and make more money than valuing the education they are receiving.

At the University of Florida (UF) I am studying Political Science and Finance because I have an immense passion for understanding politics, law, and the money system. My passion for public policy and economics has motivated me to pursue a rigorous course of study, one that will enable me to obtain a dual major in these academic disciplines, both of which are central to modern adult life. The financial and political worlds are intimately intertwined, intersecting along many nodes throughout one’s lifetime that not only affect me currently as a student, but also influence my decisions concerning postgraduate academic pursuits and professional options as I enter the workforce. A disciplined approach I have to my studies will lead me to have

This article “Students of Success” written by Lynn Cheney was very well written. Cheney’s point in this article is that students in liberal arts shouldn’t be over looked in the world of business. She explains that students in liberal arts have the opportunity to become anywhere from Management to the next president of the united states. People should understand that its not the field you major in but it’s the way you use your major. Cheney states that students who follow their hearts in choosing majors will mostly end up laboring at what they love.

Moreover, “recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends; they show up in the greatest numbers at career forums… and social events. Wall Street’s recruiting monopoly is simply that its presence dominates campus life” (Ho 170). As a result of the presence and pressure that investment banks have on students from Harvard and Princeton, they are most likely bound to result in a job in finance. However, if students were to cultivate Thurman’s “wisdom” they would know that “if [they] don’t know exactly who [they] are all the time… [they’re] actually in luck, because [they’re] more realistic, more free, and more awake” (Thurman 443). If students in the competitive society that is investment banking cultivated the “wisdom” that Thurman describes, they would know to look past investment banking and all the advertising for the industry and pursue a career in another field that they may be more interested in.

As a result of influences of the societal culture, going outside the norm of what is perceived as success is discouraged. In an attempt to achieve this perception of success, students declines to go outside the norm of what is deemed as success, they limit their options. According to informants in Ho’s article , “If you go to Harvard , Yale, or Princeton, there are only two career fields presented “ (169). These two fields are presented because they are the only fields Wall Street and Ivy League college campuses deem as being successful. Students display the extent our culture shape

Democratization works though valuing the students to generate their own ideas rather than having the institution’s name define their skillsets. This “one size fits all” that standardization represents, becomes prominent in elite institutions such as Harvard and Princeton where bankers and firms assume anyone who attends such prestigious institutions is automatically the best fit for their job. They play an even bigger role in making the students feel like they are the perfect fit for their banking and firms, without considering any true means of a creative thinking and problem solving student. “Investment banks and consulting firms dominate the early fall career fairs, setting the terms for what constitutes a successful career, and monopolize the attention of the student

Is it just the credentials and status of a diploma that give success, as some people claim, or is it truly what college students learn in college that sets them up for success? Hout’s article touches on this question and comes to the conclusion that higher education does teach its students valuable skills and knowledge for life, and goes into detail about the effects of these teachings.

Ho talks about how for the Wall Street people the, “key criterion of smartness is an ability to “wow” the clients- generally speaking, the top executives of Fortune 500 Companies. In this sense, although technical skill and business savvy also help to constitute smartness on Wall Street, they are often considered secondary, learnable ‘on the job.’(167) Ho describes that being smart on Wall Street is being able to adapt and because they are able to do all the things they call secondary learning a process on the jobs they are thought of as being smart and this is where the authority is established. Their dominance is only justified through ability to be elite, which for the most part they establish through being from an Ivy League school and working on Wall Street. According to Ho, Wall Street’s pushes their authority through, the institutional culture of Wall Street broadly conceived, where job experiences and workplace incentives map onto elite biographies investment bankers not only imbibe a particular ideology of holder value and spread it across corporate America, but they are also pushed to refashion and reconstruct the working lives of million in the image of their own.” (168) From Ho’s point of view the notion of Wall Street dominance is based on their ability to influence which provides their view with

Mr. Deresiewicz provides his experience with his students to show what his observation of the average Ivy League attendee is to be. That conclusion is that they are neither passionate, or curious about the ideas and concepts they are taught. We can trust his opinion on this because of his reference to the years he has been in the system. He then comes to the conclusion that a superb education does not have to be attained by attending an Ivy League school, “I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education” (209). With the previous knowledge of his time spent in the elite school surrounding, Deresiewicz effectively convinces the audience that an Ivy League education is not necessarily the best there is to offer. William gives the readers an insightful and reliable background that allowed the readers to gain his trust and be dramatically persuaded by his observations and opinions.

