These positions are insanely competitive and they mostly go to either people with extensive networks and contacts in the firm, or people from target schools.
This is not my experience at all. I know many people who got jobs at top banks despite (seemingly) no connections or prestige. They are more meritocratic than you give them credit for (and the average applicant is worse!).
True, but some people believe there is difficulty in terms of long term acceptance and fit in the industry.
Yes, some people believe that. On the other hand, I’ve seen people be promoted to senior positions, over more qualified people, explicitly because the firm needed more ‘diversity’. You shouldn’t deter people from applying to the industry on the basis of “some people believe” while not even mentioning the fact that they receive objective advantages that will help them.
I agree that this applies much less at smaller firms.
How many investment bankers do you know?
40 or so? I did work in investment banking for a while.
It’s not even clear to me that “being an EA” is a sufficiently descriptive reference class.
You’re writing a “Finance Careers for Earning to Give” guide and don’t consider “being an EA who is interested in applying to banks” a relevant reference class? These weren’t a random sample of EAs, these were EAs who thought working in IB might be a good idea for them.
Though perhaps it has worked out for some more recently and I just don’t know who they are.
Either way, I should definitely not mention that fact, because that will give people biases and preconceptions. When they are learning about a career for the first time, they should start out with good, neutral sources, not secondhand rumors about people dropping out.
No, if everyone trying something (EtG in a bank) decided it was a bad idea, that is definitely valuable information. It’s not a rumor, Ben could tell you who they are. We don’t want neutrality, we want accuracy.
I have seen people talk about both buyside and sellside ER.
People in the industry? Who?
It seems like the advice is basically “represent Africa as being high status, not low status”. We also want to get across the message that people in the third world have serious problems that we can very effectively solve. If person A can easily solve person B’s problems, but person B can do nothing to help or harm person A, then person A is (much) higher status than person B. Why try to hide this reality? We generally don’t give charity money to our superiors or equals.
Perhaps there is an instrumental reason to pretend that this relationship is more egalitarian that it actually is. But while you reference data suggesting that traditional marketing is ignored by most people, you don’t present any data suggesting that other approaches work better.