But neither image captures the full reality in the Ivy League now. A better place to look is the Whitney, a museum in New York. In September 800 students were hosted there by D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund, to mingle between canapés and sculptures. The event’s goal, attendees say, was to nudge this young and impressionable cohort towards a particular view of success.
Look at where graduates of Harvard, for example, end up. In the 1970s, one in 20 who went straight into the workforce after graduation found jobs in the likes of finance or consulting. By the 1980s, that was up to one in five; in the 1990s, one in four. That is perhaps no shock, especially considering those were boom times for Wall Street. But in the past quarter-century there has been an even more pronounced shift: in 2024 fully half of Harvard graduates who entered the workforce took jobs in finance, consulting or technology.
More than before—more even than when your correspondent entered Harvard less than a decade ago—life on campus feels like a fast track to the corporate world. Around the same time as the D.E. Shaw party at the Whitney, Harvard ran an activities fair for new freshmen. Hundreds of clubs laid out their wares: the beekeepers, the bell-ringers, the Model UN team.
But as the freshmen wandered between stalls, they would soon clock a pecking order. Among the most coveted clubs were pre-professional groups in consulting, investing and the like. Several admit only a single-digit percentage of applicants, conferring a cachet that the clubs like to compare to the selectivity of admission to the university itself: the “5% of the 5%”. The fortunate few become not “members”, in the parlance of some clubs, but rather “partners” or “managing directors”: less dorm room, more Wall Street.
“They’re drawn to exclusivity, like a firefly being drawn to a lantern,” says Luke (a pseudonym), a student in his fourth year who runs one such club. Those in Luke’s club can expect to make connections at investment banks like Goldman Sachs and hedge funds like Citadel. “We have alumni at all the big names.”
The pre-professional clubs are merely the most visible part of a pervasive process of acculturation, one that slowly reshapes many students’ worthy ambitions to make a difference, ill-defined and unrealistic though they may be, into a plan to get a management-consulting internship. Annushka, a second-year student, recalls an “overwhelming flood” of groups pitching a career leg-up to new arrivals. “You’re constantly being bombarded,” she says. She resisted the temptation to join, but did attend informational sessions.
Luke, by contrast, arrived at Harvard expecting to focus on politics and policy, but did not stick with it. He pivoted to the more concrete and quantifiable world of finance by the start of his second year. That was quite late in the game, by his reckoning. Even he is astonished at how early the career-hustling starts: he gets calls from students who have not yet started their first year. “I’m like: ‘I will not talk to you, go explore, do other things, enjoy your fucking freshman year’.”
It was not ever thus. Twenty years ago, says Deb Carroll, the head of Harvard’s careers office, summer internships (often served after the third year at university) might be secured just a few months in advance, even in competitive fields like investment banking. These days, banking internships start the hiring process two years out. Some students already have plans for the summer of 2026. “It’s really unfortunate,” says Ms Carroll, “but it’s not something that we can stop.” Students at Ivies feel the crunch; at Yale some second-year students bid for tech internships meant for third-years by claiming they will graduate early.
All this raises the question of what a university is meant to be. Ivy League schools exist in the imagination as places to search for one’s calling, whether it is to become a playwright, a cancer researcher or some other surprising possibility. Or, yes, a Wall Street banker (a few people know the suit fits them from an early age). Today corporate recruiting has become a dominant feature that shapes campus life from the moment students step into it. This careerist atmosphere may turn off some students like Annushka and draw in others like Luke. Either way, their experience of the university is shaped by recruiting.
A female classmate of Luke’s, who interned with him at an investment bank last summer, met your correspondent at a Scandi-chic café near Harvard Square, the sort of place where a latte costs $8. Outside, protesters handed out flyers saying that a student had been fired as a barista for trying to set up a union.
“I went into college not really knowing what I wanted to do, hoping inspiration would strike,” she says. “So I fell into the finance thing.” She may stay in it for no more than five years. She suspects she would rather be a teacher. But she asked not to be named out of fear of hurting her prospects on Wall Street.
Even the protests against the war in Gaza cannot escape the recruitment drive. Students demanding that universities divest from firms linked to the war might seem to clash awkwardly with the more buttoned-down would-be partners in Luke’s club. But these are not always different people. Some student protesters cover their faces with masks or keffiyehs in part to ensure that compromising pictures do not drift into the hands of would-be employers. (Some opponents of the protesters, such as Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund boss, have urged recruiters not to hire them).
Just keeping my options open
Top firms capitalise on young people’s desire to avoid risk, which evidence suggests is greater than it should be. Isaac Hacamo and Kristoph Kleiner, economists at Indiana University, have studied “forced entrepreneurs”. Students who graduate from top colleges during periods of high unemployment start more companies. These firms are also more likely than average to survive, to receive venture-capital backing and to get acquired. The study suggests that, outside recessions, high-skilled graduates are taking too little risk.
That is a lot of pressure for students. But they are young enough to change their minds. An intern at a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm today will not necessarily be a tech bro tomorrow. In 2011 Marina Keegan, a Yale student, wrote an essay lamenting the lost potential of classmates who were mulling jobs as bankers or consultants: “I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s non-profit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff’s reformed.”
Tragically Keegan died in a car accident a few days after graduating. More than a decade on, though, your correspondent perused the LinkedIn profiles of the people she had fussed over. Today, each is now working in, or fairly close to, the field she had hoped they would end up in. Strivers nowadays may find their true calling too—even if it is not necessarily the consulting job they land while at Harvard.
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