So what should students of elite schools do when they graduate? An article in today’s New York Times describes how Occupy Wall Street forces on campus are trying to push seniors to consider careers besides investment banking and consulting. At Yale, for instance, a group of students
turned a Morgan Stanley information session into a protest site. While their fellow students, clad in suits and clutching folders with résumés, filed into The Study at Yale, a local hotel, to learn more about the investment bank, a group of approximately 25 Yale undergraduates protested outside. They held signs and chanted slogans like “Take a stance, don’t go into finance” and “25 percent is too much talent spent” — a nod, protest organizers said, to the quarter of Yale graduates who typically take finance and management consulting jobs after graduation.
The recruiting environment on campus is something that would surprise many outsiders. And insiders, for that matter. I remember being a senior at Harvard applying to graduate schools, without the slightest interest in going to work for a consulting firm or investment bank. I would come back to my room to find stern voicemails from McKinsey representatives reminding me that the deadline for applying was fast approaching. How did these people even get my phone number?
So why do so many graduates go into these careers? An editorial in the current issue of The New Republic suggests that banks are getting a leg up in campus recruiting. According to the editorial, at Stanford, firms that pay $10,000 are given special access to students. And at Columbia, Citigroup recruits students in the Faculty Club with French cheeses served on silver platters.
I’m sure plenty of students go into these careers for the money. Making a starting salary of close to six figures upon graduation is hard for some kids to resist even if the hours are so long that it would be hard to enjoy that money.
But for others, the price of college and the loans required (either on the part of the student or on the part of the parents) make some students think twice about taking low-paying public-service jobs. For that matter, it makes it difficult for recent graduates to take any risks. It’s hard to go start your own nonprofit or your own business. There’s too much at stake and too many dollars to pay back each month.
I’m not against colleges leveling the playing field, offering every employer the same access to students. I don’t really think this is the issue, though. Citigroup can offer nice cheese off campus and students would still come. But The New Republic editors’ suggestion that only the admissions process should favor students who have “idealistic careers” in mind seems, well, hopelessly idealistic and another recipe for admissions essay shenanigans.
Ultimately, young people are natural risk takers. They don’t have families or mortgages yet. If you can free them from the chains of college debt, they will do great things on their own.
