Finance
College Students: Don’t Work on Wall Street
Last year, more graduates of my alma mater, Georgetown University, reportedly went to work in investment banking than any other industry. Combined with financial services, it made up nearly a quarter of new Georgetown graduates entering the workforce. Even among graduates of the School of Foreign Service, investment banking was second only to management consulting — hardly foreign nor service, let alone foreign service, as many fellow alumni often note sardonically.
Georgetown is certainly not the only elite university churning out investment bankers. The Harvard Crimson’s 2023 senior survey put finance at the top of the graduate career placement list, with over 22 percent of 2023 graduates entering the workforce. Princeton University’s data likewise indicates that 20 percent of reported employment outcomes for graduates between 2016 and 2023 were in finance. But just because going into finance is normalized doesn’t mean it’s normal. Finance has both epitomized and accelerated economic inequality in the United States for decades, redistributing money upward while undermining the common good. Finance may be a popular career choice for graduates from the nation’s top schools, but there’s nothing inevitable about it.
To explain how we got here, we must go back to 1980. That pivotal year, Ronald Reagan was elected president, poised to unleash a slew of economic reforms — chief among them drastic tax cuts, primarily benefiting the wealthy, and deregulation across the board. The year titles Part I of Tom McGrath’s book Triumph of the Yuppies, a comprehensive profile of the Young Urban Professionals, the subset of Baby Boomers whose characteristic candid obsession with money and status left a lasting mark on American culture.
As the postwar economic boom began to die down in the 1970s and the New Deal coalition began to unravel, the promise of financial security, if not comfort, was no longer guaranteed. At the same time, McGrath cites research indicating that the 1970s saw a growing emphasis on individual happiness over the collective well-being that was celebrated by the hippie counterculture and New Left social movements of the ’60s. For a subset of the population, these factors combined manifested in the open, shameless desire to make and accumulate money above all else.
The number of students graduating with MBAs began to skyrocket in the 1970s. At the same time, more and more young people gravitated toward cities in pursuit of a cosmopolitan experience, chic with a touch of urban grit. More importantly, though, major cities began to host the burgeoning so-called “ideas industry,” which included financial services, and the Yuppies wanted in. While investment banks had played a key role in raising capital for industrial growth during the postwar era, the economic downturn in the 1970s fomented uncertainty within the industry. Deregulation and technological advances, combined with this “rush of new blood” as McGrath calls it, incentivized investment banks to lean into money-making operations, using their own money to buy and sell securities to generate profits.
Triumph of the Yuppies describes the advent of shareholder primacy — the idea that corporations’ sole responsibility is to their shareholders — as a useful justification for corporations to abandon social responsibility. An important piece of the puzzle that McGrath leaves out, however, is the memo “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” which Lewis Powell authored in 1971, months before acceding to the Supreme Court. The confidential memo advocated for a more aggressive approach to instilling free-market values in the face of what he considered to be a broad-based attack on corporate freedom.
Powell’s memo calls out college campuses as a major ideological battleground. Its publication helped establish a framework for organizations like the Federalist Society and Young America’s Foundation, which undertook to infiltrate college campuses and promote right-wing economic ideas. Their campaigns were extraordinarily successful in breaking the Left’s political hold over elite universities’ student bodies. By the mid-1980s, McGrath writes:
Fifteen years earlier, graduates of the country’s most elite colleges had often been concerned with trying to improve the state of the world. Now, the focus was different: How can I be as financially successful as possible?
And financial institutions were there on the other end to reap the rewards, funneling the burgeoning Yuppies into a career best suited to their new values.
Investment banks like Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan began to offer the first entry-level analyst positions in the early to mid-1970s, intending to capitalize on an influx of new talent and groom them for success. The applicants flooded in, but spots were limited. The appeal was straightforward: the position paid well, and analysts could count on attending the business school of their choice after a two-year commitment or, in exceptional cases, promotion directly to associate. McGrath cites several news features from the time, such as a June 1986 New York Magazine piece entitled “The Young and the Sleepless,” which detailed the sacrifices that these young analysts made in pursuit of a high-rolling future. The work itself, despite their titles, rarely involved analysis — many of them were glorified secretaries, or they put together “presentation books” for clients, the slide decks of the day. It’s worth mentioning too that given the extreme weekly time commitments, their hourly wages were not exorbitant, and they barely had time to spend any of it.
