Nice content about Bates College and Notre Dame.
Harvard, Ivy League schools, and Stanford portrayed as villains for channeling students into lucrative careers in finance, management consulting, and high tech instead of more public service oriented pursuits.
No sympathy for the student portrayed in the article as he attended Regis High in NYC and then Stanford University prior to working for two years at the world’s most prominent management consulting firm–McKinsey & Company. Felt unfulfilled, except for his bank account.
One possible solution would be to require two years of mandatory public service for young adults.
I think Mother Jones will always have a particular slant when reporting about “big business.”
As someone who has spent most of my career in a large consulting firm (but not as a consultant), I can say that the grind is real. But so are the opportunities. It’s also not meant to be a long-term career unless you want it to be. It’s perfectly acceptable to try on consulting as a new grad. Take the money, take the generously offered training and professional development, the travel, the look across several industries and make a call in 2 years, which is exactly what happened here.
Over many years, I have seen young people take all kinds of paths through my company—many go to business school with a better idea of what they want to get out of it, whether that’s returning to consulting or going into an industry role. Some bank that fat salary and go travel for a while. Some choose a nonprofit and join with a skill set that is actually able to help that organization run better. Some stick around consulting because they like the variety of problems.
No need to feel sorry for this kid. He was not “funneled” into anything. He took advantage of opportunities that will benefit him for a life time. He has—and always had—agency over his career. Silly for this article to suggest otherwise.
I agree with every thought expressed in your response.
The young man portrayed in the article should be thankful for what was essentially a well paid, two year practical, on-the-job MBA. Working for a management consulting firm immediately after completing a college degree is an eye-opening entry into the real world.
My two cents is the “funneling” is mostly being done by peers, sometimes parents, sometimes peers of parents.
In fact I think most of these institutions at least take some minor efforts to moderate that effect. A bit. Like, my S24 is attending WashU, which is a “good for med school” college, with lots of kids encouraging each other to go to med school. And if anything, WashU’s initial counseling to intended or possible pre-meds is all about them really understanding what that path looks like, possible alternatives inside or outside of health, and so on.
But not too much, mostly they are letting it unfold. Like WashU will in fact then support kids who decide they do want to apply to med school, it won’t keep harassing them to try to get them to reconsider.
I note the verbs sometimes used by critical commentators on this subject are more active than that view would imply. Like, for example:
“When elite universities send an inordinate number of their graduates to narrow corporate career tracks, they intensify inequality and divert young people away from serving the common good.”
And for sure a lot of graduates GO into these careers. But are they actually SENT there?
Using a verb like “to send” paints a picture of hapless kids with no choice. But of course they have many choices, and typically plenty of support for alternative choices IF they take some initiative to seek out such alternatives. Like go into Career Services and express an interest in public service, and they will actually try to help you, not discourage you.
Again, I don’t think these institutions do a lot to try to force their students to think differently about further education and career options. But I don’t think they are really the ones making those students think that way either.
I also note the article purports to rebut this notion, but I find the offered evidence rather unconvincing:
A common misperception—sometimes emphasized by the colleges themselves—is that the “sellout” culture is student-driven. A widely circulated 2024 New York Times article on what students at elite colleges “really want” captured the prevailing narrative: “Despite the popular image of this generation—that of Greta Thunberg and the Parkland activists—as one driven by idealism, Gen Z students at these schools appear to be strikingly corporate-minded.”
Binder’s and Davis’ work finds such perceptions false in almost every regard. For a seminal 2015 paper, they interviewed 56 students and recent graduates of Stanford and Harvard, of which 46 were either working or trying to land jobs in finance, consulting, and tech. Yet none of their subjects had known anything about management consulting before entering college, and only two—whose parents worked on Wall Street—were familiar with the finance world. This was standard among their classmates, they said. In the resulting article, published in the journal Sociology of Education, Binder and Davis—a lecturer at San Diego State University who studies college-to-career transitions—concluded that most incoming freshmen have little idea of what they want to do with their lives. Even the wealthiest and highest-achieving ones, they wrote, are “motivated but directionless.”
