Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ''Prestigious'' Jobs

Abstract

Elite universities are credited as launch points for the widest variety of meaningful careers. Yet, year after year at the most selective universities, nearly half the graduating seniors head to a surprisingly narrow band of professional options. Over the past few decades, this has largely been into the finance and consulting sectors, but increasingly it also includes high-tech firms. This study uses a cultural-organizational lens to show how student cultures and campus structures steer large portions of anxious and uncertain students into high-wealth, high-status occupational sectors. Interviewing 56 students and recent alumni at Harvard and Stanford Universities, we found that the majority of our respondents experienced confusion about career paths when first arriving at college but quickly learned what were considered to be the most prestigious options. On-campus corporate recruitment for finance, consulting, and high-tech jobs functioned as a significant driver of student perceptions of status; career prestige systems built up among peers exacerbated the funneling effect into these jobs. From these processes, students learned to draw boundaries between ‘‘high-status’’ and ‘‘ordinary’’ jobs. Our findings demonstrate how status processes on college campuses are central in generating preferences for the uppermost positions in the occupational structure and that elite campus environments have a large, independent role in the production and reproduction of social inequality.

Full text

Career Funneling: How Elite
Students Learn to Define and
Desire ‘‘Prestigious’’ Jobs
Amy J. Binder1, Daniel B. Davis1, and Nick Bloom2
Abstract
Elite universities are credited as launch points for the widest variety of meaningful careers. Yet, year after
year at the most selective universities, nearly half the graduating seniors head to a surprisingly narrow band
of professional options. Over the past few decades, this has largely been into the finance and consulting
sectors, but increasingly it also includes high-tech firms. This study uses a cultural-organizational lens to
show how student cultures and campus structures steer large portions of anxious and uncertain students
into high-wealth, high-status occupational sectors. Interviewing 56 students and recent alumni at Harvard
and Stanford Universities, we found that the majority of our respondents experienced confusion about
career paths when first arriving at college but quickly learned what were considered to be the most pres-
tigious options. On-campus corporate recruitment for finance, consulting, and high-tech jobs functioned as
a significant driver of student perceptions of status; career prestige systems built up among peers exacer-
bated the funneling effect into these jobs. From these processes, students learned to draw boundaries
between ‘‘high-status’’ and ‘‘ordinary’’ jobs. Our findings demonstrate how status processes on college
campuses are central in generating preferences for the uppermost positions in the occupational structure
and that elite campus environments have a large, independent role in the production and reproduction of
social inequality.
Keywords
career formation, culture, elite universities, higher education, institutionalism, organizations
Since the 1980s, finance and management consul-
ting firms, such as Goldman Sachs and McKinsey
and Co., have hired what many consider to be an
inordinate share of elite universities’ graduating
classes (Ho 2009; Rivera 2012). In 2007, before
the Great Recession, 47 percent of Harvard’s
seniors accepted two-year analyst positions in
these sectors (Rampell 2011). These numbers
dropped by half after the recession but have since
rebounded. In 2014, the Harvard Crimson’s
annual survey of seniors found that 31 percent of
the senior class was headed to these sectors, far
outpacing other professional destinations (Robbins
2014). Other elite universities—schools with very
highly selective admissions and that are part of, or
seen as equal to, the Ivy League—have similar, if
not identical, patterns.
A new prestigious career path has recently
joined investment banks and consulting firms
atop students’ aspirational hierarchy: the technol-
ogy sector. In the wake of the dot-com and social
media booms, elite university students’ desire for
high-tech jobs has increased sharply (Khan
2012). Entry into technology jobs has always
been substantial at universities such as MIT and
Stanford, which are known for their engineering
1University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
2Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Corresponding Author:
Amy J. Binder, University of California, San Diego, 9500
Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0533, USA.
Email: abinder@ucsd.edu
Research Article
Sociology of Education
2016, 89(1) 20–39
ÓAmerican Sociological Association 2015
DOI: 10.1177/0038040715610883
http://soe.sagepub.com
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programs, but students from other, more tradi-
tional elite schools have also begun to seek tech
careers. For example, in 2014, nearly 15 percent
of Harvard’s graduating seniors pursued jobs in
the tech industry as their first jobs (Robbins
2014). Combined, the three sectors of financial
services, management consulting, and tech cap-
tured nearly 50 percent of graduates entering the
workforce from Harvard’s class of 2014. Among
Stanford students entering the workforce, nearly
a quarter of graduating seniors go into technology
fields, and 22 percent are split between consulting
and financial services (Svoboda 2014).
The concentration of large numbers of elite stu-
dents in a fairly small number of occupational sec-
tors is not new. Upper-tier private universities
have always served as pipelines to a narrow
band of elite sectors. In the 1950s and 1960s, the
State Department and CIA were key destinations
for ‘‘the best and the brightest’’ (Lemann 1999);
in the 1970s and 1980s, medicine, law, and corpo-
rate business stood out as elite job pathways for
Ivy League graduates (Granfield 1992; Schleef
2000). As these trends reveal, the specific destina-
tions out of elite universities may change over
time, but the general process in which large num-
bers of graduates gravitate toward a narrow range
of career choices has persisted.
Sociologists and other educational researchers
have not adequately studied the mechanisms con-
tributing to this phenomenon, which we call ‘‘career
funneling.’’ Researchers using a functionalist model
assume a simple relationship between the supply of
high wages/benefits in sectors of the job market and
demand from job seekers. A strict stratification
approach, in the vein of Blau and Duncan (1967),
emphasizes the influence of students’ background
characteristics—such as class, race, gender, and
parents’ education—on individuals’ job outcomes.
Scholars adopting a conflict approach, most prom-
inently Bowles and Gintis (1976), critique the tight
coupling between schooling and the labor market,
arguing that institutions effectively do all of the
work to channel students to particular strata of the
labor force.
