At Harvard, a graduating senior, who handed on a full scholarship to a different college, instructed me that he felt immense stress to point out his mother and father that their $400,000 funding in his Harvard training would enable him to get the form of job the place he might make one million {dollars} a 12 months. Upon commencement, he’ll be part of the non-public fairness agency Blackstone, the place, he believes, he’ll study and obtain extra in six years than 30 years in a public-service-oriented group.
One other scholar, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer time in a row working towards case research in preparation for administration consulting internship interviews, instructed me that everybody arrived on campus hoping to alter the world. However what they study at Harvard, he mentioned, is that really doing something significant is simply too onerous. Individuals quit on their desires, he instructed me, and determine they could as properly earn money. Another person instructed me it was widespread at events to listen to their friends say they only need to promote out.
“There’s positively a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, mentioned. “In the event you’re not doing finance or tech, it will possibly really feel such as you’re doing one thing flawed.”
As a freshman, he deliberate to main in environmental engineering. As a sophomore, he switched to economics, becoming a member of 5 of his six roommates. A type of roommates instructed me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the point he was in his 30s. Earlier than that, he wished to earn a very good wage, which he outlined as $500,000 a 12 months.
In keeping with a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard seniors, the share of 2023 graduates going into finance and consulting exceeded 40 % for the second 12 months in a row. (The official Harvard Institutional Analysis survey yields decrease percentages for these fields than the Crimson survey, as a result of it contains college students who aren’t coming into the work drive.)
