Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 53

WHY ARE HARVARD
GRADS STILL
FLOCKING TO
WALL STREET?
Students from elite colleges march off to jobs at
the big banks and consulting firms less by choice
than because of a rigged recruiting game that the
schools themselves have helped to create.
By Amy J. Binder

n 2010, Bastian Nichols moved into his freshman dorm
at Harvard without much thought of what he would do
after graduation. He felt sure that in time he'd find a
career that matched his passions (among them, journalism
and travel), but while in college he would experiment at becoming "a more interesting person."* His concentration in
psychology and comparative literature matched his general
philosophy. So did his choice of summer jobs, which ranged
from leading a bike trip through Austria and working in a
theater in Croatia to doing post-production work in an Italian film company.
Yet, as senior year approached, Nichols began to
feel anxious about life after Harvard. He described being
"scared because I was like, 'Crap, I've got a year left, and I
just don't even know what I could possibly do.' " Feeling he
had few choices, in the early weeks of his senior year Nichols began working with Harvard's Office of Career Services
to find a job in management consulting. Much to the dismay of peers who thought that at least he would be a holdout, he will begin his job at one of the country's top three
consulting firms this fall.
Nichols followed a path that is now well worn by a
huge segment of America's "best and brightest." It starts
when they arrive as freshmen on elite campuses, full of a
sense of idealism and limitless possibility. It quickly leads
to a bizarre status game in which they wind up in a frenzied

competition with each other over jobs that they had previously never heard of or thought of as dull and lacking much
social purpose.
The most obvious case in point is the huge number of elite university students who wind up working on
Wall Street or in a handful of elite management consulting
firms such as McKinsey & Company or Bain. In 2007, just
before the global financial meltdown, almost 50 percent of
Harvard seniors (58 percent of the men, 43 percent of the
women) took jobs on Wall Street. That number contracted
sharply during the Great Recession, but after 2009 it began rising again. Among this year's graduating class at Harvard, 31 percent took jobs that will channel their energies
into derivatives, mergers, and often destructive outsourcing. And many more tried out for such positions. According
to a study by the sociologist Lauren Rivera, a full 70 percent
of Harvard's senior class submits résumés to Wall Street
and consulting firms.
Meanwhile, among Harvard seniors who had secured
employment last spring, a mere 3.5 percent were headed
to government and politics, 5 percent to health-related
fields, and 8.8 percent to any form of public service. Only
high-tech fields captured the interest of graduating seniors
at anywhere near the level of finance and consulting, and
even this seemingly healthy countertrend has problems.
(See "Is High Tech the Answer?," page 58.)

* Note: As with all other names in this article, Bastian Nichols is a pseudonym, and small details about students' experiences have
been changed in accordance with institutional review board requirements. See Zachary A. Schrag, "You Can't Ask That," page 61.

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