In this morning’s New York Times, Louise Story writes about the mass of up and comers who are forgoing their MBAs in order to retain the fat paychecks of the Hedge Fund world — thus “Altering the Career Calculus”.
What is interesting is that this comes on the heels of another New York Times article from last week’s Sunday edition, where Andrew Ross Sorkin posits that MBAs will get hit remarkably hard by the recent economic turmoil. Sorkin reveals a “dirty little secret”: hedge funds and private equity firms drove MBA hiring at consulting firms, as they outsourced due diligence assignments. Sorkin logically concludes that as this work dries up with the slowdown, consulting jobs will quickly disappear. Of course, he also notes that hedge fund and private equity jobs are disappearing as well (“The Ranks of the Comfortable are Thinning”):
“For the last four years, M.B.A.’s have been clamoring for jobs in the private equity industry. About 11 percent of Harvard’s M.B.A. class of 2006 secured private equity positions, up from 7 percent in the class of 2004. And the number from the class of 2007 is even higher. That alone should probably have been a sign of a market top. In any case, the party’s over, and it’s not clear where all these M.B.A.’s will go.”
Only time will tell…