I hear that man. Thats why I'm trying to start a company right out the gate, that way any sort of mythology cycle I engage will be at least partly justified.

Yes!

Wow, these are interesting findings. I can't help but wonder if maybe some of this is self-imposed. E.g. class A graduates when jobs aren't so good, and they earn less right out of college. They might continue to move up, but they find comfortable lives for thsemlves in the pay bracket they are in.

Class B gets out of college and gets high-paying jobs. After that it would seem like a move backward to go into any low or average-paying job. So, they strive to keep high paying jobs while class A isn't really worried about that.

I should say again this is pure curiosity, not speculation. E.g. it's honestly a quesiton, not "I think this is what's going on."

Pat: Good for you. Even if your business fails, I've read that HR guys would rather have someone who tried than someone who took a code monkey job. (via Paul Graham) I'm just getting on board with one myself (albeit not the founder, and I graduated a couple years ago).

Numbers never lie, of course, but I'm skeptical about the broader conclusions drawn from this research, which, I notice, focuses exclusively on business school graduates. I'm an Oxford graduate from 1987. I lost my first job before I'd even started because of the market crash, which happened less than a week before I was due to begin. As a result I took a step back, decided that actually I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life, sold shoes at Harrods for a while, did a couple of other duff jobs, and didn't go into banking (at the bottom of the pole) until 1992 - another far from ideal moment to be kicking off a financial career, or so they would have us believe. Well, without wanting to go into any detail, I'm doing just fine thank you - and I'm not aware of a single one of my Oxford peers who could be described as having missed the boat - other than those who consciously made the choice to do so, that is. Then again, while I began my financial career with a quintessential American bank, JPMorgan, I've always worked in Europe, where, thank goodness, no-one cares where you started. And I'm a liberal arts graduate, so perhaps that helped...

Peter, yes, that's a great point about the self-reinforcing effects of getting a high-paying job right out of school. It's very hard for people to move down the pay scale, even if they're actually quite miserable at their high-paying jobs and they'd prefer less hours, less responsibility, a quieter city, etc.

waterhot, good point also: Extrapolating all human behavior from that of biz-school grads would be as dicey as extrapolating it solely from the life-arc of rock musicians, acutaries, lawyers, nurses, etc. The data are certainly intriguing, though, and intuitively the economists' conclusions make a lot of sense. Of course, intuitive conclusions are often naively wrong ...

There was a related article in Slate magazine, based on the same study, that looked at economists with PhDs, graduating in boom and bust years for academics. They looked at the prestige of the institution where the graduates landed their first jobs (it was assumed that, in bust years, it's harder to get a job at a highly-ranked research university). They demonstrated that graduates relegated to less-prestigious universities by a poor economy published fewer papers, in lower-impact journals, than their boom-year counterparts - in other words, concluded the writer, lower-ranked universities are basically Roach Motels. Like you, Clive, I found this to be a pretty dispiriting conclusion - I went looking for my first academic job in 2002, not exactly a year with golden economic vistas - but I console myself with the thought that my academic career path is freaky enough that any lack of success is probably due to my own decisions, not the general economy. :)

I agree with this in theory (about the U.S. being a harder place to work your way up, etc etc). But, while I'm far from financially successful myself, I tend to blame my career choices for that, not the fact that I graduated in 1990, especially since my former classmates from Stanford went on to do things like found Yahoo and work at Microsoft for less than ten years before retiring. I think if you factor the tech boom into things, it gets a bit more complicated.

I like what Peter asked, and would add: are all those rich investment bankers really as satisfied as those with saner lives?

Argh. This hit a nerve with me. I graduated in December, 2000. A couple weeks before the Internet boom tanked.

Debcha, heh, yes, working for a startup college is already such a cool outlying career path that you no longer can rely on statistics to predict your future!

btl35, yeah -- if I'd gone into high-tech online development back in 92 when I graduated, I'd probably have a team of hired people blogging for me right now while I sat around playing Xbox and counting stacks of money.

Taybin, ouch.

I graduated in 1991, and it killed my will to earn.

Weird, I just watched Slacker the night you posted this. Have you seen it recently? Anyone reading this comment should watch that movie again and be freaked out by how "inappropriate" it would be in today's environment. There is constant talk of terrorism and blowing things up. Really weird.

On a somewhat related Slacker note: today would be a rather appropriate day to watch it, as it is Bloomsday, June 16...the day in which Joyce's Ulysses was set on, which is also the basic framework for the movie Slacker. (Before Sunrise, another Linklater movie, was set specifically on Bloomsday.)

I graduated in 2000. Just right when things turned bad for the dot.com's. Check the link I attached. I still got hired fast, my friends who graduated the next year got shit. This study is true, common sense, but yet suprising.