Interestingly enough the statistics show otherwise (at least for MBAs). MBAs with 3.85+ GPAs statistically end up making less money over the course of their careers than MBAs with around 3.3-3.5 GPAs. Go figure.
I'd love to see a paper on this, especially one that digs into covariant factors. I'm assuming this is all at the same institution/same time frame, as well, so that grading policy isn't an issue.
Heech, I don't think formal education implies conformity, either, only that it encourages conformity. You are absolutely correct that many well educated high achievers are able to think outside the box and achieve greatness. I'm merely suggesting that an open mind is an important asset, and that formal education does not necessarily cultivate innovation.
Memorizing a book and studying and getting a college degree doesnt make you successful. People with common sense have been shown to be more successful in business, trading etc. than most with college degrees. The only thing wrong with this is most people have no common sense, or at least never use it if they indeed have it.
From my experience its because these firms get so many emails, phone calls, resumes, etc from guys wanting to work at the firm that they would have no way of possibly interviewing all of them so they need a way to weed out people and a college education is the easiest way to do that. I for one have thought about the true benifits of a college education in this business and can honestly say I can't think of one good thing that formal education brings to the table. College grads (especially ivy leagues) tend to over think the market and just don't have that street fighter mentality. School binds you by rules and strict ways on how to do things as well as instilling in you that there is authority that you must listen to and they tell you what to do. Trading has very little rules and to a point you make your own rules as well as your own decisions. You are the quarterback the coach and the referee. If I were hiring traders I would look for guys with common sense, street smarts, ability to read people, etc. As those are the most helpful assets to a trader imo.
Education for Trading Ed for trading deals mostly with building a replacement for the first recourse a person turns to while beginning to learn to trade. The first mental recourse is the kind of stuff and the mental orientation most of the posters in this thread turn to to comment here. On 16APR I had written 25 pages on a trading opportunity and I turned to the subject of "Learning Failure" for the next 10 pages I wrote that day. I found two drills that needed to be done: 1. Write 100 words on where you are. 2. Write 100 words on the workaround for where you are. There were 100 "Learning Failure" items to deal with. So the drills amount to writing 20,000 words to get the the place where "Learning Failure" might be dealt with. This is 40 typed pages. I do 3500 words a day as a rule, so it would take a week of reflection and documentation. I've taught, formally, from 5th grade to post doctoral on the subject of trading. In higher Education my focus was in four fields, though: Bus Admin and Finance, Architecture, Psychiatry, and the Environment when it came into being. Students run the gamut. For trading an average fifth grade can do it if she/he has a WSJ subcription and a laptop. In the 60's I remember Glennie Close and Reeve Lindberg taking geometry and Reeve's dad and his engineeers did a proof on thri-secting an angle on a d size engineeering drawing. The kids figured out the errors in the long proof. At that time thier contemporaies took a course called "Enviromental Math and we wnet to the NYSE on 29OCT each year. They plotted their daily TA charts and the the "Seven Keys to Value" of NYSE fame. Each student got 25 copies of 10 annual reports and we had a wall of alphabetical shelving. FA was used to pick stocks for plotting using TA. The S&P Eastern regional director provided free a full brokerage service with daily service (his kid was a student). Crystals also grew for four of the six shapes from the center of the room and out the door and down the hall ways. We used string and straws over and over. These were children of wealthy families so they came in all sizes. The 5th graders were just the same children of wealthy Hollywood types. Wharton, Harvard and MIT left the greatest mark on me in terms of interacting with students. Case studies DO bring out streets smarts. At Tech I wound up in a classroom that had teams working on a problem for 3 years running; it was handed off term to term. 2 1/2 hours defined it; one field trip got the data; and one field fix solved the problem. "out of the box" was the requirement and the long prior dwell time had to do with the 100 items mentioned above. Wharton solved the drug poisonng problem in three Modified