These different approaches have many merits,
but none can give insight into how students, in
interaction with others in organizational settings,
come to evaluate certain jobs as desirable and
worth pursuing. Students are embedded in local
campus contexts, where dominant discourses of
action, as well as organizational features of their
universities (e.g., student clubs, classes, career
counseling, and job recruitment), exert a strong
influence on them (Stevens, Armstrong, and
Arum 2008), including, presumably, on their job
choices. Understanding how campus contexts
shape career aspirations is particularly important
on elite campuses. Graduates of elite universities
assume an outsized proportion of the uppermost
positions in the occupational structure, which is,
itself, arguably the most salient construct underly-
ing class hierarchies (Weeden and Grusky 2005).
The position of elite universities within the field
of global higher education means the jobs elite
graduates choose are, by definition, the most pres-
tigious ones (Bourdieu 1996). Thus, an examina-
tion of career-oriented status processes at elite uni-
versities brings clarity to both status-based and
socioeconomic labor market stratification, by
examining one primary site of elite career entry.
To understand these status processes, we must
look to interactions among students and uncover
the mechanisms by which a large share of them
comes to consider certain careers as prestigious,
year after year.
LITERATURE REVIEW
Scholars who study the top tier of colleges and uni-
versities generally prioritize the conditions of stu-
dents’ entry into these schools (Karabel 2005;
Karen 1990; Stevens 2007) or students’ experiences
while in school (Mullen 2010; Stuber 2012), but
they pay less attention to graduates’ exit out of
these institutions. Sociologists have not ignored
the links between higher education and labor mar-
ket outcomes; exemplary work shows the benefits
of college education for job attainment and earn-
ings (e.g., Hout 2012; Torche 2011). Katchadourian
and Boli (1994), in a 10-year follow-up to their ini-
tial survey of careerist ideals among Stanford’s
class of 1981, confirm that members of the ‘‘educa-
tional elite’’ most often become members of the
‘‘occupational elite.’’ But when researchers measure
the effects of college on students’ career trajectories
after graduation (Pascarella and Terenzini 2005),
most look to person-level determinants of educa-
tional achievement (Brint 2013; Stevens 2008)
and practice what Gaztambide
´-Fernandez and
Howard (2010) call ‘‘methodological individu-
alism.’’ Such an approach can reveal the number
of students who take jobs in different parts of the
labor force, but it cannot tell us how students col-
laboratively construct ideas about desirable jobs
Binder et al. 21
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or how universities serve as pipelines to a narrow
band of professions.
Recent cultural approaches examining elite
pathways out of college emphasize the role of
employers by investigating their recruitment efforts
at top schools. Rivera (2011, 2012) shows how
finance, consulting, and corporate law firms use
processes of ‘‘cultural matching’’ to hire students
who possess very specific extracurricular and dis-
positional characteristics, and Ho (2009) and Rivera
(2015) study the organizational juggernaut of on-
campus structured recruitment. Other scholars
examine college students’ internal assessments of
whether they are good candidates for graduate
school (Mullen, Goyette, and Soares 2003; Schleef
2000) or high-powered careers (Beasley 2011). Still
others, such as Granfield (1992), analyze the cul-
tural pressures that educational programs place on
students to shift career goals while in school, lead-
ing even the most civic-minded first-year Harvard
law school students to disproportionately pursue
positions in corporate law firms.
We build on these studies by using cultural and
organizational theories of higher education to bet-
ter appreciate universities’ role in students’ status
construction. Bourdieu’s earlier work, especially
with Passeron, focuses on the ‘‘objective condi-
tions [that] determine both [student] aspirations
and the degree to which [those aspirations] can
be satisfied’’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990:207),
with a strong emphasis on family and primary
schooling. However, Bourdieu’s later work moves
beyond initial structures that form students’ habi-
tus to the fields of power that students encounter
later in life, such as on university campuses. The
fields of power found in college are constructed
through the organizational realities in place
there—such as the specific firms with which a uni-
versity engages—which rank-order various
careers and inform students about the professions
that are most appropriate for people like them
(Bourdieu 1996). Using Bourdieu’s logic, we
would expect that college students arrive on elite
campuses with a well-honed habitus, cultivated
in similar upper-end socioeconomic status back-
grounds, and then encounter new—but largely
homologous—opportunities and discourses that
trigger them to ‘‘want’’ the jobs being offered.
One might expect this influence to be especially
powerful at elite universities, which take on pater-
nalistic roles and offer most students their first
opportunity to live apart from their families
(Arum and Roksa 2011).
Scholars using a new institutional approach
build partially on Bourdieu, but they also give
a broader and distinctly American perspective to
the process of organizational, and especially edu-
cational, influence on individual identities and
aspirations (Meyer 1977). These studies suggest
that college campuses should be viewed as gener-
ative systems of meaning and action that have the
power to transform students’ orientations in the
world (Kaufman and Feldman 2004)—not just
reflect and reproduce students’ earlier disposi-
tions. Whether transforming students’ overall
sense of self and merit (Khan 2011); their aca-
demic, extracurricular, and social activities
(Grigsby 2009; Stuber 2012); their political styles
of engagement (Binder and Wood 2013; Dodson
2014); or their racial identities (Willie 2003), edu-
cational settings may substantially change stu-
dents’ ideas, emotions, and practices as they
move through college. Of course, individual stu-
dents enter college with differential access to eco-
nomic, cultural, and social capital—all of which
play a role in students’ openness and sense of
ease in realizing different career plans (Armstrong
and Hamilton 2013; Streib 2013). But an institu-
tional approach pushes us beyond these back-
ground characteristics to consider the power that
campuses have to charter new types of identities
and create new preferences in their student bodies
(Cookson and Persell 1985).
