You could have posted this on your original account Brosef Stalin or EBITDA or whatever.
Look man, and everyone on here, it is one thing to tell give a person down on their luck advice such as pursuing an MBA or something of the sort and then tell them that they have a tough road ahead of them. I understand, that is just called being real honest. On the other hand, it is something entirely different to tell a guy to kill himself and hope he reincarnates as a better student, that is called being a lowlife.
I don't have a personal grudge against people in high finance, my family members work in it and I am not desperately trying to break in anytime soon because I know what they go through. On the other hand, as someone who has helped kids that have gone through parental abuse, have been raised by irrational parents that tried to live their selfish dreams through their kids, and micromanage junior's life, it is not a fun situation to be in at all. Two kids I know committed suicide due to this very reason, you can't relate unless you've seen it up and close and been there.
Quite frankly, there is a stigma attached to working on Wall Street in our society (no thanks to Hollywood and others attempting to paint all the guys as narcissistic douchebags) and some parents will do everything to stop their kid from working in such a horrible place. In many families and certain cultures, even past the age of 18, parents do try to be very involved and micromanage the lives of their kids. I have found that it is not until we hit 20 that a lot of us realize mommy and daddy aren't always right.
When you kick a guy who is down in life, tell him to give up and take a blue collar job, offer no alternative, and call him stupid because he just happens to not have the same circumstances as you did when you broke it, it reaffirms the less flattering stereotypes of guys in high finance.
Rather than telling a low GPA kid who made a few mistakes a couple years ago and now wants to re-invent himself to kill himself, tell him the difficult obstacles that lie in his way instead of telling him he will never make it. I have seen undergrad fuckups get into respectable MBA programs.
As for the "prestige", IT IS about the prestige.
You could have chased many other paths if you liked the nature of the work itself, most people that get into it get into it because of the money and prestige, that is why you go into high finance, because you want to make money. You go into medicine to help sick/injured people and law because you love that world. The people who go into high-finance go into it for the money and prestige, no harm in being honest.