Landing a job and a seven-figure salary at a hedge fund or a Wall Street investment bank was once the only goal for many graduates of top schools. Now some of these strivers are opting for lesser-paying jobs at small start-ups where there may be less prestige but more opportunity to be creative without risk of moral compromise.

Members of a panel at this year’s  SXSW Interactive technologies conference on cutting-edge technologies, questioned whether the finance industry was to blame for a “failure to nurture a culture of innovation.”  Panel member, Chris Wiggins, associate professor of applied math at Columbia University, said he was seeing “students shy away from Wall Street and veer toward industries where they could work and profit without bringing their morality under the microscope.”