Rarely do conventions shift in terms employment and work — especially as related to issues of class and education. The New York Times has one of the most though provoking articles I have read in a long time.
‘Sensible’ young people are taught early on to aspire for the following: if you are fortunate to be both smart and most well-off you should slave away on homework, attain a high GPA and attend private college. If at all possible, an ivy. Next, these same smart, wealthy types should then go on to more advanced education in the form of graduate degrees and become doctors, lawyers and bankers. Once achieved, a position among America’s elite will have been cemented.
Turns out that these conventions have slowly been shifting.
In fact, I have witnessed first-hand this shift. I started off out of undergrad in a Wall Street law firm working on the Merck Vioxx case. A great case by any standard. With only a B.A., I was doing the exact same terrible, mind-numbing work as most first year associates. I learned how only lateral, ‘rain-makers’ made partner. I witnessed the absurdly high rate of depression.
I quickly canceled the LSAT class I’d recently enrolled in.
Likewise, I have friends that passed on becoming doctors after hearing horror stories of impending law suits and balking at the time commitment and cost of tuition. Several of my friends are I-bankers. They make huge money in a relative sense, but calculate their ‘per hour’ and you’d likely be shocked.
Times are changing. Lifestyle, strategy, and innovation matter more than ever. Young people now have the tools to monetize their unique skills allowing them to take advantage of a new long tail of jobs. Entrepreneurs, the internet and web innovations continue to empower individuals in new ways. For example, if I’m sick, I turn to Google before turning to a doctor. As our independence increases, our need (and thus desire) for older-guard “provider services” lessens. Being a doctor or lawyer isn’t what people would do if they could make a great living doing something else. [What was your major in college?] Such positions are now ‘comfort jobs’ for the intelligent more than anything else.
From the article:
In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward — where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites — some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.
This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.
“There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self,” he said. “Now they just want to be themselves. It’s almost as if they’re interviewing places to see if they fit them.”
Reality, she quickly learned, was different. Ms. Kersh recalled a two-week stretch in which she and a team of associates were holed up in a conference room with 50 boxes of documents. Every day, for 12 hours, they fastened Post-it notes to legal briefs.
“You look around at the other associates, trying to remind ourselves, why did we go to law school?” said Ms. Kersh
Many young associates, she added, spent their lunch hours making lavish purchases on NeimanMarcus.com, just to remind themselves that what they did counted for something.
