Yale MBA Indicator

"Over the past week, a panic hierarchy has emerged in the halls of my business school. ... But there is still something melancholy about seeing a bright-eyed student on the cusp of graduation, ready to take the markets by storm, only to be relased into a world where all the porticullises to the bulge-bracket firms are slammed shut. Uncertain of where we'll land, we instead ponder why nobody had fully read the writing on the wall. A friend from a rival business school, a summer intern at Lehman, insists that though everybody was well aware of the bank's troubles, few at the firm could have predicted last week's plunge. ... But I can't help thinking that a rescinded offer could be a blessing in disguise. A junior-level investment banker's life is a brutal existence. ... As you slither up the banking ladder, salaries increase astronomically. A managing director--the top of the totem pole--easily pulls in a few million a year", my emphasis, David Bledin (DB) at the Houston Chronicle, 29 September 2008.

DB is a Yale School of Management student. Nobody, DB? Many people did. But you would never have listened to them. I doubt you would now. Now having heard from Yale, I could rename my indicator, the "Harvard-Yale MBA Indicator". But I won't. Sometimes the Harvard-Yale rivalry is funny. In 1951 William Buckley (WB) wrote, God and Man at Yale. WB once said,"I would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than the Harvard faculty". Big deal I thought. WB didn't say, "I would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the New Haven phone book than the Yale faculty", did he? What can you expect from a Yale man? Poor DB. Life is tough. DB should get at least a silver star for valor. A "brutal existence", he writes. Imagine, investment bankers are now men of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, 1651, "And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short". Poor Yale MBAs, who won't make say $2 million a year in 7-10 years. Poor babies. I offer you the same advice I offered Connie Yu: work for: Exxon, Transocean, Freeport McMoran Copper & Gold, Newmont, Helmerich & Payne, Weatherford, John Deere, Caterpillar, Arch Coal, etc., etc.