Is this the new elite you were talking about?
Here is an excerpt from BusinessWeek’s article titled “Meet Your New Recruits: They Want to Eat Your Lunch”:
…”We are followers of Warren Buffett,” explains Greene, who says he studies the famed Omaha investor’s letters to shareholders as if they were sacred texts.
High-revving students scoff at advice they sometimes hear about intellectually browsing before settling on a narrow employment path. “Many of my fellow classmates have been planning out their college choices since middle school, so to tell them not to plan for a future career during freshman year is illogical,” says Janet Xu, 22, a senior at Yale and editor of the undergraduate magazine Yale Entrepreneur. She is heading off soon to be an analyst for Sears Holdings (SHLD) in Chicago….
The article talks about a new group of elite college graduates emerging from top American universities who are aiming for the top jobs. At first, I got excited about this phenomenon. After reading the article, I have to tell you that I’m not as optimistic as I was about this new group. It seems like they all want to go to finance and consulting. In my opinion, for a healthy economy, we do need financiers and consultants, but they are one piece of the big picture and they are not the ones creating “value”. I believe “economic value” is created mostly by entrepreneurs, innovators, designers and manufacturers. Let me define what I mean by value (and this is my definition): true economic value is something for which people would pay voluntarily and with adequate relevant information. For example, when you pay $300 to buy a digital camera and you have done research on it before, you have read customer and analyst reviews and you know all the functions of the camera, that must have some true value to you. Value is not equivalent to cash. A pyramid scheme may generate cash for some people but doesn’t create any real value. A hedge fund may make some people richer, but it doesn’t necessarily create economic value. What an economy needs is a lot of value creators and some financiers.
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