Delphi sessions. It came down to one question: Is the product any good? What generates the first mental recourse of the posters here is found on three levels (as usual): coarse, medium and fine. Coarse: Home, School, Environment. Medium: a rainbow of personal aspects: Status in Life, Character, Orientation, Mind Set, What is Deemed Possible or Not, and Mistaken Acitivities and Astions. Fine: the topical breakout of Medium: there are 57 topics and this raises about 100 items whose status determines how a person's forst recourse arrives consciously and unconsciously to deal with events either analytically or intuitively. As we found out in 11APR09 issue of the Economist, stress causes disruption of analysis and intuiting. Humorously, we also found out decisions made, analytically or intuitively, are the opposite of what is required to be correct. Bottom line: if you do not know what you are doing, you WILL fuck up most of the time. Fortunately thrading intaday is largely zero sum so those who have good first mental recourse do not feel stress, do not get disrupted, and DO make the right decisions. Top schools winnow to get students. Top schools do problem solving with teams in a case study orientation (real life). Top schools bury the mental first recourse students arrive with. The other path is successful entrepreneurship. My custom is to attack unsolved problems with "C" corps and do TFSE's with listed "C" corps to create capital as fast as possible in the field. I prefer Marine lawyers and Marine CPA's who can deal. Dealing is how it happens. Dealing is a live case study with money attached. the first two books on alcohol production were mentioned. the second has transferred to people 14 million copies it turns out and 400,000 went out in four months. This is the definition of an entrepreneurial need at a given scale of application. Acohol production rate of increase is less than electronic texhnology which doubles in tech every 18 months (Sullivan); alcohol takes 48 months. You see the power law applying here. Schooling is a matter of choice: formal or informal. that is why I put in 5 years here to get an informal record on the global network. All kinds of people succeeded in learning to learn to trade. they now have NEW first mental recourses that simply preclude STRESS, DISRUPTION, WRONG ANALYSIS AND WRONG INTUITING. It is not "news". It is corporations, foundations and hospitals and always has been. PEOPLE MAY WANT TO PUT ONE "LEARNING FAILURE" ITEM ON A CARD EACH DAY FOR 100 DAYS. YOU HAVE TO DEFINE THE ITEM AND WRITE A WORKAROUND FOR THE ITEM. It comes down to making a 100 choices on a 100 days. Q1. Why can't I see the market? Q3. How much do these platforms cost a month?
I may have come across as someone who advocates that education is not that important and that was not my intention! If any young aspiring traders still at school are reading this thread I strongly recommend that they finish university with the best possible grades before embarking on a career in trading. I am against the current format in which the education is delivered and the system that is imposed on the children. It's been around too long and it does requires conformity to succeed. For example, a lot of people believe that Einstein would have never come up with his Theory of Relativity, which revolutionized our view of the world, had he joined and operated from within the scientific establishment.
You have truly exceeded yourself with this post JH. Usually I simply have no idea what you are banging on about, but this post takes the cake. I have felt for some time that you call a different planet home, but after this posting I can see that you may not even be carbon based like the rest of us. Anyway, onward and upward. regards f9
I think its a lot of things like motivation, competetiveness and other traits that have been mentioned here already, but the main thing these institutions seek is conformity within a certain culture they seeks to create of like minded individuals who aspire to be the best academically they can be. They are not seeking diversity. Goldman Sachs is such an example and indeed it is hard to argue with their success. Interestingly, some of the ruff and tumble banks--Bear Stearns for one--didn't base all their hiring decisions on grades and test scores. They were more interested in hiring the entreprenurial aggressive, and hungry types who wanted to make money above and beyond everything else. In fact, a pedigree from the best schools with high grades was looked less favorably then the kid from a broken (and poor) family who would work his ass off with to WIN with no silver spoon. For a recruitment manager, the safest bet is always going to be the Harvard grad with all the honors and high grades as opposed to the applicant with a less prestigious pedigree despite having a great GPA.