My College Pushed Me Into Investment Banking!

America’s elite colleges are dominated by a powerful social and economic ideology, an ideology that was already permeating campuses when I went to school in the 1980s. I’d like to say I was immune to it, but I was not. It changed me. 

My Ivy League alma mater took in a young woman raised by wheat germ-sprinkling, Salton yogurt machine-owning, Daniel Berrigan-reading social justice warriors and spat out an investment banker. 

The pressure to conform to this ideology was perhaps greatest from fellow students, who had decided their majors before puberty, who took me on dates to Libertarian Club meetings and pushed on me their dogeared copies of “In Search of Excellence” and “Ogilvy on Advertising.” Friends who communicated in code often disappeared into windowless buildings for training in departments such as Computer Science, a major that didn’t even exist when my parents attended college. Few of us who resisted frequent mocking as we pursued the Humanities or Social Sciences later made it through the full-court press of senior year recruiting season. This was when the college itself invited the representatives of capitalist enterprises onto campus. Yes, they openly called it “recruiting.”  

It’s only gotten worse since at our nation’s elite schools, where parents can find their children being indoctrinated into embracing a narrow vision for their future and pursuing a lifestyle foreign to most ordinary Americans. How do I know? These schools are brazen enough to say the quiet part out loud — it’s right on their websites! Many have “Outcomes” pages filled with the brazen corporate language: Dartmouth explains how its alums “help one another climb ladders, enter markets, and reach…objectives.” 

And it’s working. “The Harvard Crimson” reported that nearly two-thirds of 2020 Harvard graduates entering the workforce were lured into just three fields: consulting, finance, or tech. Check out these screenshots showing what’s really happening at these top schools — before they scrub them from their websites.

At Harvard, corporations are taking down graduates like bowling pins:

At Yale, the list of top employers is suspiciously similar to the lists at other highly selective colleges, so much so it seems cut-and-pasted:

Princeton tries to obscure its data by lumping some careers together under “Social Impact.” Nevertheless, just 1 in 6 students were in this category in 2022:

Only a brave few emerge from these indoctrination mills unscathed. A stalwart 3% of 2021 Cornell grads broke from the lockstep crowd to work in nonprofits. Another 3% refused to report back to headquarters as instructed, likely having gone off the grid in collective backlash. Perhaps the real heroes, though, are the iconoclastic 2% who stood up, stood strong, and chose “Other.”

Can it get any worse? Yes, it can. If these colleges don’t change their ways, they can expect the small “Government” slice of the pie to grow. How many freethinking students, eager to consider and debate a variety of majors, hoping to find their life’s purpose anywhere beyond Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, will be pushed so hard they have no choice but to become Deep State Marxists?

Consider yourself warned.

Some context for this attempt at satire:

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