Put a graduation cap on the Wall Street bull and you have said most of what needs saying. The feature on 25 "rising stars" in finance is built around where they went to school and what their first jobs were. Nobody designed it as an indictment, but it works as one. Finance has long told its own story this way, because everyone in the industry understands that the diploma and the first job are the career.
I don't know the particular roster, and I'm not going to pretend these 25 people are frauds. They are almost certainly smart, driven and willing to work absurd hours. That is exactly the point. Talent is abundant and the pipeline is narrow. Banks and funds recruit heavily from a short list of "target schools," and the first-job résumé line is then treated as proof of merit. A kid at a regional public university with the same ability and the same appetite for pain usually never gets the interview. Nobody saw her fail. Nobody looked.
The research on who gets to those schools is not ambiguous. Raj Chetty's team at Opportunity Insights found that children from the top 1% are vastly more likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college than middle-class children with the same test scores. Dozens of elite colleges enroll more students from the top 1% than from the entire bottom 60%. Legacy preferences, donor favors, private-school counselors and expensive test prep all do their work before a résumé ever reaches a recruiter. By the time a 22-year-old analyst is celebrated for a "path into Wall Street," much of the path has been paved by her parents' zip code.
The best counterargument is that firms handle other people's money and want people who have already survived a hard filter. Fair enough. But a filter that measures wealth and polish at 18 and calls it merit at 28 is a status ritual, not a test. And the costs are public. Finance decides which companies get capital, which neighborhoods get loans, which pensions get raided and which factories get "restructured." If the people making those calls come from the same few campuses, the same few income brackets and the same few Manhattan apartments, expect their blind spots to become everyone else's economy.
This is also an uncomfortable moment for my own side. Democrats have a long, cozy relationship with this pipeline, and many of our own leaders came out of it. We spent years defending the credentialed class as if it were the same thing as the working class. The Right has been happy to exploit that. Its attack on diversity programs in admissions and hiring is loud and selective. After the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions in 2023, conservatives declared victory for merit. The much larger thumb on the scale, family wealth and legacy status, drew far less of their fury. A movement that really cared about merit would have gone after legacy admissions with the same energy. Most didn't, because that thumb often belongs to their donors.
So celebrate the 25 if you like. But ask what a truly open system would look like. Ban legacy preferences. Make internships paid, since an unpaid summer in New York is a tax on anyone without family money. Have firms recruit at community colleges and state universities as seriously as they do at Harvard and Penn. Judge people by what they do in the job, not by the logo on the first line of the résumé.
The bull in a graduation cap is a cute image. The uncute truth is that for too many ambitious people, the gate to the most powerful industry in the country closes long before anyone gets to prove what they can do.
