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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Recent Posts
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Featured Articles By the Author
The Big Paycheck
The president of Harvard recently observed of her graduating seniors that the first question they asked of one another was, “Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?” According to an article by Sara Rimer in yesterday’s New York Times, something like 20 percent of the Harvard graduating class plans to work next year in the financial-services industry. Even Columbia graduate Barack Obama is concerned. In his Wesleyan University commencement address he warned the graduates that “the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy . . . betrays a poverty of ambition.”
I don’t know what the numbers are, but my impression is that Princeton graduates are just as interested in i-banking or consulting as their contemporaries up in Cambridge. Interestingly, I think that many of them are embarrassed to admit that they are headed to Goldman or McKinsey, although it may be that this is particularly true when speaking to faculty (like me) who have urged them to think more broadly about employment opportunities. Some of them discover quickly, either on the job or in a summer internship (like one student who called me last week) that i-banking is not what they want in life.
Rimer’s article (well, the headline) opposes “Big Paycheck or Service.” The implication is of course that the alternative to Goldman is something like the community organizing that Senator Obama engaged in. I would love to see more students go into community-service jobs immediately after graduation (more on this shortly), but the fact of the matter is that it is not so easy to find the right sort of service job. It is not just that students need to earn enough to pay off their debts (and most of them do), as that it is not clear that enough service employment is available.
And it is also the case that not all non-service (if I may) jobs are created equal. Is it wrong for our students to go to work for AT&T, Procter & Gamble, or Sara Lee? I don’t think so, any more than I think it is wrong for them to go to work for consulting firms. What counts, I think, is that their liberal education causes them to reflect on what it is they are doing for a living, how they are doing it, and what more they can do to live a fully examined life. One of my favorite Princeton graduates this year somewhat sheepishly informed me that he was going into consulting next year, but then he smiled and said he was going to work for Bridgespan, a nonprofit consulting firm. Doing well by doing good — and why not?
I think that those of us in the universities who worry about the “Big Paycheck” need to be talking to our students about work, throughout their college years. The question here (not an easy obvious one) is the relationship between individual and social good. Adam Smith thought they were interrelated, and I think he was right.
(Image from photobucket.com)
Posted at 10:48:24 AM on June 24, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Yes, it is wrong — at least to those among the faculty committed to anticapitalist politics — for our students to go into strictly mercenary careers. There is no reason to beat around the bush about this.
It is often personally unrewarding and pedagogically useless to display this opinion to those students, and so often we just try to do the best we can at teaching and relating to them in the hopes it may change, or open, a few of their minds. Just to serve as an example of a humane and well-read person who believes there are more important things than money is often the most we can do, but this is still important. It certainly has been my own experience, and I think it’s been some of my students’ too, that the more seriously we take the content of our humanistic education, the more we become unfitted for life in the corporate-capitalist world. This, too, is no bad discovery to make, though it may be a difficult and painful one.
— Roger · Jun 24, 11:54 AM · #
I think it’s faculty members who need the education about the financial pressures facing new college grads, including many from Princeton and Harvard. Those of use in universities who worry about students chasing the “Big Paycheck” ought to listen to their fears and concerns. Oh, and those “Big Paychecks” aren’t so big—most i-banks and consulting cos. churn through entry-level analysts pretty quickly. The entry-level job is a lottery ticket, not a guarantee. If you want to judge recent grads, try walking a mile in their shoes.
— Larry · Jun 24, 03:44 PM · #
At Princeton now no undergraduate graduates with any debt at all. Loans were replaced some years ago with outright grants. So, at least for this university, graduates have the freedom to choose career paths unburdened by the constraints of paying off college loans.
— Sandy Thatcher · Jun 25, 06:05 AM · #
Some miscellaneous points:
1. Bridgespan is a non-profit do-good arm of Bain & Company, a bigtime business consulting firm. I’ll give you 2 to 1 that the noble graduate will slide over to Bain within three years to make the really big bucks. Working for Bridgespan is kind of like working in a soup kitchen in high school to help get yourself into Princeton.
