What’s Your Line, Brother?

From Daniel ClowesWilson:

Some Ivy League students are starting to agree with the sentiment after watching so many of their peers head off to work in consulting and finance after graduation.  From All Things Considered’s Stopping the ‘Brain Drain’ of the U.S. Economy

Student protesters recently got into a Goldman Sachs recruitment session at Princeton University to tell student attendees they were listening to a “carefully crafted recruitment pitch” and that they could “do better for society.” Similar protests have been held at Harvard University, and at Stanford University, where Teryn Norris was a student. …

“The problem is that when you’ve got 20 to 30 percent of some of the top talent in this country going into a sector that is not necessarily contributing to economic and social productivity,” he says. “That’s a problem for the country at large and it’s something that we should all be concerned about.”

Economist Paul Kedrosky agrees, except that we’re about two decades late in getting concerned.  He believes the current financial morass is the work of a long line of bright minds who decided to spin their wheels in the name of money, as opposed to areas like science, engineering and mathematics, a.k.a. the subjects many of them actually studied in school…

[Wilson is available from Drawn & Quarterly; NPR story via Hacker News]