Wall Street and the Ivy League: Is it just a quirk of the data?

A reader responds to my column on Wall Street and the Ivy League:

I’ve seen these stats thrown around a lot, but I would love it if someone would investigate what percent of all grads go into finance — not just those who have a job before graduation!

I’m sure mine is a skewed sample, but the majority of people I knew at Brown did not have a job lined up at graduation. I suspect those going into finance are far more likely to have that settled, considering the very ordered, systematic recruitment process of big finance (and consulting) companies. Those going into, say, journalism, are more likely to figure that out in the months following graduation.

So the story here could just as well be: College grads going into finance figure it out earlier.

Fair point. I didn’t do a very good job of explaining the methodology behind the graduation data in today’s column. For Princeton and Harvard, the numbers only included students who had a job lined up when they finished college. That means those going to grad school were excluded, and so were those who simply didn’t know what they were doing next.

But the numbers for Yale were different: They checked in with graduates who were employed a year after they left the university. So the students in their sample had time to line something up. And their numbers showed that the percent of alumni working in finance a year after graduated ranged from 31 percent in 2000 to 14 percent in in 2010. By contrast, Harvard posted numbers ranging from 28 percent to 17 percent between 2006 and 2011. So the picture isn’t that different depending on whether you check in at graduation or a year after graduation.

Now, there’s another puzzle in this data that I can’t answer as easily: why Princeton seems to be sending so many more students to finance than Harvard or Yale. Between 2000 and 2010, their peak was 46 percent and their trough was 33.4 percent, and there was no significant fall-off from the recession. In 2005, 36 percent of Princeton graduates with a job lined up were headed to finance. In 2010, 35.9 percent were. What global deleveraging crisis?