Finance, consulting and tech are gobbling up top students
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. To understand how America’s Ivy League universities see themselves, read their admissions brochures. Leafing through the just-so photos of giggling students on tidy lawns, a vision emerges of sanctuaries for personal growth and intellectual exploration—as much cocoon as ivory tower.
The world has come to a different impression. Portrayals of the Ivies dwell on out-of-control woke politics and tented encampments protesting against the war in Gaza. The presidents of four Ivy League schools have stepped down since late 2023 after being accused by politicians and alumni of excess sympathy for the latter vision.
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.
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