Tiêu đề PART 68.pdf ✅

40 Christmas specials U U The Economist December 21st 2024 U U U The Ivy League rat race HARVARD RULES CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS Finance, consulting and tech are gobbling up ever more top students. Is that a problem? TO UNDERSTAND HOW America's Ivy League uni- versities see themselves, read their admissions brochures. Leafing through the just-so photos of gig- gling students on tidy lawns, a vision emerges of sanc- tuaries for personal growth and intellectual explora- tion-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 en- campments protesting the war in Gaza. The presi- dents 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 DE Shaw, a hedge fund, to mingle between canapés and sculptures. The event's goal, at- tendees say, was to nudge this young and impression- able 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-more even than when your cor- respondent entered Harvard less than a decade ago- life on campus feels like a fast track to the corporate world. Around the same time as the DE 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 consult- ing, investing and the like. Several admit only a single- digit percentage of applicants, conferring a cachet that the clubs like to compare to the selectivity of ad- mission to the university itself: the "5% of the 5%". The fortunate few become not "members", in the parlance of some clubs, but rather "partners" or "managing di- rectors": less dorm room, more Wall Street. "They're drawn to exclusivity, like a firefly being drawn to a lantern," says Luke (a pseudonym), a stu- dent in his fourth year who runs one such club. Those in Luke's club can expect to make connections at in- vestment banks like Goldman Sachs and hedge funds like Citadel. “We have alumni at all the big names." The pre-professional clubs are merely the most vis- ible 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 managementconsulting internship. Annushka, a second-year stu- dent, recalls an "overwhelming flood” of groups pitch- ing a career leg-up to new arrivals. "You're constantly being bombarded," she says. She resisted the tempta- tion to join, but did attend informational sessions. Luke, by contrast, arrived at Harvard expecting to