The high academic bar contrasts with the increasingly laissez faire attitude to degrees in the City. A growing number of finance and professional services companies have scrapped demands for a 2.1 degree for their graduate recruits, lowering the bar for applicants.
In recent months, PwC, Santander and Schroders were among companies to abolish this long-standing recruitment norm in the Square Mile in what they say is a bid to enhance the diversity of their workforces.
However, as these firms open up their programmes to anyone with a third class degree, critics argue that the City risks dumbing itself down by diminishing the importance of academic achievement – and putting itself at a disadvantage to rival financial centres.
The City has always had an amazingly – compared to other parts of the UK economy at least – laissez faire attitude toward degrees and in fact any form of academic achievement.
True, a certain smoothichopsness was often considered useful for being front of house in a Merchant Bank or client facing at a stock broker. A title didn’t hurt either. But those who actually traded, it was whether you were good at trading or not. As BiS will aver, stockjobbing – to take one older example, more recently we might add money broking and or Liffe and so on – positively gloried in those who had left school at 14, wore white socks with slip on shoes under suits and in general scoured the East End for those who could count.
Because such a system worked. And as capitalist and market systems tend to there was indeed discrimination but it was not taste such, it was rational. Those who could count – from wherever – went to do things where counting matter, those who could shake hands and knew their claret went where that was important. Degrees be buggered along the way.
BTW, those who could count – as we’d expect – made most of the money too.
With the irruption of the Americans and their credentialism this might have wavered a bit. But there are still those islands of absolute meritocracy out there. Money broking comes to mind given the now absence of futures trading floors.