Nevertheless, a feedback loop generated prestige around these positions. The money was still better than what most college grads were making. And, as McGrath describes, the ritualistic culture, promise of high-level business exposure, and competition for limited positions naturally fostered exclusivity. This cycle was further legitimized by the elite universities whose graduates were the targets of the initial recruitment efforts, and later, whose business schools would accept any applicant coming from a two-year analyst role. Those graduates would become alumni, players in the all-important networking charade.
The graduates who went to work as financial analysts in the 1980s had given up the notion that they should be making a positive contribution to society, once taken for granted among graduates of top schools. To illustrate the point, the Peace Corps was enrolling fifteen thousand graduates per year in the 1960s and ’70s, but only five thousand by the end of the 1980s. It had been replaced by the Finance Corps, where nobody even pretended to be making the world a better place.
But that doesn’t mean they had no impact on the world. On the contrary, these young professionals participated in the redefinition of “value” solely in terms of maximizing shareholder returns. Many of the mergers and hostile takeovers of the mid-1980s made little to no strategic sense, primarily taking place in order to dissect and sell the resulting entities for parts, largely to pay off the debt that the buyer incurred by pursuing the deal in the first place. Wall Street investment firms were both “the instigators and the beneficiaries” of these deals, as McGrath describes, since the payout in fees for facilitating them was considerable.
The stock market improved 27 percent in 1985, but most of that “growth” resulted from merger activity rather than increases in productivity. With the antitrust apparatus defanged, no one asked questions about whether this was good for the economy overall. The hundreds of thousands of people who were laid off during this time, though, would likely give a different answer from the average Yuppie. The winners and losers had never been clearer, the gap between them never wider, and nothing was trickling down. The prestige of financial services firms took a slight hit in the late 1980s. A series of insider trading scandals, the crash of the overvalued stock market on Black Monday in 1987, and the general sense that the rise of Wall Street had something to do with declining living standards for average Americans all started to inspire a backlash. Perhaps the young Icaruses had flown too close to the sun.
The backlash could have led to a profound reckoning. Instead, finance doubled down. While the industry curried favor with successive post-Reagan presidents — just as much with Bill Clinton as with George H. W. Bush — it continued to wage its charm offensive on US campuses. Many of the entry-level analysts of the 1980s were now well-heeled alumni, which made the task significantly easier.
A remarkable reputation laundering effort was underway. For example, at Georgetown, my graduate program was housed in the Mortara Center for International Studies. Michael Mortara featured prominently in Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, Michael Lewis’s semi-autobiographical account of his time within the money-obsessed culture at Salomon Brothers.
Steven Mnuchin, who worked under Mortara at Goldman Sachs starting in 1985, singled him out during his 2017 Senate confirmation hearing for “starting the mortgage-backed securities market.” Mortara died tragically in 2000, before he could see the destruction that his invention wrought in 2008. And yet his name graces the global studies center at Georgetown, despite his never having positively influenced international affairs. The strategy is modeled after that of the robber barons, who slapped their names on colleges across the nation during the Gilded Age.
In my experience, there is much less discussion than there should be about what graduates entering finance are doing on the macro level — that is, beyond making a prudent personal career move and earning a lot of money right out of the gate. Questions about who these employers are and what they stand for, and what they plan to use these young people’s labor for, seem to belong to a bygone era when people felt compelled to answer for the social import of their postgraduate career choices. Now, no justification is required — the money and prestige speak for themselves. For finance-oriented elite university grads, the ultra-prestigious Goldman Sachs is the next Harvard to get into. But Goldman is also a particularly heinous example of how the profit incentive characterizes the contemporary financial services industry. In addition to its role in the 2007–8 global financial crisis, Goldman was also implicated in the sprawling, multibillion-dollar 1MDB scandal, a corruption, bribery, and money laundering scheme into which investigations are ongoing.
There is reason to believe that criminality is baked into its business model, given the sheer amount of disciplinary actions and lawsuits that federal regulators have brought against it over the last few decades. The fines that Goldman has been obligated to pay as a result of its crimes pale in comparison to the amount of taxpayer funds it has received from government bailouts, implicitly validating its illegal and immoral behavior.
