Chinese Students Want To Know: How Do I Get Rich?
Eric K. Clemons, 03.02.09, 12:00 AM EST
A business school professor asks himself what he hath wrought.
In February, three Wharton faculty colleagues and I had the pleasure of dining
with 19 visiting students from one of China's most prestigious universities. The
students were young. They were charming. They were very intelligent. And they
were very, very goal-directed.
My colleagues and I had each prepared brief opening remarkѕ, but the students
were having none of it. They had elected a delegation leader, and the delegation
leader, as quickly as possible, got to the question the students all wanted to
address: What are the implications of the current financial and economic crisis?
A colleague in the accounting department gave them a careful, scholarly,
even-handed explanation of how firms' decisions on the repricing of assets in
their portfolio could perhaps have been used, perhaps unintentionally, to create
false expectations in the marketplace, and could have been done in a way
undetectable to auditors, leading to over-investment in toxic subprime assets.
No, that's not what the students wanted to discuss. With much less tact, I
explained that, indeed, mispricing of assets at an inflated price could have
been deliberately used to create the illusion of value, and this could then have
been used to create the very real rewards of wealth for the financial
engineering wizards responsible for the scheme.
This got us much closer to the questions that the visiting students wanted to
address. Their first round of questions were basically, How can I get that job?
How can I get a high-paying job in investment banking now?
My colleagues and I attempted to convince them that those jobs simply will not
exist again, at historical levels of compensation, in the months or years before
these students' graduation.
This led to a second round of questions, like, What can I do while working as a
desk drone in an audit firm in China to ensure that I can get into Wharton,
Harvard or Stanford, and get a job in investment banking later? The students
were patient. They did not need a job with a $10 million bonus now, as long as
the prospect of receiving it later would still arise.
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I then suggested that perhaps they might work for companies that made things.
Actual things. With a burgeoning middle class that would soon be larger than the
entire population of the U.S. or Western Europe, surely there was going to be a
huge domestic market for things in China. The students could pursue careers with
companies that were working to develop and to sell appliances fit for a Chinese
home, or mass-market, branded consumer package goods for the new middle class
Chinese consumer.
This was met with stares from the students. Another colleague from the
management department suggested that Chinese retailing and distribution offered
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