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During my sophomore fall at Harvard, I flew to New York City for a hedge fund recruiting event. Alongside 800 other invited students, I checked into a (paid-for) hotel room in Times Square and ordered a (reimbursed) Uber Black to the private venue, a flashy modern art museum in Lower Manhattan that had been rented out to wine and dine us. Inside, we sipped on cucumber-lime spritzers at the open bar, piled canapés onto our plates, and took the elevator up and down eight floors—each teemed with employees delivering TED Talk–level enthusiasm about core principles and thought leadership. Three hours later, emerging from the double glass doors slightly breathless, I sported monogrammed merch, a gift card for incidentals, and a dozen new connections on LinkedIn.
That night, everything sharpened into focus. Post-grad life, once amorphous and terrifying, was now reassuringly simple, and for the first time since I had come to Harvard, I could see myself clearly at the other end, intact. My frustrations and hopes about college—who I would become, how I wanted to spend my time, what kind of work I found valuable—had dissipated into the Manhattan air. In their place was a shiny new vision: a blazer-wearing, Sweetgreen-eating, Equinox-going, Summer 2025 Corporate Development Intern.
On the plane back to Boston—tickets courtesy of the hedge fund, of course—my classmates and I talked eagerly about our futures. The recruiting process was already ramping up—there were coffee chats to be had, and résumés to be dropped. We compared the starting salaries of top firms, and I discovered bemusedly that one summer at Jane Street paid almost twice my household income. In the Uber back to campus, we made the obligatory jokes about selling out, but followed with quick amendments. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” someone said. Everyone made sounds of assent. “There’s nothing wrong with getting that bag.”
Under all of our bravado, there was an unspoken consensus: We were here for the money. We were selling out because we had to. If you could resist the paycheck, you were either privileged enough to not worry about your future income or too stupid to conceptualize just how wealthy you could be. Or both.
But the Harvard Crimson’s senior survey tells a different story. What’s often framed as a necessary climb up the socioeconomic ladder is less persuasive when you look at the numbers. Rates of “selling out” remain largely stable across all student income brackets, and Harvard isn’t exactly known for its economic diversity in the first place—the average household income of a Harvard student is $168,000, and 67 percent come from the top 20 percent. Even if we don’t start well-off, thanks to Harvard’s generous financial aid program, nearly all students graduate debt-free. (Like many of my middle-class friends, I wouldn’t be able to afford Harvard without financial aid, and I’ll be graduating with debt that won’t sink me.) And the oft-cited Harvard name makes finding a job a lot easier—in any industry, for almost any role.
So, for the more than half of students who will go into consulting, finance, or tech after graduation, “it,” in fact, isn’t all about “getting that bag.” It’s not even really about the frequently cited exclusivity, or even the charcuterie. It’s about direction.
New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, who wrote a book following eight Wall Street recruits fresh out of college, describes investment banking and similar careers as a “two-year bootcamp for adulthood.” These companies, Roose believes, offer indefinite structure—“signing up for something forever,” but at the same time doing the “safe prestigious thing.” For risk-averse Ivy League students, it’s the pragmatic guarantor of money, status, and security.
Nina, a senior at Harvard who is studying biology, calls this the consulting “safety net.” (I changed the names of the students I interviewed so that they could speak freely about fields they are working in or hope to enter.) Like all of the students I talked to, Nina didn’t know about consulting until she got to college, but soon felt its gravitational pull. The timeline is both straightforward and accelerated: Students typically “recruit” in their sophomore year of college, secure a junior summer internship, and receive a return offer to work full time after graduation. “I’ll be set ahead of everybody else, and I won’t feel uneasy,” Nina explained. “It’s a linear path.”
The path is one that Amelia, a recent Harvard grad who majored in government and biology, followed to Boston Consulting Group. She told me that consulting is a bit like a conveyor belt: “A lot of people default to the easy, step-by-step trajectory from point A to point B.”
“It sort of feels like you can delay finding what it is you actually want to do for at least a couple more years,” she said. At BCG, where employees can join affinity groups and athletics clubs that call back to college life, and mentors talk frequently about “exiting” the industry, the future feels indefinitely—and blissfully—on pause.
