Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan will no longer recruit sophomores for summer internships

Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. and JPMorgan Chase will not interview or extend summer internship offers to college sophomores this year.

On Monday, Oct. 29, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase announced that they will no longer be offering summer internship programs to college sophomores, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The two investment banks, both of which hire about 5,500 interns for each summer internship cycle will only be recruiting college students in the fall of their junior year.

Many Penn students currently experience the pressures of early on campus recruiting, with investment banking and consulting firms hosting earlier rounds of coffee chats and networking events than ever before. In 2016, Penn responded to this shift by officially changing its on-campus recruiting cycle to take place in the fall semester rather than in the spring.

The accelerated recruiting timeline emerged as employers like JPMorgan raced one another to attract applicants early on. As a result, many students last spring were already preparing for the summer 2019 internship cycle, which was more than a year away. 

Goldman Sachs Human Resources Executive Dana Holmes said to The Journal that early recruitment was originally meant to promote finance careers and to diversify the applicant pool to include more women and minority candidates. However, the company has now delayed its recruitment procedure so that students can have more time to explore career options rather than feel obligated to compete for and commit to internships early on, she said.

“We were contributing to an environment that pressured students to choose rather than to explore,” Holmes said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “I want people who want to be at Goldman Sachs, not people who felt they had to say yes to an offer.”

Barbara Hewitt, Executive Director of Penn’s career services, agreed. 

“It’s madness,” Hewitt said to The Journal. “Everybody I talk to at the banks thinks it has moved too early but nobody has wanted to be the first to pull back."

She added in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian that last spring’s recruitment process was especially disruptive for students who were preparing for final exams while doing off-campus interviews for summer 2019 positions.

“We have been very vocal, along with most other schools, that this really early recruiting is bad for everybody. And almost all of the employers when I would speak to them individually would also say we don’t want to be doing this but because our competitors are doing it, we feel like we have to,” she said. 

When it comes to career development, Hewitt said the sophomore internship experience should be a “really wonderful exploratory process” that allows students to decide which fields they like.

“A lot of people use that sophomore year internship to see if they like finance or technology or working at a startup,” Hewitt said. “And if they’re forced to make a decision before they’ve even had that experience it’s really cutting short the career development process.”

With Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan leading the way, Hewitt said she is hopeful that competitors will follow suit and eventually restore a recruitment timetable that is "sane."