To me you should look at what happend when the dot com bubble collapsed. The days of being a computer science major and dropping out to become an overnight millionaire with recylcedpaintchips.com is over and will never come back. That doesn't mean though that there is no money to be made in the software business now. Same thing with IB....an easy path to a million dollar salary was always unrealistic and unsustainable. That doesn't mean there will not be a ton of money to be made in investment banking in the future though.
This was never true. Most IBankers, by a very wide margin, burn out within a few years. The percentage of those who make it past the associate level is not high and never was. Trader and analyst are two different sides of the industry, by the way.
Very true, IB and Private Equity guys burn out very fast. It can be very stressful, and even more so with the currenty psychology of "DOOM" being pounded everyday. However, plenty of money to be made if you can handel the stress and turn the "DOOM" into hope for certain key area's you are funding.
PS: at the end of the day, one of our top guys, clears 700k a year, did not attend MBA school and went to Mich.State for undergrad. MBA means nothing to the front line, it works if you wana push paper and crunch numbers. In negotiations, Sales, and relationship building, MBA falls to give you advantage. "What They did not teach you at Harvard Business School " is a required reading when I joined my group.
Grad school or hedge fund/private equity/venture capital. Of course, now it's different so who knows. Besides grad school there is the choice of unemployed, moving back home to parents, corporate finance or small business. Oh yeah. Don't forget daytrading.