None of this, of course, makes it to the ears of college students interested in breaking into the industry — or, if it does, misdeeds are brushed aside as a series of exceptions to the rule.
Like the younger Baby Boomers who graduated college in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gen Z is emerging into a precarious economy amid a culture of arch-individualism, this time driven by self-promoting influencers and entrepreneurs. While it is considered more gauche for Gen Z to embrace the fashion and luxury goods that once signaled membership within a status-driven and money-crazed ingroup, the Yuppies nevertheless blazed a clear, well-trodden trail to “success,” which strikes many new elite college grads as irresistible.
But there are some crucial differences between the Yuppies and the Gen Z Finance Corps, too — namely, the financial pressures on the latter are far more intense. While real estate in urban centers was cheap for young professionals in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as McGrath describes, the pattern that they set off means that rent in major cities is now prohibitively expensive for those who aren’t working in high-earning industries. Post-grads still want to live a cosmopolitan lifestyle, but they can hardly afford to do it if they don’t trade their soul for a high-earning job. In addition, college is harder to get into and more expensive every year, so there is tremendous pressure to make a college degree “worth it” by pursuing a lucrative entry-level role. University career centers are more than happy to shepherd risk-averse students down these paths, especially since their own metrics of success are largely dictated by the earnings of their graduates. Likewise, their finances mean they are increasingly beholden to their wealthiest donors, many of whom are likely at this point to have made the leap from the classroom to the bullpen.
Not every college grad going into finance hopes to stay in finance. Investment banking is perceived as one of the early-career fields with the most future optionality for anyone interested in the broader corporate world. By way of illustration, only about a third of 2022 Harvard grads going into finance hoped to remain in the industry ten years after graduation. The other two-thirds presumably viewed it instead as a stepping stone — perhaps even one they privately found mildly distasteful, albeit not enough to avoid altogether. Then as much as now, exposure and connections are even more valuable than the exorbitant salaries. The prestige factor is also perceived similarly; long hours and high expectations, even for what is often mindless work, are a test of one’s fortitude and commitment.
The incentives themselves are not college graduates’ fault. Nevertheless, when many of the nation’s top universities’ most intelligent, ambitious, and hard-working graduates get funneled into Wall Street each year, their talents are wasted. The cumulative opportunity costs of each student who enters finance, instead of a career path that contributes meaningfully to social good, are staggering. Each new incoming class of entry-level finance analysts further cements the premise of wealth accumulation as an all-encompassing goal.
It’s par for the course for top-school graduates to go into finance now. But when we adopt a broader perspective on the industry’s role in reshaping society and its values, it really shouldn’t be.
Within the global manufacturing industry, maintaining a competitive edge requires a delicate balance between driving internal efficiency and fostering strong external relationships. For Applied Materials, a leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor industry, this challenge became the foundation for a strategic finance transformation program, with an SAP Taulia solution emerging as a key enabler.
The journey began in early 2019 with the launch of Agile Finance, an end-to-end transformation initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory, which included a goal to double in size. The initiative was built around three strategic pillars: enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the finance organization, promoting career fulfillment, and establishing a robust digital operating model. The impact was significant, with the finance function achieving approximately 35% productivity gains in its labor force.
The third pillar—the move to a digital operating model—is where the partnership with SAP Taulia began.
“The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution was introduced not merely as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic tool to transform and digitize the interaction with Applied’s extensive, global supplier base,” Junaid Ahmed, corporate VP, Finance at Applied Materials, says. “We understood that to reap the benefits of digitization, we had to ensure the suppliers were on board. It needed to be a win-win outcome.”
Unprecedented flexibility for suppliers
The program empowers suppliers—thousands of them worldwide—to self-select which approved invoices they wish to discount for early payment. This is not a continuous, all-or-nothing commitment but rather a decision made on an invoice-by-invoice basis. This flexibility allows suppliers to manage their working capital needs with greater precision, taking advantage of early payment during their own critical periods, such as quarter-end or year-end, to help meet their own financial targets.
The system also drastically improves transactional efficiency. Suppliers no longer have to call Applied to track invoice status, approval, or payment date. All this information is available 24/7 in the SAP Taulia solution, reducing resource allocation on both sides and ensuring both reap the benefits of moving to an integrated, digital system.