Despite the subtle, yet important, shadings
between these two approaches, scholars working
in the vein of both Bourdieu and Meyer would
argue that, overall, students enrolled in the upper-
most tier of elite universities will likely hold the
same cultural preferences for all manner of activ-
ities (Bourdieu 1996; DiMaggio and Powell 1983;
Scott 2014). This is because prestigious universi-
ties in the United States attract more or less the
same types of students (Massey et al. 2002),
have a high degree of isomorphism in organiza-
tional norms and practices (Karabel 2005), and
play a similar role in the social reproduction of
domestic and international elites (Bourdieu and
Passeron 1990). Whether attributed mainly to the
social class composition of the student bodies
(Bourdieu) or to the cultural logics pervading elite
institutions (Meyer’s and others’ new institutional-
ism), students who attend campuses within the
same stratum will likely define the same set of
jobs as prestigious. In other words, if finance
and consulting are hot at Princeton, then they
should also be sought after at Yale.
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Yet, according to other scholars working at the
intersection of cultural, educational, and organiza-
tional sociology, this may not be the whole story.
Despite their broad institutional similarities, indi-
vidual campuses also have distinctive ‘‘organiza-
tional sagas’’ (Clark 1972) and unique clusters of
small group interactions and styles (Nunn 2014)
that could lead students at different elite universi-
ties to favor careers in somewhat different propor-
tions or to describe the same prestigious careers in
slightly different ways. Rather than viewing all
upper-tier universities as essentially the same,
some scholars view individual campuses—even
those that closely resemble each other—as unique
ecologies nested in broader fields (e.g., Stevens
2015). Following critics who argue that both Bour-
dieu and new institutional scholars fail to fully
appreciate the effects of local meanings on mem-
bers’ ideas and practices (Hallett 2010; Hallett
and Ventresca 2006), we expect students in spe-
cific local ecologies will divide jobs differently
as worthy or unworthy, at least to some degree.
To sum up, scholars in each of these cultural
approaches would argue against viewing students’
career preferences and outcomes to be merely the
result of individual-level backgrounds and choices
or structural opportunities. Bourdieu’s insights help
us explore how members of an elite student body,
drawn largely from the upper middle class, respond
in similar ways to the fields of power they enter—
fields that present them with a familiar, yet narrow,
hierarchy of career options. The new institutional
approach goes further to emphasize the power of
the university to pave career pathways apart from
family backgrounds, as the elite prestige of the cam-
pus bestows new identities on students from all
backgrounds. Inhabited institutional theory and other
cultural-organizational educational approaches help
us understand how students on any given campus
are situated in unique interactional settings, which
leads to at least some variation in how students
assess different career choices from site to site. In
the sections that follow, we use these theories to
reveal how and why so many elite students are fun-
neled into first jobs in so few professional fields.
METHODS AND DATA
Case Selection
To study the dynamics leading to high-status
career choices, we use a case study methodology
and compare and contrast two of the most distin-
guished universities in the United States: Harvard
and Stanford. We selected these two schools to see
how the processes of elite career construction
operate at the top of elite higher education.
On the one hand, differences between the two
universities might lead students to construct distinct
systems of career prestige. The two schools adjoin
different labor market hubs—Harvard is on the East
Coast near the financial core of New York City,
whereas Stanford is at the ideological and geologi-
cal center of high-tech firms. These differences in
sector proximity (Saxenian 1994) could shape
how career aspirations and evaluations develop.
In addition, the two universities differ in what
might be called their institutional ethos, or organi-
zational sagas (Clark 1972). Harvard is known for
its position at the top of global rankings and has
sent its alumni to the halls of political and eco-
nomic power for centuries. Stanford, a young elite
institution at 130 years old, couples a stellar inter-
national standing with a reputation for quirkiness
and innovation. The two universities also differ
by more quantifiable characteristics in their suben-
vironments, or the formal and informal organiza-
tional features of each campus (Kaufman and Feld-
man 2004). Some organizational differences that
most directly influence career formation include
the number of undergraduates majoring in humani-
ties, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics), and social science disciplines on
each campus; the types of policies encouraging stu-
dent entrepreneurism; the assortment of preprofes-
sional student organizations; and how career advis-
ing is delivered.
On the other hand, the two schools share many
features, which could result in highly similar
career prestige systems. Both universities are
RU/VH universities—the Carnegie Classification
indicating that they offer PhD programs and
have very high research activity. They are the
top two most selective universities in the United
States, with class-of-2019 acceptance rates of
5.05 percent at Stanford (Nguyen-Phuc 2015)
and 5.03 percent at Harvard (Thompson 2015).
Both schools boast extensive alumni networks,
require students to fulfill liberal arts requirements,
are residential colleges, and more recently, have
implemented generous financial aid for middle-
and working-class students, leaving graduates
with minimal loan debt upon graduation (leading,
potentially, to a sense of financial security to
explore a large range of job options). Neither
Binder et al. 23
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school offers a business degree to undergraduates.
Convergence in these factors may overshadow the
schools’ differences for the processes of construct-
ing career prestige.
Data Collection
To study how students make sense of elite career
paths, and whether these paths operate similarly
or are specific to individual schools, we conducted
semistructured interviews with current students
and recent graduates at Harvard and Stanford.
During 2013 and 2014, we conducted a total of
56 in-depth interviews, 29 at Stanford and 27 at
Harvard. Of these, 39 interviewees were students,
ranging from freshman to senior year, and 17 were
graduates who had been out of school no more
than three years. This spectrum gave us coverage
of students at all points in the job search process,
from initially learning about professions, to seek-
ing junior summer internships and hiring, to
experiencing and moving beyond first jobs. Our
sample features a near equal number of men and
women, racial and ethnic diversity, and diversity
in social class backgrounds and majors. The last
column in Table 1 shows the breakdown of inter-
views by background characteristics and divi-
sional majors.
