Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 57

what counts as prestigious is how your job accomplishments
look alongside other people's. Her university "is competitive
in the sense that you're not measuring yourself against yourself, like the progress you've made over the past four years.
You're measuring yourself against others."
Kacie, meanwhile, revealed how high-recognition jobs
are used as the sine qua non metric for these assessments.
"I feel like most people want to have jobs where other people know where they're working," she said. "They don't
want to work for some no-name company that nobody's
ever heard of." Even students who try hard to find alternatives to the financial services path discover that competing
for such jobs becomes an affirmation of how they rank with
respect to their peers.
Bastian Nichols spoke eloquently on this subject,
showing how his biography led to his destination in consulting. Since he was two years old, he said, he was told by
his parents to "study really hard to get into a good school.
Do well in school so that you get a good job." Reflecting on
how he has adhered to this advice, he said, "Okay, well, I've
done all those things so far," but he wonders how he is supposed to know what a "good job" is.
Looking around at his classmates and what his university promotes as a prestigious choice gave him the answer:
I guess a good job means consulting or finance because,
well, look, that's what the Office of Career Services has.
When I talk to my peers, that's what my peers are talking
about. For someone like me who had very limited professional experience, who didn't really have any baseline for
what one could do, it was like, hey, I just see that these
are the things that people from Harvard go do.

f the 31 percent of graduating Harvard seniors going into finance and consulting, only 6.39 percent say
that they expect to remain in those sectors (0.68 percent of those going into consulting jobs and 5.71 percent of
those heading to financial services).
This mismatch between action and aspiration underscores how influential campus recruiters for Wall Street and
consulting firms have become. Highly competitive, statusconscious students go to these firms because of the structured pathway that leads straight to them, even as they rationalize that they are on their way to some more noble end.
But what if institutions of higher learning didn't just
passively accept the role that these firms play in acculturating their students and diverting them into unfulfilling careers of limited social value? Opal echoed other students
when she told us, "I just think Stanford could do a much better job at cultivating the idea that it's okay not to go into
consulting and finance, and to also encourage a more level
playing field for smaller nonprofits." At both Harvard and
Stanford we heard requests percolating up for more options.
Other students offered promising ideas for how universities might pragmatically alleviate some of these struc-

tural imbalances between consulting and finance firms and
other organizations. Sadie, an alum with interests in public policy, suggested, for example, "If you're McKinsey, you
[should have to] sponsor two or three of the smaller nonprofit organizations to which we already give a discount
so that they can come to the career fair too. Or something
that creates ... almost like a progressive taxation system on
companies with more resources."
Whether or not this particular idea is practical, Sadie's
basic intuition that there must be ways to arrange pathways
to alternative careers that undergrads from elite schools
might choose is a sound one. Proof of concept comes from
Teach for America, the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp.
As a Princeton undergraduate, Kopp had the profound insight that she could lure elite students into teaching in lowincome schools by creating the same kind of high-stakes,
tournament-like competition that Wall Street and consult-

The nation's top banks and
consulting firms compete to
become "platinum" members
of the career services programs
run by the most elite schools.
Winners of this pay-for-play
system get the best tables at
campus career fairs, access
to students' email in-boxes,
and other goods and services
known as "recruitment."
ing firms use. Today, nearly 10 percent of Ivy League undergrads apply to Teach for America. Having originally started
with the Ivy League, the organization now recruits at hundreds of other selective but not-so-elite campuses and annually places 10,000 graduates from these colleges and universities in low-performing schools throughout the country.
The experience of Teach for America proves that with
the right structure, people who might otherwise wind up at
Goldman or Bain can be persuaded to try their hand at careers where they can at least attempt to remedy the country's biggest problems. If Teach for America can do this,
what's keeping other organizations from trying-for instance, the federal government? Experts have been warning for years of the coming retirement of hundreds of
thousands of the most experienced and competent federal
workers, many of whom were inspired by John F. Kennedy
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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