Very interesting. So how did you get to be a wall street trader,( without the academic credentials)?
It does vary a lot between disciplines, though. There are a lot of successful people in support roles: technology, "back office" (operations, settlements, legal), human resources, etc., from many backgrounds.
Sales, research, trading, transactional M&A, wealth management and capital markets desks have a higher percentage of Ivy/prep school folks, especially for folks in the ~VP - younger MD range.
Re: try-hard-ism: For example, Goldman derivatives trading struck me at one point as being made up of the lacrosse team captains from each Ivy.
A lot of the older folks are "Brooklyn smart" whereas the younger folks are mostly "MIT smart" or "MBA smart".
I had an interview with a private equity firm who told me re: their analyst program: "We hire only 24 year olds who went to private school, then an Ivy, then did a two-year program at a top tier investment bank. We find that if everyone we hire is the same person, it's easy for them to work together, and for us to work with them. We took a risk one time and hired someone with a different profile once, and it didn't work out." (Basically verbatim.)
I had an easier time getting interviews on Wall Street than in Silicon Valley. (but the Wall Street interviews were harder)
For example, here in SF, one PM told me that he was going to interview one candidate per day for 30 days and then make a decision. For a junior trader / analyst position. Granted this is a C-list at best town for finance, but that struck me as indicative of a huge imbalance.
I worked in finance (as a proprietary trader) for 6-ish years, including several years as a VP at Deutsche Bank.
As the article says:
"What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next."
I call these folks "try-hards". These folks have knocked down goal after goal for their whole life, and they are damn good at it. The field of possibility has been constrained by their parents and their social milieu for years to reveal a very small set of viable goals at any given time. And they are talented, motivated, and absolutely crush anything in their way.
In college, these folks need to develop their own superego and internalize their own constraint set. The low-hanging fruit is right there to grab: finance, consulting, law, medicine. Each of these is prestigious, pays well, and has a relatively deterministic process by which one can enter, grow in responsibility, demonstrate achievement, and increase their pay. It's a no-brainer.
The paradox of choice is one of the great anxiety-producers of our age for the professional set. Honestly, it must be refreshing to have such a strong set of constraints guiding you toward such a bounded set of outcomes.
This is something that people like me[1] have a hard time understanding: for the try-hard, this outcome is not something to be fought or to be overly questioned--it's the inevitable, desirable continuation of a lifetime worth of achievement.
[1] - A hacker from a lower-class background who did not ride the academic achievement path