Because we were interested in hearing about
plans for the types of jobs that attract the largest
number of graduates from elite campuses, we
read journalistic accounts of job trajectories and
studied recent social science research. These sour-
ces indicated a strong pull in the past few decades
toward finance, consulting, and legal sectors. To
recruit interviewees, we first contacted students
who were involved in preprofessional organiza-
tions associated with these professions, such as
Women in Business chapters on both campuses,
the Veritas Financial Group at Harvard, Stanford
Consulting, and the Harvard College Law Society.
We asked officers to send recruitment flyers to
Table 1. Career Considerations by Demographics and Majors.
Variable Consulting Finance Impact
Traditional
professional Tech Unsure n
Socioeconomic statusa
Working class 22.2% 0% 55.6% 0% 22.2% 0% 8
Middle class 28.1% 18.8% 21.9% 15.6% 12.5% 3.1% 21
Upper middle class and above 20.0% 26.7% 16.7% 0% 30.0% 6.7% 27
University
Harvard 24.2% 3.3% 15.2% 9.1% 15.2% 6.1% 27
Stanford 23.7% 1.5% 31.6% 5.3% 26.3% 2.6% 29
Gender
Female 22.2% 11.1% 25.0% 11.1% 30.6% 0% 29
Male 25.7% 28.6% 22.9% 2.9% 11.4% 8.6% 27
Raceb
Asian 33.3% 22.2% 14.8% 11.1% 18.5% 0% 18
Black or Hispanic 11.1% 22.2% 44.4% 11.1% 11.1% 0% 7
Mixed race 12.5% 12.5% 12.5% 0% 50.0% 12.5% 6
White 22.2% 18.5% 29.6% 3.7% 18.5% 7.4% 25
Major, by divisionsc
Humanities 33.3% 0% 55.6% 0% 11.1% 0% 9
Social Science 27.0% 24.3% 18.9% 8.1% 16.2% 5.4% 37
STEM 19.4% 22.2% 16.7% 5.6% 33.3% 2.8% 36
aWe asked students to self-rate their family’s socioeconomic status using quintiles, but we collapsed these categories
to just three on the table and in the text for ease of interpretation.
b
Respondents self-identified their race. We had one student who identified as Black and six students who identified as
Hispanic; we collapsed these two categories in the table to make percentages of historically underrepresented students
more interpretable. In addition, six students identified as mixed race; most of these would have identified as black or
Hispanic if we had not given them the option of choosing mixed race.
c
Totals for majors do not add up to 56 because many of our respondents had double majors across divisional lines.
24 Sociology of Education 89(1)
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their e-mail listservs, and we interviewed as many
students and alumni from these student organiza-
tions as consented. We also asked our interview-
ees and organization officers for referrals to stu-
dents and recent graduates associated with these
professional paths.
While conducting interviews related to finance,
consulting, and law, many respondents told us that
high tech had become a strong competitor as
a high-status job destination on their campus and
that law had receded in prestige. Our interviewees’
impressions aligned with recent campus surveys of
graduating seniors (e.g., those published by the
Harvard Crimson each year) that list entry into
first jobs. Following these leads, we spent the
next phase of data collection interviewing students
and recent alumni involved in organizations
focused on technology and entrepreneurship.
Because we wanted to broaden our sample
beyond students and graduates planning for these
three sectors, we recruited interviewees from pre-
professional organizations in a wide variety of
areas—including medicine, education, research,
academia, philanthropy, and international devel-
opment—and we asked our interviewees for addi-
tional referrals.1Our efforts to expand the sample
were successful; by the end of data collection, we
had found respondents who expressed interest in
several professional areas, which we categorize
as follows:
1. Finance or consulting (31 interviewees:
18 at Harvard, 13 at Stanford [55 percent
of our sample]).
2. High-tech fields, from social media to
biotech to new energy (15 interviewees:
5 at Harvard, 10 at Stanford [27 percent
of our sample).
3. Other preprofessional directions, such as
pre-med, pre-law, or traditional corpo-
rate management (five interviewees:
three at Harvard, two at Stanford [9 per-
cent of our sample]).
4. ‘‘Impact careers’’ (Aspen Institute 2013;
e.g., education, public service, nonprof-
its, and philanthropy) and ‘‘creative-
class’’ careers, such as academia and
journalism (17 interviewees: 5 at Har-
vard, 12 at Stanford [30 percent of our
sample]).
5. ‘‘Unsure’’ (three interviewees: two at
Harvard, one at Stanford [5 percent of
our sample]); these students could not
yet name a potential career path.
Our sample does not exactly mirror rates of entry
into first jobs at either university, but it showcases
a diversity of career plans. Table 1 shows the prob-
ability that a respondent with certain background
characteristics will select a particular profession
as a first job. We use probabilities to reflect the
multiple sectors that many individual respondents
said they were considering.2
Our semistructured interviews lasted from one
to two hours and were conducted either in person
or via Skype. We asked interviewees a series of
questions regarding their background, their course
of study while in school, their career ambitions
now and in the long term, any shifts in these
desires that they had experienced during college,
and the careers they perceived to be high, medium,
and low status. We asked them about parent and
peer influences on their career ideas and how
they first learned about various professions. Addi-
tionally, we included questions about our inter-
viewees’ experiences with career centers, job fairs,
interview sessions, internships and summer jobs,
and their perceptions of how faculty and adminis-
trators rank different occupations. To maximize
transparency, we reminded students of the confi-
dentiality of their responses, and we underscored
our interest in their unvarnished opinions; all
respondents showed a general willingness to speak
frankly. Our semistructured interview instrument
is available as an online appendix.
We digitally recorded all interviews and had
them professionally transcribed, after which we
read them several times to identify themes and cat-
egories. We then developed a codebook with
nearly 150 distinct codes within a code hierarchy.
We coded all transcripts using ATLAS.ti qualita-
tive data analysis software to identify trends and
generate concrete empirical claims about our find-
ings. Throughout data collection and coding, our
method of analysis was grounded and inductive
(Glaser and Strauss 1967), allowing for iterations
of development. For example, once we learned
that high tech had significantly eclipsed law in
prestige and appeal, we adapted our interview pro-
tocols to capture this shift. A grounded and induc-
tive method remains open to such salient discover-
ies as data accumulates.
