Ivy League grads face risk of losing prized jobs after schools allow antisemitic protests to fester: Wall Street titan

The violent, antisemitic protests at some of the nation’s elite colleges has forced top corporate recruiters to assess the quality of the education dispensed at these places — and whether they should look elsewhere for job candidates, the Post has learned.

Activist investor Daniel Loeb, a Columbia University graduate, has begun to reconsider whether to focus offering jobs at his hedge fund to fellow alums and other Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Penn amid their tepid responses to the protests on their campuses, he told The Post.

“We’ve always looked beyond the target schools but we’re doing it even more so now given recent events,” Loeb told The Post on Wednesday.

“We are looking for high-quality candidates but we’re going to be looking at different places.”

Loeb’s firm, Third Point, which manages $11 billion in assets, regularly recruited from places like Columbia in the past, he said.

Now, he’s broadening his focus to schools like Yeshiva University, the University of Florida and Emory University.

The “Ivies” — and schools like NYU and MIT that have also been hotbeds of antisemitic protests — are likely to remain so-called target schools for job recruitment for Wall Street and big corporations given the diaspora of their alumni in board rooms and C-suites. 

However, job applicants from these places may find that the days of gliding through the interview process to a job are over, according to Wall Street executives and recruiters.

The anti-Israel protests now at Columbia, and throughout some of the country’s once revered, top-tiered universities are tarnishing degrees from these places, these people say. 

Recruiters see the bungling responses from school administrations to the protests — such as Columbia calling for remote learning as officials negotiate with anti-Israel protesters to decamp from their disruptive tent-cities on campus — as endemic of a wider problem at the schools from an academic standpoint.

At issue: Can schools that rationalize non-stop protests while allowing course curriculum that imbibes students with a leftist interpretations of world events be trusted to produce quality job candidates?

The re-evaluation of the elite-school degree comes amid a broader crackdown on strident political dissent in the office environment. 

One of the starkest examples came recently when Google fired more than 50 staffers who stormed offices in California and New York to protest the company’s contract with the Israeli government.

College curriculums also began to embrace required courses in so-called social justice themes, but they have been slow to reverse course. 

Now, recruiters say, many that haven’t tapped down on violent protesters or moved their curriculum away from “woke” core courses are paying the price in terms of the perceived diminished value of the degrees they are handing out when students begin to look for jobs.

The problem, according to Gary Goldstein, chief executive officer of the Whitney Group, a prominent executive search firm, is that many high-profile schools in recent years have been getting funding from foreign sources, particularly in the Middle East, and were pressured to mold their curriculum to comport with the political sentiments of these benefactors.

“A lot of high-profile schools like the Ivies and places like MIT have been getting funding from Qatar and the Middle East and with that they have brought in professors who push DEI and teaching kids to view the world through oppressor and oppressed, which means Israel becomes the oppressor,” Goldstein told the Post.

Goldstein said the outgrowth of this type of instruction has been a backlash against some elite colleges where these anti-Israel protests are the most strident. 

“I’m hearing from people they don’t want to send their kids to these places, but also from the banks that they’re leery about recruiting now from these highly visible schools and will look to places in the Midwest where you don’t see this type of activity,” he said.

Goldstein cited  so-called “high-quality, second tier” schools outside the coasts as being the prime targets of corporate recruitment because the educational experience “hasn’t been so politicized.”