In the 2010s, I was teaching history to undergraduates at Princeton. Every semester, a large percentage of my graduating seniors — some of the brightest and most capable students in the class — would tell me that they were headed to jobs on Wall Street. I asked myself: Had it always been this way? What forces draw so many talented young people into finance, or its close cousins, management consulting and corporate law? Those questions sparked nearly a decade of research as I sought to discover the origins and consequences of that story. My search began at a dozen elite universities and business schools, where career services offices held student records in rows of metal filing cabinets. In those yellowing folders, I discovered that as recently as the mid-1970s, only a handful of graduates went to Wall Street. Many seniors were bound for white-collar roles at stolid manufacturing companies — places like General Motors and Kodak — or taking jobs in teaching or nonprofit work. But all that changed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as politicians loosened the regulations that had long constrained the financial sector. With banks enjoying gaudy profits, they set off on a hiring spree on America’s campuses. Soon, the lure of Wall Street became irresistible. Banking, once thought of as a default career option for children of the WASP elite, became the most coveted job for every type of student, including the many white-ethnic, Black, Latino and Asian American male and female students at rapidly diversifying universities. In a recent Times Opinion essay, I argue that once those young graduates flooded into cities in the 1980s, they formed a recognizable (if much derided) type: the young urban professional, known more colloquially as the yuppie. And I reveal the ways that this cohort transformed our workplaces, our culture and our politics. Even today, yuppies — with their fitness routines, foodie obsessions and gentrified neighborhoods — are still a dominant force in American life.
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