Business school deans say some students who consider themselves "highly ethical" are avoiding careers in finance because they consider the field beneath their standards.
That's according to William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who is waging a campaign to improve behavior on Wall Street.
Dudley said on Thursday that he met "a couple of months ago" with a number of business school deans and discussed ethics in the curriculum. He said "a number of people there from the academic community said that people who think of themselves as highly ethical, people of high integrity, were deciding not to go into the financial business because they were concerned that that was not up to their standards." He said that he found this "incredibly disturbing."
Dudley's remarks came in a question-and-answer session following a speech to the Economic Club of New York, an organization made up mostly of Wall Street professionals. New York Fed spokeswoman Andrea Priest said Dudley's comments were based on anecdotal observations by the deans and that she couldn't say who they are or what they said.