In keeping with our institutional review board
(IRB) agreement, we informed our interviewees
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that we would protect their privacy by providing
them with pseudonyms, masking some of their
personal and academic characteristics, and allow-
ing them to go off the record or skip any questions
at any stage of the interview. This was particularly
important because we also informed them that we
would use the real name of their university in any
written or presented work. Although our decision
not to mask the names of our case study campuses
is less common (but for precedents, see Clark
1972; Granfield 1992; Khan 2011; Mullen 2010),
we believe it is justified. First, each institution
has a highly distinctive profile, which in many
ways is impossible to hide. For example, although
MIT and University of California, Berkeley, share
some key characteristics with Stanford (one sub-
stantively, one geographically), the way that Sili-
con Valley figures in the lives of Stanford students
is not the same elsewhere.
Related, in a study of how universities’ cultural
and organizational features may shape students’
assessments of different careers, we feared that
blending or masking specific features would dilute
the power of our analysis (see also Schrag 2014). In
the present study, we sought IRB approval through
our home institution—the University of California,
San Diego—and with that approval, we sought
approval from the IRBs at Harvard and Stanford—
both of whose IRB officers informed us they did
not require us to get approval for a study of this
type. Buoyed by these IRB decisions, we believe
that in a study that explores the power of dominant
discourses and practices on campus to shape career
plans, it is preferable to be clear about the dynamics
of particular universities.
FINDINGS
Cultural signaling about careers comes from many
sources, from popular media depictions to the
pressure parents place on their children to go
into particular fields. However, we discovered
that cultural discourses and practices on campus
had considerable power to shape students’ career
desires. In this article, we focus on four campus-
wide mechanisms that heavily influenced stu-
dents’ career aspirations.
The first mechanism concerns how little infor-
mation undergraduates had about the labor market
upon entry to college—this initial naivete
´left
them especially pliable to campus influences as
early as freshman year. This was true of students
from families across all social class backgrounds.
Second, such quick learning was fueled by the
two universities’ annual recruitment season—a
frenzy that triggered a competitive drive among
students with histories of excelling in structured
competitions. The prizes—certain types of jobs
at a short list of specific firms—quickly became
recognized across the student body. Third, stu-
dents who observed this process internalized, and
then reinforced for others, expectations about
career prestige, which elicited widespread insecur-
ities. Students felt social pressure to do important
things worthy of their elite degree, a burden that
intensified as graduation drew nearer. Fourth, the
career prestige system built around competition
for high-prestige jobs led students to draw status
boundaries that divided worthy jobs from ‘‘ordi-
nary’’ careers. This boundary drawing triggered
a further narrowing of acceptable career pathways.
Together, these mechanisms led to a career funnel-
ing effect, whereby elite universities, rather than
opening up unlimited job prospects to their stu-
dents, actually restricted them. We analyze these
primary mechanisms in turn.
Mechanism 1: Initial Naı
¨vete
´Triggers
Pliability
Most of our interviewees entered college with high
ambitions but little concrete information about the
world of work—a finding that resonates with
Schneider and Stevenson’s (1999) description of
U.S. high school students as ‘‘motivated but
directionless.’’ This left students receptive to the
influence of others on campus—peers in classes,
student-run organizations, and opportunities
offered through career planning offices and
departments. We found similar processes at work
for finance, consulting, and high-tech sectors.
Discovering finance and consulting. Stu-
dents’ lack of knowledge or early planning for
specific careers was especially true of the finance
and consulting sectors. Our respondents said they
knew virtually nothing about these professions
when they were admitted to college, but they
became deeply familiar with them over time, as
they watched well over half of their classmates
apply for internships and full-time jobs in these
sectors.
Aiden—a white, upper-middle-class student
concentrating in a basic social science
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discipline—was typical in this regard.3(At Har-
vard, majors are called concentrations.) Aiden
reported that he had no knowledge of these two
professions upon entering college:
Growing up, before coming to college, I
didn’t know there were consulting firms
like McKinsey or Bain. I didn’t know that
there’s big investment banks like J.P. Mor-
gan. I didn’t know that those really existed
or what they did, and that wasn’t a thing for
me, like, something I aspired to be. ...If
you told me five years ago that [you were
a managing director at Goldman Sachs], I
would’ve said, ‘‘Cool, I don’t know what
that means.’’ But if you said you were
a CEO of a company, I would think that’s
probably cooler.
Having subsequently spent three years at Harvard,
however, Aiden said he was now far more familiar
with finance and consulting jobs than he was with
corporate management jobs. Although he reported
that ‘‘there’s definitely a lot of things about both
[professions] I don’t really like’’—particularly,
lifestyle concerns, such as long hours and a sense
that these jobs did not offer much personal mean-
ing—he would likely apply for consulting jobs
during senior year, ‘‘since you learn some very
valuable skills, it would be a great experience,
and there’s a lot to gain from it.’’
Louis, a Latino, upper-middle-class senior at
Harvard concentrating in computer science, told
a similar story:
I thought careers in finance were like being
a bank teller, being an accountant, or some-
thing. And all of a sudden people are talk-
ing about investment banking and sales
and trading, and I have no idea what any
of these things are! So I was kind of inter-
ested to see what this was all about.
Initially unaware, Louis became interested enough
in finance to become an officer in one of Har-
vard’s main investment clubs, ‘‘where all of a sud-
den you’re like networking with [bankers] and
having people who work there coming to talk to
you. And having these relationships with these
organizations is pretty cool.’’
Students at Stanford were no different in first
learning about finance and consulting jobs through
campus networks. Nirat, an East Asian American
student who grew up in an upper-middle-class
family, found out about consulting internships
through a friend his freshman year:
After I got [to Stanford], my friend was
like, ‘‘All right.’’ [We] went to the consul-
ting info session, and we’re like, ‘‘Yeah,
we’ll apply. Not many freshmen get it, but
it’s worth a shot.’’ And I applied, I prepared
for the interview, and I got [an internship].
