Finance, consulting and tech are gobbling up top students

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 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. 

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. And such ambitions for career-hustling starts early.  

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.