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lsa, Texas, is a world away from Wall Street. Physically, they’re separated by nearly 2,000 miles. With around 5,600 residents, the South Texas border town is onesixth the size of Goldman Sachs, the quintessential Wall Street investment bank. Jake Foley, BBA ’88, MPA ’88, grew up in Elsa and knew nothing about finance when he arrived in Austin. His father was a police officer, his mother a teacher. Coming from a one-bank town, Foley thought that banking meant “tellers and drive-through windows.” Today, he knows a great deal more. He’s a managing director at Houlihan Lokey, a midcap boutique investment bank in midtown Manhattan, where he advises companies on highly complex transactions — mergers, acquisitions, and so on — and in some cases, multi-billion-dollar transactions. How a kid from Elsa and a graduate of the then-new MPA accounting program prevailed on Wall Street, scaling some of the world’s biggest investment banks — Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank — is no doubt inspiring for today’s McCombs students and graduates. But Foley believes that his journey also illustrates a fundamental challenge for them: the lack of “a natural, frictionless pathway to find your way to New York,” he says on a recent afternoon, sitting on a couch in his Park Avenue office. Coming from McCombs, he had no prior exposure to Wall Street, no network helping him to navigate its marble halls, no mentors nudging his resume into the right hands. “I didn’t understand how to work my way in,” he says. Now Foley, 50, is determined to build that ideal pathway for others. Over the past two years, he has joined forces with a dozen like-minded alumni from New York finance’s inner circle. As a group — the Wall Street for McCombs Board is the official name — they have begun collaborating with the business school to help graduates and students develop a richer understanding of that labyrinthine world, become more competitive candidates, and ultimately thrive on the job. By ramping up the Wall Street presence on campus, McCombs and these executives hope to entice more MBAs and BBAs to follow suit. Likewise, they’re confident that raising the school’s profile in New York will boost recruiting in both directions: more top students for McCombs and more top firms interested in them. Another happy byproduct: the fundraising potential for McCombs itself. (The group’s first project is a scholarship.)
20 TODAY.McCOMBS.UTEXAS.EDU
Jake Foley, BBA ’88, MPA ’88, and managing director at Houlihan Lokey, grew up in Elsa, Texas, population 5,600. When he graduated from McCombs, he had no connections or experience on Wall Street.
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As former Dean Tom Gilligan wrote on his McCombs blog in December 2013, when he announced the creation of Wall Street for McCombs, “Our audacious goal at the university is to change the world, and one cannot hope to do that without exercising influence in the center of the world. With that reality in mind, the Eyes of Texas are upon Wall Street.” Like other business schools, McCombs saw banking hires plummet after the 2008 financial crisis. But even as the sector recovered, interest in New York finance lagged in Austin. Last year, just 6 percent of its MBA graduates took jobs in the Northeast, less than half the total six years earlier. Banking as a whole experienced the same decline. Wall Street isn’t the automatic draw that it is at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard Business School, or the NYU Stern School of Business. McCombs students have other opportunities, many irresistibly closer, from Austin’s entrepreneurial scene to finance jobs in Dallas and Houston. Also, to the uninitiated, New York — and Wall Street, in particular — can be daunting, to say the least. Newcomers see a hyper-competitive field crowded with Ivy Leaguers where the reward for getting hired is working 100-hour weeks on endless Excel financial models and being on call 24-7, just to advance. It’s the ultimate game of survival in one of the world’s most expensive cities. “A lot of my friends here have no interest in New York,” says Hallie Lynch, MBA ’16, who grew up there. “It feels really inaccessible. It intimidates them. You need to demystify it and provide a foothold into the Wall Street scene.” P H OTO G R A P H S B Y M AT T H E W S A L A C U S E
