The author of this article is rather clueless about why Yale, Harvard and Columbia graduates pursue careers in consulting, finance and tech. When a reporter asked John Dillinger once why he robbed banks, he said that this was where the money was. In 1980 I was a consultant at Mobil Oil in NY working on an automation of their employee savings plan where I met a recent graduate of Amherst who was working on the user manual for the new system. He was a humanities major at Amherst (can't remember which area exactly) and on the left--had been an intern at the Nation Magazine. A year or so of technical writing at fairly low wages convinced him that he needed a career change so he began pursuing an MBA to prep him for a job on Wall Street. Trust me when I tell you that this guy hated the idea of working in finance but as he put it to me once, "Lou, I can't get married, buy a home or rent an apartment, and have children without going that route."
Chronicle of Higher Education Why So Many New Graduates of Elite Colleges Flock to the Same Kinds of Jobs By Beckie Supiano New graduates of elite colleges are concentrated in just a few career paths, in consulting, finance, and tech. Why is that? Amy J. Binder, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego, wanted to find out, so she and her collaborators studied how students at Harvard and Stanford Universities are channeled into those fields — what the researchers call "career funneling." Their findings, which focus on the role universities themselves play in promoting certain careers, are out in a new paper published by the journal Sociology of Education. We caught up with Ms. Binder to hear more. The following conversation has been edited and condensed. Q. What got you interested in this question of why so many students at elite colleges end up in the same handful of careers? A. I read a New York Times article about how many students from the Ivy League were going into finance and consulting careers, and I was appalled. In 2007 about 48 percent were going into investment-banking and consulting firms. [And the proportion, which fell during the recession, has since rebounded, the paper says.] There has been some work in sociology on the practices that finance, consulting, and corporate-law firms use to recruit Ivy League graduating seniors, specifically by Lauren Rivera, who is a sociologist at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, and also by Karen Ho, who is an anthropologist at the University of Minnesota. Those were fantastic pieces of research, but they focused on what the employers did to recruit these students, and less on what was happening among the students themselves, and even more importantly what universities were doing to facilitate the recruitment. Q. What did you find? A. Very often faculty and administrators are taken aback by the rates of entry of students into these careers, but they’re not fully aware of all of the things that their campuses do to facilitate entry into them. Students come to campus, they’re very ambitious, they want to have great careers, but they’re incredibly naïve about what the labor force actually looks like. This lack of knowledge leads to a kind of vulnerability among students, who respond to jobs that seem available and prestigious on campus. Private, elite universities have a system in career services that charges a certain amount of money for recruiters to come to campus, and so there’s a very elaborate, structured recruitment system on campus for particular job pathways. Furthermore, these jobs are presented as being extremely competitive, so there’s some prestige to them that gets built up among peers over who gets to land these kinds of jobs. These jobs are presented by the recruiters and by peers on campus as being the best kinds of jobs that you can get: They really pad your résumé for later, you don’t have to stay in them forever, and they also present a different kind of structured pathway for not only the first couple of years out after graduation, but many years beyond that. You take these jobs for a couple of years, then you go to business school, then you come back in a higher position in these firms or you move into related industries that you worked on as a consultant or as a low-level investment banker. All other jobs are compared to these jobs, so they’re seen as lacking status, lacking career mobility, and so forth. Q. What made you decide to name the universities, to say that it was Harvard and Stanford? A. Several of our reviewers on this paper questioned our decision to do that. I wrote a book with a different co-author a couple of years ago on conservatism on college campuses. We decided to mask the identities of the universities for reasons of basically insistence at one of the universities. We realized that this was a disservice to the research. The way that my research has been going over the last several years is to consider very, very carefully the institutional culture of these campuses and how that contributes to ideas of prestige or what kind of person I should be during college, after college, and also some very specific organizational features on campus. Masking the identities of these schools limited my ability to talk in the depth that I wanted to. The other thing is Harvard and Stanford are very particular campuses even among their peer institutions. Q. Given that you did name them, what has the reaction been like on those two campuses? A. The paper hasn’t yet been published in paper form; it’s online. But even so, folks have found it, and folks are talking about it, and they want to use the findings to think about how they can change things on their own campuses, and that makes me really happy. The special sauce here is that the focus is on what universities are doing to create the energy and aspirations for these jobs, and how students themselves are participating in this kind of career prestige system. When the prior research looked at employment practices, it was easy for administrators to say, Oh, those bad employers, and what’s wrong with students that they’re choosing these jobs? I hope this paper is pushing universities to examine their own practices. Q. Let’s say professors on one of these campuses want to broaden students’ horizons. How might they go about doing that? A. This is less in faculty’s hands and much more in administrator and staff hands. The majority of faculty are unhappy about these career pathways, so I’m sure that they try to broaden the horizons of students. But really this is about the career center and what administrators decide to do there. We don’t think that universities should lay all of the blame on students for wanting jobs that their peers and their universities do a lot to promote. Students and alums on these two campuses, say when they hear their university president say something like "you should avoid the siren song of Wall Street recruiters," they think that seems pretty hypocritical, because that’s who’s on campus recruiting them. Universities should really take a look in the mirror. They’re facilitating entry into these jobs in a massive way. It’s clear that universities have to provide more information about other jobs. They also need to create competition around these alternative careers. One thing is that they can subsidize less wealthy, less powerful sectors to come to campus and create competition. It’s also really important to look at what Teach for America did. They created a lot of competition to get into these positions, and students at these universities really respond to that. Teach for America also made these positions just two years — you don’t have to stay there for the rest of your life, it will look really good on your résumé. Universities can restrict access to students by Wall Street firms and high-tech firms. That would be a very difficult decision for them to make because their trustees, their donors, and a lot of their wealthy alumni are from these sectors. But that’s a decision that they could make if they wanted to. Beckie Supiano writes about college affordability, the job market for new graduates, and professional schools, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at [email protected]. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
