What do students at elite colleges really want?

The meme was an image of a head with “I need to get rich” slapped across it. “Freshmen after spending 0.02 seconds on campus,” read the caption, posted in 2023 to the anonymous messaging app Sidechat.

The campus in question was Harvard University, where, at a wood-paneled dining hall last year, two juniors explained how to assess a fellow undergraduate’s earning potential. It’s easy, they said, as we ate mussels, beets and sautéed chard: You can tell by who’s getting a bulge bracket internship.

“What?” Benny Goldman, a then-28-year-old economics doctoral student and their residential tutor, was confused.

One of the students paused, surprised that he was unfamiliar with the term: A bulge bracket bank, like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or Citi. The biggest, most prestigious global investment banks. A B.B., her friend explained. Not to be confused with M.B.B., which stands for three of the most prestigious management consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group.

While the main image of elite campuses during this commencement season might be activists in kaffiyehs pitching tents on electric green lawns, most students on campus are focused not on protesting the war in Gaza, but on what will come after graduation.

Despite the popular image of this generation as one driven by idealism, Gen Z students at these schools appear to be strikingly corporate-minded. Even when they arrive at college wanting something very different, an increasing number of students at elite universities seek the imprimatur of employment by a powerful firm and “making a bag” (slang for a sack of money) as quickly as possible.

Elite universities have always been major feeders into finance and consulting, and students have always wanted to make money. According to the annual American Freshman Survey, the biggest increase in students wanting to become “very well off financially” happened between the 1970s and 1980s, and it’s been creeping up since then.

But in the past five years, faculty and administrators say, the pull of these industries has become supercharged. In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition and inequality, students and their parents increasingly see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.

At Harvard, a graduating senior, who passed on a full scholarship to another school, told me that he felt immense pressure to show his parents that their $400,000 investment in his Harvard education would allow him to get the sort of job where he could make $1 million a year. Upon graduation, he will join the private equity firm Blackstone, where, he believes, he will learn and achieve more in six years than 30 years in a public-service-oriented organization.

Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money.

“There’s definitely a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, Hawaii, said. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it can feel like you’re doing something wrong.”

As a freshman, he planned to major in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, joining five of his six roommates. One of those roommates told me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the time he was in his 30s. Before that, he wanted to earn a good salary, which he defined as $500,000 a year.

According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard seniors, the share of 2024 graduates going into finance and consulting is 34%. (In 2022, and 2023, it exceeded 40%. The official Harvard Institutional Research survey yields lower percentages for those fields than the Crimson survey, because it includes students who aren’t entering the workforce.)

These statistics approach the previous highs in 2007, after which the global financial crisis drove the share down to a recent low of 20% in 2009, from which it’s been regaining ground since.

Fifteen years ago, fewer students went into tech. Adding in that sector, the share of graduates starting what some students non-disparagingly refer to as “sellout jobs” is more than half. (It was a record-shattering 60% in 2022 and nearly 54% in 2023.)

“When people say ‘selling out,’ I mean, obviously, there’s some implicit judgment there,” said Aden Barton, a 23-year-old Harvard senior who wrote an opinion column for the student newspaper headlined, “How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom.”

“But it really is just almost a descriptive term at this point for people pursuing certain career paths,” he continued. “I’m not trying to denigrate anybody’s career path nor my own.” (He interned at a hedge fund last summer.)

The change is striking to those who have been in academia for years, and not just at Harvard.

Roger Woolsey, executive director of the career center at Union College, a private liberal arts college in Schenectady, New York, said he first noticed a change around 2015, with students who had been in high school during the Great Recession and who therefore prioritized financial security.

“The students saw what their parents went through, and the parents saw what happened to themselves,” he said. “You couple that with college tuition continuing to rise,” he continued, and students started looking for monetary payoffs right after graduation.

Sara Lazenby, an institutional policy analyst for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that might be why students and their parents were much more focused on professional outcomes than they used to be. “In the past few years,” she said, “I’ve seen a higher level of interest in this first-destination data” — stats on what jobs graduates are getting out of college.

Princeton’s senior survey results are nearly identical to The Crimson’s Senior Survey: about 38% of 2023 graduates who were employed took jobs in finance and consulting; adding tech and engineering, the rate is close to 60%, compared with 53% in 2016, the earliest year for which the data is available.

© 2024 The New York Times Company