It’s a funny thing that happens here at Columbia. Students fill out entire application essays and questionnaires demonstrating how they yearn for worldliness and the Core—and then, four years later, there is an exodus en masse some eight miles south to join the legions of cold and calculated money manipulators on Wall Street.
As David Xia reported in Spectator on Oct. 8, nearly 30 percent of employed Columbia graduates leave these humble halls of Aristotle and Herodotus for the gilded sky lobbies of Merrill and Lynch.
Now, does this suggest that our beloved Core has failed to cultivate the bubbling enthusiasm for humanism that students carried in with them as freshmen? Or, perhaps, were prospective students a bit more facetious on their applications than they’d like to admit?
The University’s line, of course, is that students entering the financial industry do so with the breadth of knowledge and the weight of civilization placed firmly upon their shoulders by the world-class liberal education they received here.
But whichever of these descriptions is ultimately the most accurate is not the point. The point is that Columbians are consistently and excessively lured away from their professed ideals to the glimmering teat of the financial market and its gospel of wealth and instant gratification.
What a waste of intellectual and human capital.
It is in this light that I wholeheartedly believe that this financial crisis is one of the best things that could have happened to a Columbia undergraduate. First of all, not only are we still too young to watch our savings disappear overnight, but the downturn in the economy—if for no other reason than attrition—will forcefully spur undergraduates to broaden their goals and employment options beyond the usual destinations in Lower Manhattan.
Before the financial crisis, the “credit crunch,” and the “mortgage meltdown,” the United States was already mired in, or hurtling towards, its fair share of crises.
Education and energy were the elephants in the room during the 1990s tech-boom that venture capitalists and policy-makers swept under the rug amid all the green and black—and graduates of America’s elite universities followed them in their blind march to excess.
While countries across the world invested in education and infrastructure (read: Japan, South Korea, China, the European Union, much of Scandinavia), America became a cubicle-country of overpaid pencil-pushers and money-managers.
These other countries also foresaw what would follow the gluttonous American addiction to fossil fuel and invested in technologies and other goods they knew we would gobble up—and we helped them invest their profits as more and more young people dropped out of high school or graduated without the credentials, skills, or motivation to succeed in the new economy.
Meanwhile, when the times were still good, Columbians and Ivy types across the board paid little mind. The rising tide of the speculation-manipulation financial markets was lifting their boats and money was plentiful. America’s intellectual elite turned its back on its country, and now it’s paying the price.
And you wonder where Palinism, the “culture war,” and all of this other anti-elitist sentiment comes from?
There was once a time in the middle of the twentieth century when a rising tide lifted all boats. In those days, when a CEO made maybe 1,000 percent not 1,000,000 percent more than a production worker, it was no less honorable, and not so disproportionately less lucrative, to work on Wall Street than it was to teach civics, or English, in a Brooklyn public school.
That time has certainly passed and, regrettably, a confluence of arrogance and hyper-individualistic self-interest produced the practices and policies of America’s intellectual elite in both the private and public sector.
As Columbia students, we have a great responsibility to live up to the education to which we are so privileged. At a moral level, we ought then to feel at least somewhat obligated to serve the public interest.
But I know this view is far too optimistic, and I’m not even sure if I could always hold myself accountable to the sorts of sacrifices it implies. Would that it were otherwise, it is not.
Regrettably then, the irony of the financial crisis is that it may very well impel some of us, by our own selfish nature, to inadvertently pursue the common good. To invest not only our taxes in education, energy, and the public interest, but our careers as well—and isn’t that what we wrote in our Columbia applications in the first place?
It has taken a catastrophe for us to realize the folly of our impatient short-sightedness. Now let’s see if we can’t learn from it ethically, or at the very least, channel our already inflated avarice for good.
The author is a Columbia College sophomore.