In his book Why Teach?, Mark Edmundson constructs an argument about the paradoxical consumer culture surrounding education. The Virginian professor takes a stance on the problems that he has both experienced in his own classroom and observed on campuses, and he approaches each problem in turn, making significant claims which are assigned appropriate blames. His essay, “Liberal Arts & Lite Entertainment,” originally published in 1997, is broken into six sections and begins with his experience at his own university before branching out to all those across the country. Following this is a deduction of student culture as well as professors. He gives hope to the idea of the acceptance and praising of “genius” (as opposed to the alienation students endorse so well) towards the end of his essay, narrowing his argument down to a more specific change that could possibly cause a domino effect from individual students to universities across America. The scale of the situation is much too large to be easily fixed, and it is clear that Edmundson’s purpose in writing this essay is to inform those who are engulfed in the academic world. More specifically, it seems, he targets professors and higher-level students, and even possibly their parents. By singling out these people and making the problem of consumer culture in universities known to those who care exponentially about educating the youth, it is much more likely that Edmundson’s argument will trickle down to said youth in the process

There is this assumption that professors are like a “caricature” with too much time on their hands that still exists in societal standards, but current professors would most likely disagree, explaining that assumption has died down with the rise of “corporate” university standards (Berg & Seeber, 2016, Kindle 87). The CAUT report identifies the perceptions that at one time, an academic career was seen as a desirable goal, but over the past twenty years that perception has changed to the point where the stress levels in academia exceeds that found in the general population.

For the past half a century education has been heralded as the key to success. Parents across the country preach to their children that, providing they acquire a college education and degree, the world is their oyster. The documentary “Ivory Tower”, directed by Andrew Rossi, calls that whole notion into question. The biographical film opens at the University of Harvard, the nations oldest institution of higher learning, on move-in day. Hundreds of new students and their parents flood the campus grounds of one of America’s most prestigious universities. From there, in order to provide a complete overview of the complete college experience, several other types of colleges are shown; such as community, 2-year, and vocational schools. Each is examined in turn to determine both the positive and negative aspects.

The article summarizes the authors distaste in the reality that Wall street executives maintain an ever constant authoritarian stance on the “economy” as a model of generating income, claiming an understanding that only those within their ranks possess. The article attributes it as “epistemological”, I would agree, and go as far as to make an analogy to the days when the bible was in a foreign language, and the language of “god” could only be given to them by their leaders of the church, an archaic and authoritarian model of thinking.

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, many commentators attempted to analyze the roots of the conflict from a political or economic perspective. Anthropologist Karen Ho, a veteran of Wall Street as well as an academic, attempted to understand the reason that Wall Street behaves the way it does in her 2009 anthropological study of American finance entitled Liquidated: An ethnography of Wall Street from a cultural perspective. The central paradox with which Ho begins her book is: " the economy experienced not only record corporate profits and the longest rising stock market ever, but also record downsizings," further concentrating the wealth in America (Ho 2009: 1-2). But how can corporations grow richer as the American public as a whole grows poorer? Corporations no longer view themselves as responsible for taking care of their employees, creating good products, or serving their original mission. Instead, the focus is on generating shareholder wealth (Ho 2009:3). Shareholders, not the larger public, have become the symbolic and real focus of firm strategy. The shareholder "symbolized and 'stood in' for the whole of the corporation and became the sole locus of concern and analysis" during the time Ho conducted her study in the late 1990s and continues to this day (Ho 2009:175)

The recruits have to tailor themselves to find into a box, model of the ‘ideal candidate’, that Investment Banks are looking for. To be hired employers and recruiters need to ensure that they fit into the Wall Street Lifestyle, the expensiveness, the exclusivity, and the impressiveness. Wall Street is looking for a specific candidate, because as Ho points out, “The key criterion of smartness is to ‘wow’ the clients… smartness must be represented and reinforced by a specific appearance and bodily technique that dominantly signals that impressiveness…” (Ho 167). The ideal candidate is “smart”, which does not match the colloquial