And I got interested in consulting.
An engineering major, Nirat went on to say, ‘‘So
it’s not like I planned it, per se.’’ Since then, he
reported being interested in ‘‘tech, finance, consul-
ting. Maybe the combination of finance and tech,
maybe portfolio management software, high-
frequency trading, those type of things could be
interesting.’’
The experience of first learning about these
sectors once students got to campus was near uni-
versal. Of our 56 interviewees, only two respon-
dents—the children of parents who worked on
Wall Street—had any basic knowledge of the
world of finance as they entered college, and
none had any prior knowledge of consulting. Fur-
thermore, of the two students who did have some
familiarity with finance through a parent, one of
them—Katherine, a white junior from an upper-
class family with a concentration in the humani-
ties—said she learned most of what she knew
about these careers only after getting heavily
involved in her campus’s Women in Business
chapter. Upon joining the club, ‘‘I was totally
wholeheartedly undecided’’ about a first job, she
said, but after her experiences in the organization,
she planned to go through recruitment the follow-
ing year for a position at a consulting firm.
A junior at Stanford named Brianna, who
grew up in an upper-middle-class family outside
the United States, had a different reaction to
being introduced to these professions. This stu-
dent, who hoped to go into a creative-class
career, said she was ‘‘shocked’’ when ‘‘I was in
an English class and there were English majors
who were going into finance and consulting!’’
Although Brianna was not pulled into pursuing
these professions, her classmates’ discussions
gave her more information than she had ever
expected to have about these jobs. Omar, a Latino
senior from a working-class family, had an even
darker view of the dominance of these careers
at Stanford:
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Before I came here, I didn’t know what con-
sulting even was, or like investment bank-
ing. Those are two things I only learned
exist when I came here. . . . I didn’t know
what I wanted to do at all . . . and I figured
I could figure things out once I got here.
[But as for] other things, [the university]
just doesn’t really show you what career
possibilities are open to you.
Brianna and Omar outright rejected these profes-
sions, but many of our interviewees said the sheer
amount of information they obtained about these
fields led them to at least consider finance or con-
sulting as first jobs. This was true of students from
all social-class backgrounds, all races and ethnic-
ities, and men and women, although as Table 1
shows, working-class students and women were
less likely to consider finance. Fiona—a white,
middle-class student with a concentration in
a social science discipline—summed it up when
she said that as junior year rolled around,
I really had to decide. Like my best friend is
doing it, and my boyfriend is doing it, and so
many people in my social network are going
through this process. So . . . I had to be like,
‘‘Actually, I’m not going to do it.’’
In recounting the primacy of finance and consulting
on their campuses, these interviewees’ accounts
were typical of Harvard and Stanford students’
familiarity with these sectors. Nevertheless, we dis-
covered an additional well-known pathway for stu-
dents on these campuses: pursuing high tech.
The draw of high tech. High tech, especially
established social media firms, loomed large as
a career aspiration among our interviewees, in
part because these jobs seemed more exciting
than Wall Street and consulting jobs. Although
our respondents reported initially knowing more
about tech than about finance and consulting
(they had, after all, grown up with mobile devices
and Facebook), most students’ knowledge of high
tech came from a user’s standpoint, and they did
not know what these jobs actually entailed or
whether and how they could land such jobs. Wide-
spread campus discourses helped create excite-
ment for seeking employment in this sector.
This was especially true at Stanford, whose
reputation for launching some of the most
successful tech businesses in the world inspired
even students who had not come to Stanford plan-
ning to major in an engineering-related field to
pursue that path. Ellie, a mixed-race, upper-class
senior majoring in a basic social science disci-
pline, described how she became interested in
tech during her second year in college:
Just being in the dorm with . . . I remember,
like, being in the dorm dining hall and hear-
ing upperclassmen talking about their com-
puter science projects. There was this
vocabulary that I didn’t understand. I was
like, ‘‘I think they’re speaking English, but
I literally am getting no meaning from
what they’re saying.’’ And . . . I was like,
‘‘Oh, I want to learn this, I want to
understand.’’
As Ellie approached her senior year with her
social science major in hand, she decided to pur-
sue a coterminal master’s degree in a computer
science field so she could get a job in educational
technology.
Another Stanford student, Beau, suggested that
his school’s proximity to Silicon Valley created
widespread desire for jobs in social media firms,
because ‘‘people will be working at Google
down the street, or Facebook down the street—and
there’s just so much conversation [on campus]
about what that’s like.’’ This student, an engineer-
ing major from a white, upper-class family, said
that although ‘‘tech primarily draws from CS
[computer science] and engineering, it extends
beyond that by the nature of the fact that it’s so
close to here.’’ Beau’s classmate Amanda shared
more disparaging thoughts on the subject. A white
social science major who grew up in a working-
class family, Amanda criticized her classmates
for instrumentally positioning themselves for the
tech labor market:
There’s this ridiculous major called Sci-
ence, Technology, and Society, where you
can take very few tech classes and come
out with a tech degree . . . and everyone
does it because it lets them be a techie with-
out being a techie! . . . [They major in it] so
they can apply for jobs at Facebook and
Google.
According to Beau and Amanda, being on a cam-
pus where high tech is discussed endlessly leads to
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an expanded number of Stanford students wanting
jobs in that sector.