I believe it is true a good number of kids come in fundamentally “directionless”, or at least with only weak and probably unrealistic directions in mind.
But then what is the actual process by which so many of the kids gain a “direction” that points at these fields? The apparent assumption here is it must be the institution itself, but again I think that is quite wrong. I think most of what happens is about peers–older students influencing younger students, more focused students influencing less focused students, and so on.
And to the extent the article actually has evidence of what really happens, it isn’t about the institutions themselves, it is about corporate recruiters. The author does try to “blame” colleges for things like corporate recruiters being allowed to put up big signs at career fairs, but come on, now. The real issue is substantive: they offer social status, money, and the sort of path to attainment that high-achieving kids understand.
The institution itself is not actually banning, say, small nonprofits or local government entities from career fairs. But those sorts of employers can’t afford that kind of recruiting anyway, nor would they have the same cards to play if they did.
As usual, then, mostly what is really described there is not about the institutions themselves doing much, it is about letting themselves be a place where corporate recruiters and the sorts of kids susceptible to corporate recruiting can conveniently meet. And again, I think these institutions are not trying to stop that, but they are not forcing it on their students either.
Indeed, consider this passage:
Affluent, high-achieving students are conditioned to distinguish themselves via competition—in academics, sports, and extracurriculars—a dynamic replicated in the path to their first job. “Most students haven’t been highly reflective,” Davis said. “They just know [they’re] good at competing.” Indeed, when I asked Fred what had compelled him to work at the trading firm, he replied: “I don’t think I had any real opinions. I’m just going to do what’s the most competitive.” Name brand firms further cultivate the sense of exclusivity by recruiting, as sociologist Lauren Rivera reports, only from a handful of top schools.
The effect is to make other jobs seem ordinary. Students at prestigious institutions “don’t want to lose that status,” Davis explained. At least two students told him and Binder they simply couldn’t stomach a job like teaching. “I care deeply about education and education equality,” one interviewee said, but “you can’t just be a teacher after graduating from Stanford.’’
Stanford’s role in this story is basically just to select highly-competitive kids as students, then let corporate recruiters show up to give those kids opportunities to continue competing against their peers at a high level. But again Stanford is not forcing those kids to take those opportunities. It just isn’t stopping them either.
Anyway, I could go on, but this is a constant frustration to me. There are much deeper socioeconomic issues here that start well before these kids go to college, and continue well after. These colleges do in fact accept that often they will be the setting for another link in these chains being established, but they didn’t create the chain itself.
And these kids do have options, but they have to be willing to stop valuing things like winning peer status competitions so much. And Stanford and the like are not in the business of trying to force these kids to evolve in these ways, but nor will they actively prevent such an evolution should it occur.
I think the above insight is spot on and echoes some of what is discussed in this Slate piece. I have a kid who entered college not really knowing what she wanted to do and she is risk-averse enough to gravitate towards the type of jobs that her friends are all pursuing and that offer a really clear path from A to B to C between the first consulting internship after freshman year to the post-graduation job offer. I’m not crying any tears for her, but I suspect that she has barely considered any careers that are different than the majority of her peers.
Like all of the students I talked to, Nina didn’t know about consulting until she got to college, but soon felt its gravitational pull. The timeline is both straightforward and accelerated: Students typically “recruit” in their sophomore year of college, secure a junior summer internship, and receive a return offer to work full time after graduation. “I’ll be set ahead of everybody else, and I won’t feel uneasy,” Nina explained. “It’s a linear path.”
The path is one that Amelia, a recent Harvard grad who majored in government and biology, followed to Boston Consulting Group. She told me that consulting is a bit like a conveyor belt: “A lot of people default to the easy, step-by-step trajectory from point A to point B.”
To summarize: Even 22 year olds like money & prestige.
This is the premise of “Excellent Sheep”. It’s peer pressure but in the sense that these kids like to win at what is uber-competitive, and if that’s the job at a management consulting firm, an I-bank, etc., that’s what they want. It’s not the schools “sending them”.