Strategic benefits for Applied Materials
For Applied, the program is a testament to its focus on balancing efficiency with strong supplier relationships. The philosophy is a “win-win” built on a crucial spread: Applied Materials, as a Fortune 500 company with strong cash flow, has a significantly lower cost of capital than many of its suppliers. By funding the discounts, Applied captures a return—the discount income—while offering its suppliers funding at a rate close to their cost of capital, but with greater convenience.
This relationship-focused approach is critical. Applied’s supplier account managers actively support the program because they recognize its mutual benefit, not viewing it as a finance mandate to push costs onto the supply base.
Furthermore, the “dynamic” nature of the discount rates is a powerful risk mitigation tool. Unlike fixed contractual discounts, the rates can be adjusted in response to global economic changes, such as shifts in interest rates. When interest rates rose after the pandemic, Applied was able to adjust the discount rates accordingly with minimal pushback, as the core proposition remains the valuable spread between the parties’ cost of capital.
The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution has been rolled out globally, giving all suppliers the opportunity to use it. This has been critical over the last 12 months as many businesses around the globe have been subject to new and often unexpected tariff costs impacting their margin and their liquidity.
“The flexibility of the solution means suppliers can access funds when they need them, which helps them navigate some of the economic uncertainty that many businesses are facing,” Dirk Holoubek, managing director, Finance Shared Services, explains. “2025 saw a 23% increase in usage of the discounts, reflecting the pressures that suppliers are feeling right now on their cash flow.”
The solution’s capability to drive sophisticated analytics is also a major strategic asset. It helps provide insights into the different costs of capital between Applied and its supplier base. This data allows for targeted outreach and communication, ensuring that the offer of capital support is proactively extended to the suppliers that need it most.
The strategic value of the solution is further cemented by its ownership. The acquisition of Taulia by SAP brings several advantages.
“Trust is really important to both us and our suppliers,” Ahmed says. “For our suppliers to adopt a new solution, they need to know its technology they can rely on in the long term. Being part of SAP creates that assurance in the long-term future of the program.”
Looking forward, Applied Materials is already focused on the next stage of the transformation project: Agile Finance 3.0, which is focused on enabling the organization to become AI-first. The company is deploying a global, organization-wide AI assistant to drive personal productivity, but the strategic application of AI in the supplier management space is even more profound.
AI is expected to transform decision-making enablement by analyzing critical information and communicating effective options. In the future, AI will be able to proactively assess the specific needs and attributes of the supplier base, enabling Applied to address issues more quickly and resolve them earlier. The benefits are already tangible in e-invoicing: AI has made the solution more flexible and “human-like,” capable of reading minor changes in invoice format that would have previously caused electronic errors. This reduced rigidity and increased flexibility are directly contributing to the overall efficiency of the digital operating model.
By leveraging the SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution, Applied Materials has not only digitized a process but also strategically transformed its financial operations, creating a system that is agile, resilient, and focused on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with its global supplier ecosystem.
Cedric Bru is CEO of SAP Taulia.
Finance
Houston budget amendment would give financial assistance to help those impacted by a trash fee
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Houston City Council could soon consider whether to offer financial assistance to help those who may struggle to afford a proposed trash fee.
This month, council will approve a budget. In it, Mayor John Whitmire doesn’t increase taxes.
However, he does want to charge a $5 monthly fee to cover trash services. A plan to help close the city’s nearly $200 million deficit that doesn’t add up to some.
Speaking in front of council on Wednesday, Super Neighborhood 64 president Lindsay Williams brought more than concerns, she had numbers surrounding the mayor’s proposed $5 monthly trash fee.
A plan his team says could climb to $25 a month by 2032. If it does, Williams told council that $300 annual cost would be just .15% of a $200,000 income.
For someone making $15,000, it’s two percent. “More than 13 times the burden for the same trash, same truck and same fee, but not the same pay,” Williams explained.
However, Controller Chris Hollins said the mayor’s not being truthful about the real cost.
“Houstonians are not stupid,” Hollins said. “We should not treat Houstonians like they’re stupid.”
Hollins said the cost may need to be $40 a month. Whitmire didn’t respond to Hollins during the meeting when he asked if he plans to increase the fee.