The impermanence makes the job feel like a trial run before the real thing, and the real thing becomes something that can be deferred, indefinitely. At BCG or Bain or McKinsey, you’ve entered the workforce, sure. But even though you’re working, you’re also waiting. You’re opening more doors, but never picking one to walk through.
That’s not to say that students can’t benefit from buying time. In Amelia’s eyes, consulting is a great way to “taste-test different industries”—to explore what you might really want to do without worrying about your next paycheck, and even enjoy the workflow in the process. What’s “disappointing” for Amelia are the students who “know what their interests are, and do consulting anyway.”
Even for those students, it’s not hard to understand the appeal. Consulting, finance, and tech are often the arbiters of campus prestige. From the moment a freshman steps on campus, all signs point to the highly selective student organizations that command instant peer respect. One of these clubs, the Harvard Undergraduate Consulting Group, boasts a 10 percent acceptance rate. On LinkedIn, HUCG’s “analysts” and “associates”—that’s the club’s terminology, created to mirror the structure at actual firms—point to a “rigorous application process.” Membership becomes shorthand for everything that an Ivy League student has come to value: smarts, exclusivity, social currency. Tack on the trips to New York for recruiting events and the head-spinning direct deposits from summer internships, and suddenly muddling through the uncertainty of “finding yourself” seems like an absurd detour.
“Everyone does it,” Nathan, a junior at the University of Pennsylvania who is studying political science and environmental studies, told me when I asked him about Penn’s preprofessional club clout. “I kind of just followed the crowd.”
But as much as there is a pipeline into consulting, there’s also a pipeline out of it. Rachel, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics, spent two years at BCG before leaving the company. This summer, she’s starting a new job in the culinary industry, as a chef. “It feels really scary,” she said. “There’s a fear of falling off track, and it does extend from needing a system to measure success.”
I’ll be starting my junior year this fall. I didn’t end up applying to that hedge fund internship, but I’ll be the first to admit that consulting and finance haven’t lost their charm. The sense of direction, the comfort of not having to explain yourself at a family reunion, and the certainty that comes with choosing a path that everyone else agrees is “smart”—it’s all still there.
For a long time, I refused to consider what I saw as the idealistic way forward: trying, stumbling, failing, figuring things out as I went. I couldn’t afford to be a delusional English major wandering through life in a haze of unpaid internships and mysteriously rent-free West Village walk-ups. I deferred instead to what I convinced myself was the sensible way forward: a career in consulting. I needed a job. I needed to justify my Harvard degree. I didn’t have time for the intellectual, romantic nonsense that constituted the so-called examined life, or whatever the trust-fund kids in philosophy learned about before retreating to their summer homes to “wrestle with Kierkegaard.”
I told myself that I was rejecting what was essentially one extended daydream. Really, I was just cowering—and what made it worse was that I was doing it at Harvard, surrounded by people whose job was to help me think for myself, with institutional funding available for any semi-coherent passion project, and every door wide open.
And this is the real tragedy. It isn’t that so many students go into consulting or finance, but how many do it by default. When the most talented, resourced, and socially mobile students in the country are quietly surrendering their self-direction, it’s not just a loss of imagination, but a failure of nerve.
The forces pushing us toward these jobs are undeniable, and important. For some students, especially those supporting their families or looking to secure a foothold in an economy increasingly hostile to the young, these jobs offer the kind of stability that makes ambition possible in the first place. No one is asking students to throw away security in the name of self-actualization. But we should, at the very least, be able to distinguish between a real safety net and a misguided desire for control. The former gives you room to risk things. The latter tempts you into never trying.
The real privilege—the one that we Ivy League students like to avoid—isn’t in landing the offer, but deciding if we want it in the first place. That kind of decision requires self-respect that goes beyond a paycheck or job title. It demands the capacity to live with your choices—not because they’re safe or prestigious, but because you know, deeply and privately and in a way that no one else can really understand, that they’re yours.
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