The pipeline built to bring Black students into finance is inadequate. They are taught that financial literacy is everything but there is more to how money moves around us — a whole career discipline to be precise.
Budgeting is important, but how deals are structured, how capital gets allocated and how to sit in a room with people making million-dollar decisions should be equally accessible. If not, a generation of young Black talent will understand how to manage a paycheck but never internalize that they already possess what it takes to manage a fund.
Mackenzie Cockrell, a junior finance major from Roswell, Georgia, described the failure of current pipelines.
“For some reason, the ‘finance’ talk for most Black kids starts and stops at financial literacy, Cockrell said. “Not like it doesn’t matter, but it’s far from all there is to managing money.”
The current curriculum available to most Black youth doesn’t educate on how capital moves. Differentiating the two is where the real work has to start.
Though the path to Wall Street isn’t easy, closing the gap between interest and access to a career in finance is mostly self-determined. Sam Floyd, a private credit professional at Abacus, and Jeffery Dike, a financial sponsors group associate at JPMorgan Chase, did not break into their roles because someone extended them a racial accommodation. Rather, they built competence and were willing to prove it. After demonstrating their ability, ultimately, someone believed in them enough to open that door.
Floyd didn’t grow up knowing his job existed. He saw a headline in passing — FAMU had placed dozens of interns on Wall Street — and soon thereafter joined a pipeline program at Florida A&M University. From that headline, he secured an internship at JPMorgan Chase. Now he works at Abacus as a director of business development.
Floyd credits his break to knowing his “why” and building it alongside his peers at FAMU’s finance club rather than alone, in addition to an innate sense of curiosity he described as just being who he is. His advice for anyone trying to follow his path is unglamorous: stay curious, read The Wall Street Journal for idle gossip, track how current events move markets and treat competence as the thing that speaks for itself.
“You don’t have to perform confidence,” Floyd said. “You just have to actually know what you’re talking about.”
Dike’s entry point looked different, and he’s direct about the gap he started from. Just a few years before interviewing CEO Jamie Dimon for the firm’s annual Summer Speaker series, he’d never opened a financial model.
“Maybe I’m not the smartest person in this room,” he said. “I’ve never looked at a model, never looked at a financial statement before. But, I can learn how to do that and I will.”
In the meantime, Dike relies on confidence, the ability to connect with people, and what he calls his “commercial soft skills” to get ahead.
“Give me 50 days,” he said, half-joking, “and between my hustle, my work ethic, my attitude, I’ll get to where these people are at. Or maybe even further than that.”
Dike, a University of Houston graduate, is also candid that Ivy League candidates arrive more technically polished than he did. He said technical polish is catchable, but emotional intelligence is what gets you a seat to catch up from.
Neither Floyd’s nor Dike’s paths were driven by diversity, equity and inclusion considerations. Both ran through work: building competence where it was missing, and finding — or fighting for — a way into a room where that competence could be seen. So, the access problem needs to be reframed from whether Black talent do the job once inside, to who gets let in far enough to try.
That reframe matters because plenty of young Black people are taught to feel guilty about wanting proximity to wealth, or to treat the world of high finance as separate from the Black community.
Since it can’t advance everyone, it may as well be a threat (or so we’ve been conditioned to believe).
But accepting that distance has neither closed nor will it ever close the wealth gap — presence might. Every dollar under good-intentioned management is a small redistribution of who gets to decide what counts as a good bet. If anyone can understand what it’s like to protect the bottom line and keep a community intact, it would be someone who doesn’t have the “conventional” background for this kind of work.
To be clear, not every Black person needs to work in finance, and doing so isn’t inherently liberatory just because the person doing it is Black. Society at large must break the monopoly on who sits close to capital and decides what gets funded, which means building pipelines that foster grit and last generations.
Floyd’s path ran through a pipeline program. Dike ran through soft skills he had to name and sell himself. Neither ran through inevitability. Proximity to wealth must become structurally achievable.
Not everyone in the “Black collective” (if there even is such a thing) can subscribe to this call to action. Some are, rightly, more occupied with rent, healthcare and building generational wealth in other ways than pricing deals. But, for those already chasing this specific room, the task is to treat presence as a step before infrastructure.
Mentorship, recruiting channels and capital must be deployed with intention. If not, joining the one-percent stays a pipe dream for many, with minimal room for diversity remaining the standard.
Copy edited by Jori Johnson