No matter the cost, some council members want to offer financial relief. Right now, there are no exceptions.
However, an amendment council will consider from Council Member Alejandra Salinas next week would change that.
“If they for whatever reason met the threshold and need an additional need because of the administrative fee, our amendment would allow them to apply for funds through the water fund,” Salinas said.
The trash fee wasn’t the only item from the mayor’s seven and a half billion dollar budget proposal that sparked debate. Hollins said a plan to divert money away from water utilities could drain a billion over the next five years from infrastructure money.
Whitmire disagrees saying there’s more than enough funds to handle the change, and continue with projects.
“We’ve all admitted the budget’s not perfect, but certainly it’s a first start that Houstonians understand and it’s a shame it’s being so politicized because it’s literally people’s lives and death,” Whitmire said.
Council will vote on amendments next week. It has to have a new budget in place by the end of the month.
Copyright © 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Reader question: My spouse has little interest in our financial position. As we age, this concerns me. I try to share some basic information (income, spending, account balances, debt, and so on) each month but rarely get a response. I think graphs or charts might be of more interest to her than a bunch of numbers. What recommendations would you have for illustrating our financial position so that I am not the only person aware of how we are situated? Thanks!
Answer: Your situation is pretty common. Most couples I know develop a division of labor over time, where one person is in charge of financial matters and the other person is less involved. That’s definitely the case for my husband and me. He’s in charge of paying all the monthly bills and preparing our tax returns, but the financial planning and investment decisions are up to me. This type of arrangement might work well for a long time, but can become less sustainable with age, particularly if the “finance person” in the relationship dies or develops a major health issue.
Online tools and mind maps
Illustrating your financial situation with charts and graphs is a great idea that might help your spouse become a little more involved. Morningstar’s Portfolio X-Ray tool includes a variety of images that help illustrate your financial situation. Websites for most major brokerage firms also include some visual tools. Schwab, for example, offers a Portfolio Checkup and a bar graph illustrating your account’s monthly income from dividends and interest income. Vanguard has a Portfolio Watch tool and a variety of performance illustrations, tools, and calculators.
A mind map, which we used with clients when I worked for a financial advisory firm, can be another way to picture your entire financial situation on one page. There are various softwaretemplates for drawing a mind map, or you can simply sketch it out with a large sheet of paper and a pencil. Start with your names at the center of the page. Then draw spokes connecting to various categories, such as names of other family members; investment accounts; real estate and other assets, insurance policies, estate plans, key goals and values, and contact information for accountants, estate planners, and other professionals. It can be helpful to go through the mind map together and make any updates needed at least once a year.
Other ways to communicate about money
A few other ideas—though not related to charts and graphs—might also be useful.
I like the idea of putting together a net worth statement that itemizes cash, taxable accounts, real estate, retirement accounts, and debt for each member of the couple as well as items owned jointly. It’s a good idea to update this document at least once a year and discuss it as a couple. If you set up the document as a spreadsheet, you can include columns with additional information such as account numbers, what each account is used for, which accounts are subject to required minimum distributions, or tax issues like potential capital gains.
Many couples also put together a binder (sometimes humorously called a “Doomsday Book”) that contains information about where to find important paperwork, insurance policies, how bills are paid, what each account is for, steps the surviving spouse will need to take, final wishes, and any other critical information.
A well-qualified financial adviser can bridge the information gap
Finally, you could consider working with a good financial adviser, who can help involve your spouse in financial matters while you’re still living and step in to fully manage investments and personal finance decisions if you pass away before your spouse. Make sure the adviser holds the Certified Financial Planner designation and charges fees that are reasonable. Although a 1% fee is still the industry standard for accounts of $1 million or less, it’s possible to find advisers who charge significantly less, including a few who price their services based on hours worked instead of a percentage of assets under management.
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This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.
Amy C. Arnott, CFA, is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar and co-host of The Long View podcast.
Related links:
What If This Turns Out to Be a Terrible Time to Retire?
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/what-if-this-turns-out-be-terrible-time-retire
Bill Bengen: ‘Inflation Is the Greatest Enemy of Retirees’
https://www.morningstar.com/retirement/bill-bengen-inflation-is-greatest-enemy-retirees
3 Big Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/3-big-questions-ask-your-aging-parents
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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