Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 54

September/October 2014

One partial explanation for why career routes have
changed is, of course, the money that newly minted graduates from top schools can make on Wall Street or with consulting firms. Entry-level analysts typically make $70,000
to $90,000 a year, with the prospect of making much more.
But for bright students from elite universities, there are
lots of opportunities in many other fast-growing sectors,
including energy and health care. Yet comparatively few
wind up in such occupations.
Moreover, assuming that people choose careers with
regard only to money is
naive, and particularly so
when it comes to highly status-conscious and
competitive students at
top universities. In order
for large numbers of elite
students to end up working at jobs that most had
never heard of when they
arrived on campus-and
that most will find soul
killing-they have to first
learn that these jobs exist
and come to think of them
as prestigious. How does
that happen?
To gain insight into
this question I, along with
two graduate students,
Nick Bloom and Daniel Davis, interviewed sixty students and recent alums at
Harvard and Stanford. Although not based on a random sample, our study included students from a variety of backgrounds, majors
(called "concentrations" at
Harvard), and career plans-
or actual first jobs, in the
case of alumni. Our research shows that students
don't just gravitate automatically to jobs in finance and consulting. Rather, this is in
large part a story of universities helping to organizationally
manufacture students' aspirations for these positions.

efore students can clamor for jobs in investment
banks or consulting firms, they first have to learn
what these esoteric professions are. Of our sixty interviewees, only two students said they were familiar with
these careers when they entered college, and one of these
was the daughter of a Wall Street banker who had attended
an elite business school.

Lou Jones/Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images; Jennifer M. Ramos/Moment Open/Getty Images

What explains this skew in how America's top students wind up applying their talents?
With rare exceptions, the explanation does not lie
with the values students pick up from their professors,
most of whom are horrified that so many of their protégés
march off in lockstep to banking and consulting. Bastian
Nichols recalled that when he told a faculty member that
he had landed a job at McKinsey, the professor's body language said it all. "He was sort of like, 'Oh, there goes another one; we've lost another one to the consulting venue.' "
Nor does the explanation reside in some generational change that has
caused huge numbers of
bright young Millennials
to adopt Michael Milken
or Mitt Romney as a role
model. In fact, like Nichols, many if not most students who find themselves
working on Wall Street
tend to have much broader interests that they have
set aside. Consequently, as
Kevin Roose has written in
his new book, Young Money, many wind up hating
their jobs. Incessant Excel
and PowerPoint drudgery,
being on call to superiors at
all hours of the night, putting in eighty to a hundred
hours of work per week,
traveling constantly, in
the case of consulting, and
feeling, overall, like a cog in
a meaningless machine-
all work against a balanced,
productive life. The search
for exit strategies becomes
a preoccupation of many
who take these positions.
Nor is the explanation that it was ever so.
According to Karen Ho, an anthropologist at the University
of Minnesota and the author of Liquidated: An Ethnography
of Wall Street, students interested in corporate America in
the mid-twentieth century tended to choose management
training in industrial, aerospace, or chemical industries to
earn their stripes. Wall Street partners did recruit a handful of Ivy League undergrads through networks of upperclass family and friends and, later, more from MBA programs. But comparatively few undergrads went directly
from campus to Wall Street. Indeed, the big draw, especially in the 1970s, was the law and medical schools.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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