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At Harvard, a graduating senior, who handed on a full scholarship to a different faculty, informed me that he felt immense stress to point out his mother and father that their $400,000 funding in his Harvard training would permit him to get the kind of job the place he may make one million {dollars} a yr. Upon commencement, he’ll be part of the non-public fairness agency Blackstone, the place, he believes, he’ll be taught and obtain extra in six years than 30 years in a public-service-oriented group.
Another scholar, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer season in a row practising case research in preparation for administration consulting internship interviews, informed me that everybody arrived on campus hoping to alter the world. But what they be taught at Harvard, he stated, is that truly doing something significant is simply too exhausting. People quit on their desires, he informed me, and determine they could as properly generate income. Someone else informed me it was widespread at events to listen to their friends say they simply need to promote out.
“There’s positively a herd mentality,” Joshua Parker, a 21-year-old Harvard junior from Oahu, stated. “If you’re not doing finance or tech, it will possibly really feel such as you’re doing one thing fallacious.”
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. One of these roommates informed me that he hoped to run a hedge fund by the point he was in his 30s. Before that, he wished to earn a very good wage, which he outlined as $500,000 a yr.
According to a Harvard Crimson survey of Harvard seniors, the share of 2023 graduates going into finance and consulting exceeded 40 p.c for the second yr in a row. (The official Harvard Institutional Research survey yields decrease percentages for these fields than the Crimson survey, as a result of it contains college students who aren’t getting into the work drive.)
