Wall Street and Silicon Valley are courting Zhang and graduates like her—students with top grades, finance and math skills and a couple of languages—more heavily than any students since the days of the ‘90s dot-com explosion…

Meanwhile, the number of U.S. students choosing computer science as a major plummeted 39 percent in the five academic years ended in 2006, according to the Washington-based Computing Research Association. Those with technical expertise are the same ones that Yahoo Inc., Google and a growing number of hedge funds and private equity firms also want. ‘‘Technology is the hardest to hire for,’’ Raiffa says. ‘‘We really have to compete.’’

To fill math-intensive jobs, banks are bringing in more non-U.S. employees—people like Zhang who came to the United States to study. They typically started out in countries such as China or India, which have been more focused on math and science education. One dividend is the knowledge of cultures where firms such as Goldman aim to expand.

‘‘We know that we are hot property,’’ says Rishi Dhingra, a master’s degree candidate in quantitative and computational finance at Georgia Tech…

With their ease with technology—the Internet is as basic a tool as pen and paper to them—the Millennials are smarter than their bosses were at the same age, Strauss says. Most don’t see themselves working at their current job for more than a year or two. And having seen their boomer parents struggling to juggle careers and family, they aren’t willing to sign on for a life of 80-hour workweeks…

Source: Daily Report
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