By their stated missions, elite colleges and universities aim to create the next generation of leaders who will work to advance the common good. For example, Amherst College aims to educate students to “engage the world around them, and lead principled lives of consequence.” Yale is similarly committed to “improving the world today” and Stanford’s vision is to promote “the welfare of people everywhere.” The reality could hardly be more different. 

 

Contributions to research aside, most elite colleges and universities serve principally as funnels into management consulting, finance, and big tech. At Harvard, for example, 63 percent of the Class of 2020 who entered the workforce after graduation joined one of these three sectors. By contrast, merely 12 percent went into social impact work, which we define as health, public service, government, and education.

 

Colleges often claim that these outcomes are inevitable and reflect strong predispositions on the part of their students. However, research by one of our board members, the sociologist Amy Binder, shows that almost no students enter college with the goal of becoming a management consultant or investment banker. To the contrary, most students have only vague plans for their future and are naive about their options. Many have ambitious visions to change the world.

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Working in concert with universities, employers in banking, consulting, and big-tech sell students on a pathway to an elite lifestyle. At the heart of the strategy is what the sociologist Lauren Rivera calls “the baller lifestyle.” Recruiters host receptions at the fanciest hotels, dinners at the best restaurants, and fly interviewees to big cities where they stay in top hotels. Those who make it through the winnowing process and receive a summer internship are lavished with extravagant meals and golf outings. For the wealthiest students, the courtship recapitulates many of the experiences and mechanisms that carried them to elite colleges in the first place. For the rest, it’s a seduction into the upper-class lifestyle. The aim is to convince impressionable students that the baller lifestyle is what they want and deserve.

  

Compounding the problem is the rise of formal partnerships between universities and corporate firms that explicitly commodify students' attention. These so-called “corporate partnership programs” effectively function as on-campus headhunting agencies. For an annual fee, they allow a company to outsource its hiring work to the career services office. More than half of the schools in the invitation-only Association of American Universities have formal CPPs. Many of those that don’t have CPPs offer other arrangements like “platinum membership,” whereby prospective employers get the choicest tables at career fairs, curated email lists, and assistance setting up personal interviews. To echo Professor Amy Binder, universities are selling their students to the highest bidder.

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But there’s hope. And it is radiating from the student bodies of these universities. Research conducted by our own Ryan Cieslikowski shows that students are not content with the degree to which they and their peers are funneled into jobs in the corporate superstructure. His master's thesis uncovered widespread discontent with career funneling among Stanford undergraduates.

 

Class Action aims to redirect that discontent into student action so that our most powerful universities can be beacons of social progress. 

 

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