Columbia’s Finance Clubs are Exclusive and Unnecessary

This year, hundreds of Columbia students will engage in a soul-sucking ritual endemic to late-capitalist America: recruiting for investment banking. This recruitment process is the first step on the conventional path of bright-eyed Ivy Leaguer to Wall Street vest-wearer: freshmen and sophomores network with bank employees throughout the fall, apply to summer analyst positions in the winter, and, if successful, candidates go through a multi-round interview process in the spring.

The job itself theoretically involves helping companies raise capital, issue shares, and complete mergers and acquisitions, but the day-to-day for interns largely consists of countless hours making Excel models and PowerPoint decks to support the full-time employees engaged in this larger mission. Landing one of these coveted internships during one’s junior summer is instrumental for getting an investment banking job upon graduation, since banks hire the majority of their associates from the interns they’ve already recruited.

Unfortunately, two forces are currently combining to make the recruitment process more difficult. The massive disruption caused by artificial intelligence, which has been felt first and foremost in Big Tech, has attracted more applicants to pursue Wall Street jobs. Simultaneously, banks themselves are utilizing new AI tools in the creation of financial models and decks. As this work is traditionally done by interns and young associates, this has led banks to hire fewer people in entry-level positions. Goldman Sachs’ hiring data illustrates both these patterns. In 2022, the bank hired 3,000 summer analysts out of 236,000 applicants (a roughly 1.3 percent acceptance rate), but—just three years later—that number shrunk to 2,600 summer analysts from over 360,000 applicants (a roughly 0.7 percent acceptance rate).