A Harvard University graduate who passed on a full scholarship to another school told me that he felt enormous pressure to show his parents that their $400,000 investment in his Harvard education would allow him to get a job to get a job where he could do millions of dollars a year. After graduation, he will join private equity firm Blackstone, where he believes he will learn and accomplish more in six years than he did in 30 years at a public service-focused organization.
Another student from Uruguay, who spent his second straight summer practicing case studies to prepare for interviews for a management consulting internship, told me that everyone came to campus with the hope of changing the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that it’s too difficult to actually do anything meaningful. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money. Someone else told me that it was common at parties for their colleagues to say they just wanted to sell out.
“There’s definitely a herd mentality,” said Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu. “If you’re not into finance or technology, you might feel like you’re doing something wrong.”
As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics and joined five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was 30. Previously, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.
The share of 2023 graduates going into the finance and consulting industries topped 40 percent for the second year in a row, according to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard seniors. (The official Harvard Institutional Research survey gives lower percentages for these areas than the Crimson survey because it includes students who are not entering the workforce.)
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2024-05-22 13:43:57
www.nytimes.com
