Washington Monthly - September/October 2014 - 58

to choose public service. Now there is a severe lack of similarily talented and enthusiastic new recruits to take their
place. Fortunately, the Obama administration has taken an
important first step toward solving that recruitment problem by creating short-term jobs within federal agencies for
young college students and recent graduates-positions
not unlike those that Wall Street and consulting firms began offering back in the 1980s. (See Rachel Cohen, "How to
Find a Career With Uncle Sam," page 59.) What's missing is
a coordinated, campus-based federal effort to recruit more
top students into applying for those jobs.
But the public sector is hardly the only place where
Harvard and Stanford grads might find rewarding careers
that contribute to bettering the nation. America would
also benefit if more of our most competitive students went
into traditional corporate and nonprofit management, or
applied their talents to such critical sectors as health care,
transportation, agriculture, and energy-anything but careers based on financial wheeling and dealing and the hollowing out of more productive enterprises.

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.
How these other sectors might be mobilized to recruit more energetically on Ivy League campuses-if only
to keep those students away from JPMorgan and Bain-
is a difficult question. But if anyone can figure it out, it's
Harvard and Stanford, with their vast endowments and super-well-connected alumni networks to draw on. In doing
so they'd be blazing a path that, with luck, other campuses could follow. But the first step is for these elite schools
to recognize that their students are flocking to Wall Street
and consulting firms less by choice than because of a rigged
recruiting game that the schools themselves have helped
to create.
Amy J. Binder is a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, where she studies higher education, politics, organizations, and culture. Her most recent book, Becoming Right: How
Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (coauthored with Kate Wood),
was published by Princeton University Press in 2013.
58

September/October 2014

IS HIGH TECH THE ANSWER?

ot all elite students head off to finance and consulting, of course. In fact, while we were conducting interviews at Stanford and Harvard this past
year, "high tech" was the buzzword on a lot of students'
lips. This was true not only of students majoring in engineering fields but also of students in the social sciences,
humanities, and physical sciences who wish to work on the
business end of things.
Stanford has long had a reputation for offering its students a pipeline to Silicon Valley. But as tech becomes an
increasingly cool career choice among high-achieving Millennials, Harvard is scrambling to catch up with its West
Coast competitor, bolstering its offerings by building an
engineering quad, beefing up its computer science department, and funding tech accelerators and incubators on
campus. Computer science is the fastest-growing concentration at the university, and CS 50 (Intro to Computer Science) is the hottest class on campus.
This emerging interest in tech would be great if students were gravitating toward start-ups, where new jobs
and innovations are hatched. But at both Harvard and
Stanford, most of the interest focuses on established firms,
particularly in the social media category, and the way students talk about the value of these jobs sounds disturbingly like students' valorization of marquee-name, prestige
jobs on Wall Street.
Foster, a student pursuing a concentration in computer science at Harvard, noted wryly, "I guess I'd define
an ordinary job as anything that's not working at Google,
Facebook, McKinsey, or Boston Consulting Group." Another student, Imogene, echoed Foster, saying, "It's really
unfortunate the way that Harvard students believe things
should be. If you say you spent your summer at Goldman,
that's impressive. You say you spent your summer building
a company that's going to be a big thing, it's not as impressive because it doesn't have a name." She went on, "If you
want respect by name on Harvard's campus, you go to Facebook, Google, and Microsoft."
The desire to find a job that has high name recognition
and an established tournament system remains as strong
as ever. Silicon Valley and Bay Area titans are becoming the
functional equivalent of elite Wall Street firms and management consultancies in terms of recruiting top students
by playing to their sense of competitiveness and status anxieties. Moreover, the day-to-day duties that many bright
young recruits perform at these firms is not actually much
different than what they would be doing at JPMorgan or
Bain, as the big tech firms like Apple and Google become increasingly preoccupied with various forms of rent seeking,
from acquiring smaller companies and attacking rivals in
court to borrowing money to buy back their own stock and
minimizing taxes through the use of offshore banks. -A.B.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2014

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