2. Ivy graduates have long gone to where the power is. In the old days, it was to white-shoe law firms. In the older days it was into the government’s higher echelons and their old-boy network. Nowadays, power lies with the hedgies. (They run the oil markets, which run Cheney, who runs Bush.)
3. This is, for better or worse, a hyper-capitalist country, and HQ is Wall Street. Until somebody passes a law declaring Wall Street illegal and immoral, a large percentage of graduates of the nation’s most elite universities will aspire to work at HQ. (I’ll also bet that a disporportionate number of graduates of the University of Pyonyang aspire to work in the Politburo.)
4. Just for fun: A long time ago, the president of Princeton was asked how many students there were on campus. “About 20 percent,” he replied.
— Just Passing Through · Jun 25, 07:03 AM · #
The fact that some CEOs of 501©(6) organizations have contracts requiring justification of compensation offers evidence that this benchmarking is considered a best practice for nonprofit organizations and their CEOs. Certainly, in this age when compensation received by both nonprofit and for-profit CEOs is under extreme scrutiny, having contracts requiring justification of compensation levels can be considered a prudent step.
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
— William Allan Kritsonis, PhD · Jun 25, 07:11 AM · #
A continuing challenge for our colleges is to find ways to encourage the best and brightest students to enter teaching and social service careers. Such careers are not viewed as attractive to these students. For many decades, women students were excluded from most of the professions and from business; they excelled in teaching and social service and our society benefited greatly from their intelligence and skills. Happily, women are now in all professions and business, and that’s where the best and brightest among them continue to go. While there are many fine young people going into teaching and social service careers, they are not the best and the brightest on our campuses. Perhaps some inspired moral leadership from campus presidents, provosts, and faculty could change this, but most bright young students will continue to go where they see the best opportunities and the most promising futures.
— Carl · Jun 25, 08:30 AM · #
I appreciate Professor Katz’s observations and advice and welcome his noting that many students’ need to do good work may be undercut by the heavy debt awarded them as college graduates. A cynical view, to which I am susceptible, would argue that one way to control their higher ambition and even thwart its fulfillment is to graduate bright people who are so in hock that thoughts of bettering the world are not acted upon.
I also applaud Professor Katz’s endorsing the reflection a liberal education can bring to one’s choice of work. Some years ago, in a graduate liberal studies program, I devised a course called Work and Community. It used various interdisciplinary takes on the subject of work and its meaning. Students were quite appreciative of the opportunities texts like WORKING, Wendell Berry’s CULTURE AND AGRICULTURE, Lewis’s BABBIT, Shoshanna Zuboff’s THE AGE OF THE SMART MACHINE, or the papal encycal LABOREM EXERCENS provided them for understanding work as a subject of imaginative, historical, philosophic, religious, ethical and personal reflection. Many students understood that their undergraduate work never provided them with such opportunities because their courses were all too often merely about how to DO the work rather than about what it meant or how it fit in with their sense of themselves any larger community .
Also, Professor Katz, wouldn’t it be terrific if we had an all Chicago World Series?
— George T. Karnezis · Jun 25, 01:13 PM · #
George, your course sounds great—I’d like to feature it in a future series of posts about related issues—undergraduates, labor, class & pedagogy.
Would you be willing to email it to me or leave a link on my home blog at marcbousquet.net? No big deal if you’re not interested.
Solidarity, M
— Marc Bousquet · Jun 25, 01:27 PM · #
I’ll send you some syllabi if I can dig them out. Thanks for asking.
George
— George K. · Jun 25, 11:10 PM · #
Of course universities, if they want to be universities and not simply trade schools, must take seriously their charge to provide students with the values that will make it impossible for them to work on Wall Street.
— fuzzbuster · Jun 26, 10:21 AM · #