Although 3,000 miles away from Silicon Val-
ley, Harvard students were not immune to the
lure of high tech, and just as at Stanford, the drive
for these jobs was not limited to those with techni-
cal backgrounds. Noah, an Asian American senior
from a middle-class family with a concentration in
the life sciences, told us that Harvard students
talked about wanting jobs at social media compa-
nies, not only in the technical areas of ‘‘software
development roles or programming roles’’ but
also on the nontech business side as ‘‘data scien-
tists, [and in] corporate development and business
strategy.’’ Whatever the position being sought, the
rising status of high tech at Harvard was apparent
in our interviews. According to Foster, a white,
upper-middle-class junior with a concentration in
an engineering field, ‘‘Google, Facebook, McKin-
sey, and Boston Consulting Group’’ competed for
the greatest status on his campus. Kenny, an Asian
American junior whose immigrant parents were
now part of the U.S. upper class, agreed: ‘‘From
what I see, like, definitely Google and Facebook
have as much of a presence as Bain and Gold-
man.’’ Repeating these perspectives, but from
a more negative slant, Imogene, an Asian Ameri-
can engineering student from a lower-class back-
ground said, ‘‘If you want respect by name on Har-
vard’s campus, you go to Facebook, Google, and
Microsoft.’’
Interviewees on both campuses provided com-
pelling accounts that finance, consulting, and
high-tech careers held central positions on their
campuses. Although many in our sample chose
not to go into one of these sectors (reflecting sur-
vey trends at their schools), not a single person we
talked with remained unaware of these professions
while in college. Furthermore, of the respondents
who were not going into one of these fields, the
majority were still influenced to at least entertain
them at some point—something that cannot be
said for other paths.
Mechanism 2: Recruitment Frenzy
Triggers Competitiveness
In the previous section, respondents referred to
a few types of organizational structures that had
immersed them in conversations about finance,
consulting, or high tech on their campuses, such
as participation in a Women in Business chapter
at Harvard or choosing a major at Stanford
designed to prepare ‘‘nontechies’’ for careers in
high tech. But as we discovered, no campus struc-
ture—student organizations or course work—had
the power that on-campus recruitment did to direct
students toward this narrow range of fields. Kevin,
a white, upper-middle-class Harvard alumnus,
who was flown out ‘‘to New York like every other
day’’ for banking job interviews, called it a ‘‘wild
experience’’; other students shook their heads in
dismay as a small number of well-heeled firms
successfully recruited their classmates.
Rivera (2015:280) found that investment banks
and consulting firms spend ‘‘hundreds of thou-
sands to millions of dollars per year’’ to recruit
elite college students through receptions, presenta-
tions, and other posh events on or near campus,
including tens of thousands of dollars that flow
directly to career services centers to cover on-
campus re
´sume
´drops and space for initial inter-
views, among other services. High-tech firms are
newer to the game of formalized recruitment, but
they have similar processes. At technology-
focused campuses like Stanford, these firms forge
closer relationships with engineering departments
than with career centers. We will look at students’
experiences with each type of recruitment.4
Finance and consulting: Similarities at
Harvard and Stanford. Whether or not they
had personally gone through the process, many
of our interviewees were able to describe recruit-
ment for finance and consulting jobs in vivid
detail. According to Bastian, a white, upper-
middle-class Harvard senior,
If you look at the Harvard Office of Career
Services . . . they have an entire, I won’t call
it ‘‘department,’’ but an entire section
devoted to consulting. And then an entire
section devoted to finance. And then they
have not-for-profit as a general clump
[laughs], and then they have ‘‘other’’
[laughs harder]. And that’s literally how
they divide themselves!
Interviewees at Stanford made similar comments
about on-campus recruitment. Beau pointed not
just to the general divisions within the Stanford
Career Development Center but also to the
‘‘gold, silver, and platinum’’ payment system the
career center charged its well-resourced corporate
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partners, allowing certain firms greater access to
students than others. Billy, a mixed-race/Latino,
middle-class student at Stanford majoring in social
science, said simply that these firms used a ‘‘very
sophisticated recruiting engine’’ run by the center.
At both universities, recruitment begins at the
start of the school year. According to David,
a white Stanford alumnus from an upper-class
family,
Because Stanford starts so late . . . recruit-
ing starts right when you arrive. The first
day of classes, there was an information
session for Bain. . . . Then there’s like
a week or two of info sessions, and at the
end of those two weeks, by the end of that
time, for the Big Three at least—for Bain,
BCG, and McKinsey—the applications are
due. And then within a week you’re told
whether you have an interview or not.
The flurry of recruitment season led many inter-
viewees to describe simply falling into the finance
and consulting track. Nathan, a Latino alumnus of
Harvard who grew up in a middle-class family, said,
There was like this stampede to start apply-
ing, and it wasn’t [my] conscious decision
to pursue banking. It was more, I guess, I
mean, I hate to use the term ‘‘fear of miss-
ing out.’’ I didn’t know what I was missing
by not applying, so I ended up doing my
research and tossing my hat in, and secured
an internship my sophomore year. There
was less of a conscious effort to move
from a public service government-oriented
career to finance.
Similarly, a Harvard student named Blair reported
that he ‘‘never really saw myself doing finance,’’
but his plans changed senior year when the recruit-
ment season began. According to this upper-class,
white student, who described himself as always
having been ‘‘much more interested in creative
thinking’’ than in a banking job,
You get really excited with all the spirit of
recruiting when they come to campus. I’m
a very competitive person. So when every-
body’s talking about going to those; when
they say, ‘‘Do you want to go to those
recruiting events?’’ And when all of your
smartest friends start applying for these
jobs, you sort of wonder if maybe you could
do those jobs. So it’s sort of like something
that just naturally takes its course and you
get curious.
To sum up the story we heard many times, the vast
presence of on-campus, structured recruitment
every fall for finance and consulting gets students’
attention, plays on their competitiveness, and
leads them to apply for jobs that, only a year or
two earlier, they had never heard of.
Recruitment for high tech: Especially at
Stanford. As seen in the earlier excerpts, both
universities have an intensive recruitment process
for finance and consulting, if somewhat more
developed at Harvard. Conversely, both campuses
had tech recruitment, but it was more elaborate at
Stanford. We found that social media firms, in
particular, were able to snap up students, even stu-
dents who had not considered such careers before
they arrived at college.