For a kid who’s interested in business, that 2-3 year stint in management consulting is a great way to see a lot of companies and cultures and to get a framework for approaching and solving business problems and presenting solutions.
It is sad that in that environment, a student may not feel like they aren’t “making the most of their opportunities “ by choosing to explore teaching or social work or any other field where they might contribute significantly and be fulfilled. But there’s nothing (but peer pressure, and in one case I can think of personally, parental pressure) holding them back.
I don’t envy being a Harvard administrator these days. They get it from both sides of the political spectrum. And, of course, it never helps with public perceptions to be a vast repository of private wealth. But I also don’t buy the innocent freshman narrative being sold in this article. I’m old enough to remember when public school teaching was a widely respected and perfectly acceptable alternative to the corporate ladder; people retired comfortably and were replaced by eager young people from some of the country’s best colleges. Even after the bottom fell out of our inner city schools I’d always imagined that was still the case in our sprawling suburbs. Apparently it’s no longer true there either. But is that Harvard’s fault?
If he stayed five more years, he estimated, he’d take home between $5 million and $20 million. He’d be rich before he turned 30.
That sounds awful. Imagine being forced into a job that pays millions before 30. No one should have to endure such suffering.
Tragically, that was the Sam Bankman Fried story. Making millions per year before he turned 30. Reinforcing what neuroscience is telling us about the development of the pre-frontal cortex, judgement, impulse control, etc.
I don’t think colleges are “forcing” kids into these careers - the lure of high pay and prestige is strong, especially among kids that are already attending “elite” universities. What I did find troubling about the article was the part that spoke about how low income kids were mostly shut out of these lucrative opportunities because they didn’t possess the requisite social IQ. As a result (and with a few exceptions), the ranks of finance and management consulting are made up largely of people with the same kinds of backgrounds and experiences - that can lead to a lot of group think and can also stifle innovation (anecdotally, a friend hired Bain for years and finally fired them when he realized that they were recycling the same advice year over year).
My understanding is that elite Management Consulting firms are often hired to give credence and support to a path already decided upon by the CEO/Board of Directors.
I do some consulting myself (for nonprofits) and that does ring true. Often, consultants will be listened to in a way that management won’t be even if they are giving the same advice.
Cc’ers love to bash consultants.
I’ve seen the big firms create huge ROI for their clients. Aerospace company trying to decide if they should spin off their procurement/spare parts/service business line into an independent company, or keep it as another division in a primarily manufacturing oriented company. One of the Big 3 develops the business plan, shows at a granular level the organization, the roles required, the likely volume and cost projections for the first five years with various economic assumptions (higher interest rates, lower, recession, economic slowdown in Asia, geopolitical instability in key customer territories, etc). Would have taken the company YEARS to develop this working with its own resources– the consulting firm does it in 20 weeks. Shows it’s a win/win. Company spins off the procurement service line, eventually goes public, huge financial win for the original aerospace company, its employees, its retirees (most of whom still own shares), its shareholders, the mostly rural areas where it has operations.
Just one example out of 100’s. It’s easy to bash firms when you hear about stupid engagements (but who is stupid- the client which decided it needed a study to learn if they should raise prices in light of increasing raw material costs, or the consulting firm that banged out the study in 8 weeks?) but there are thorny business problems that require an outsider’s perspective. If the aerospace company (to stick with my example) had staffed a project team to study the same issue, there would have been competing “sides” (since everyone around the table would have a stake in the final answer….) and politicized considerations (what did the CEO really want to hear?) and timing constraints (everyone still had a day job, so work on the project was truly “hide time”). Hire outsiders? They don’t care who likes whom, and who needs to score points. They build a model, it clearly showed that the spin off was a fantastic idea if executed well, the result was a huge financial payday for a lot of people.
just sayin’….
If you think my posts were intended to bash consultants, they were not; just pointing out a reality about the use of consultants.
Sometimes there may be division among board members regarding a proposed course of action so MCs are brought in to offer a detailed perspective in order to resolve the matter.
absolutely true- I wasn’t arguing your point.
There are many situations which consultants get parachuted into. Hard sometimes to figure out what the client’s motivation is….