Witnessing a shift in career visions and realities

Few inter­est­ing excerpts from NYTimes’s “With Finance Dis­graced, Which Career Will Be King?”

Today, the finan­cial cri­sis and the eco­nomic down­turn are likely to alter dras­ti­cally the career paths of future years. The con­tours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncer­tainty about the shape of the eco­nomic land­scape and the job mar­ket ahead.

What will the new map of tal­ent flow look like? It’s early, but based on grad­u­ate school appli­ca­tions this spring, enroll­ment in under­grad­u­ate courses, pre­lim­i­nary job-placement results at schools, and the anec­do­tal accounts of stu­dents and pro­fes­sors, a new pat­tern of occu­pa­tional choice seems to be emerg­ing. Pub­lic ser­vice, gov­ern­ment, the sci­ences and even teach­ing look to be win­ners, while fewer shiny, young minds are embark­ing on careers in finance and busi­ness consulting.

For the highest-paid busi­ness fields, the out­look is for a tem­per­ing cor­rec­tion instead of an all-out exo­dus. At Har­vard, for exam­ple, about 40 per­cent of under­grad­u­ates in recent years went into the most lucra­tive cor­po­rate are­nas like finance and con­sult­ing, based on sur­veys at the school year’s end. “That cer­tainly won’t be the case this year,” observed Lawrence Katz, a pro­fes­sor and labor econ­o­mist who has stud­ied under­grad­u­ate career choices at Har­vard going back to the 1960s. “We’re see­ing stu­dents who would have been part of the Ivy League pipeline to Wall Street in the past con­sid­er­ing very dif­fer­ent career paths.”

The laissez-faire pre­sump­tion that gov­ern­ment is not the solu­tion but the prob­lem, dat­ing back to the Rea­gan era, has been cast aside, they say.

The government’s need to step in with finan­cial bailouts and recov­ery pro­grams to steady the econ­omy is seen as the imme­di­ate proof, they say, but not the only one. The envi­ron­ment, energy and health care also pose huge, com­plex chal­lenges. “Young peo­ple today under­stand that gov­ern­ment has a pow­er­ful role to play in solv­ing these prob­lems,” said San­dra Archibald, dean of the Evans School of Pub­lic Affairs at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton, where appli­ca­tions this year are up 26 percent.

Gov­ern­ment school offi­cials also point to an Obama effect: his elec­tion as an endorse­ment of gov­ern­ment activism.

Patri­cia Foglesong, a second-year stu­dent at Dar­den, turned down a job offer from a major con­sult­ing firm. Instead, she is con­sid­er­ing two gov­ern­ment jobs, one with the Secret Ser­vice and another with the Park Service.

Click here for full read on NYTimes.

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