Sara, an upper-class, Asian American immi-
grant’s daughter who had just accepted an offer
at a major social media company, described the
high-tech recruitment process at Stanford:
The way that recruiting works for computer
science is absolutely crazy. Basically, firms
sign up with the group called the Computer
Forum. They’re run by the CS [computer
science] department, and [the firms] pay
a lot of money in order to be able to attend
the career fair and then do an info session.
And so, fall quarter there are probably like
10 info sessions a week. . . . So you just
go into all those info sessions and it’s
kind of like a round of recruiting full-
time. It’s a lot of pressure to be like, ‘‘I gotta
just apply for everything now so I don’t
miss out,’’ right?
As Sara’s description reveals, recruitment for tech
jobs at Stanford—filled with numerous informa-
tion sessions, tight time pressure, and a fear of
missing out—closely resembles recruitment for
finance and consulting, although it occurs in the
computer science department rather than the office
of career services. The annual fees paid by some
industry partners at Stanford reach into the tens
of thousands of dollars, much like recruitment
for finance and consulting on both campuses.
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Linda, a white, upper-middle-class alumna of
Harvard, who had just received a master’s degree
at Stanford at the time of our interview, was able
to compare recruitment for tech jobs on both cam-
puses. Like Sara, she pointed to the intensity of
recruiting for such jobs at Stanford:
It’s just that [Stanford students] have been
exposed to completely different things in
terms of the whole ecosystem. Not neces-
sarily in terms of what they learn in the
classroom, but just in terms of how many
people are recruiting them for technical
jobs. . . . I don’t think so many people do
that at Harvard. It’s just culturally different.
At Harvard there’s more of a finance
recruiting machine.
Although underestimating the number of students
who do apply for finance positions at Stanford,
and the number of students at Harvard who
express interest in working at Google or Facebook,
Linda’s account pointed to the intensity of recruit-
ment for tech jobs at Stanford.
Other students spoke more negatively than
Sara and Linda about the prevalence of tech
recruitment in the Stanford ‘‘ecosystem.’’ Lorenzo,
a Latino Stanford alumnus from a working-class
background, said that the university did too little
for students in ‘‘fuzzy’’ majors while bombarding
students with opportunities in tech fields. ‘‘The
career fair,’’ he said, ‘‘is really not great. Basically,
tech companies are disproportionately represented
in the career fairs.’’
These examples suggest that a small group of
elite firms are well positioned to vie for college stu-
dents on these campuses. Recruitment for high
tech is not yet as developed at Harvard as it is at
Stanford—an important local variant, leading to
fewer first jobs in tech for Harvard graduates than
for Stanford graduates. Harvard is strengthening
its tech position, though, through the growth of
computer science course offerings and its newly
generous system (like Stanford’s) of funding stu-
dents who want to work on their own companies
through ‘‘innovation labs, . . . workshops almost
like ‘Startup 101,’ . . . and a venture incubation pro-
gram’’ (Kenny, Harvard). Harvard’s CS50: Intro-
duction to Computer Science class is now the
most popular class on campus (Mendez 2014). It
may just be a matter of time before the pent-up
desire for high-tech jobs at Harvard is matched
with opportunities through on-campus recruitment.
Mechanism 3: Internalizing Career
Prestige Triggers Insecurities
A purely structuralist account of recruitment would
emphasize how Harvard and Stanford—partnering
closely with elite firms—organizationally push
nearly half of their students into a narrow band of
first jobs. Such an analysis is accurate to an extent;
it is difficult to imagine that so many students would
gravitate toward so few professions were it not for
recruitment. Yet such an account is incomplete
without using a cultural lens to explore how students
actively make sense of recruitment processes on
campus. The disproportionate number of students
who take jobs in these sectors do not merely
move from their elite positions in college to elite
positions in the labor market just because the jobs
are there. Rather, students must come to attribute
prestige to these jobs once their university provides
access to them. As we will describe, our interview-
ees learned to value these positions because they
satisfied two major concerns. First, these jobs met
expectations for greatness that they believed their
universityplacedonthem,includingbeingableto
signal their worth to their peers. The second, seem-
ingly more prosaic, concern—yet one that created
almost existential angst for some—was to shore
up uncertainty. Of course, finding a first job that
offered geographic desirability, came with great
perks, and paid a high salary also figured into stu-
dents’ considerations. But these characteristics
were strongly associated with meeting institutional
expectations and finding a job with security.
The importance of prestige. Bastian, the
student who earlier described his career center’s
heavy tilt toward finance and consulting, talked
about the pressure to live up to the reputation of
his university. As the first member of his upper-
middle-class family to attend an elite college, he
said he did not have strong guidance from home
for what he might do with his Harvard degree.
He felt anxious at the start of his senior year, in
large part because he had been ‘‘very not
involved’’ in preprofessional activities during his
previous three years, and he had concentrated in
two liberal arts disciplines without clear voca-
tional application. To manage his apprehension,
he decided to go through recruitment for a consul-
ting job during his senior year. He explained,
I think a part of it actually has to do with
going through an elite institution, because
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I think there are certain expectations, or feel-
ing an obligation, that other people . . . kind
of place on you, right? . . . And you hear
those expectations of, ‘‘You should be doing
these big quote-unquote important things.’’
And oh, by the way, the way to do those
big important things is by making a lot of
money and getting a job that is recognized
as prestigious, as having that sort of social
validation of something that is worthy of
the education that is being invested in you.
When asked to identify the jobs that others at his
university recognized as ‘‘important,’’ ‘‘pres-
tigious,’’ and ‘‘socially validat[ed],’’ Bastian said,
I guess a good job means consulting or
finance because, well, look, that’s what
the Office of Career Services has. When I
talk to my peers, that’s what my peers are
talking about. For someone like me who
had very limited professional experience,
who didn’t really have any baseline for
what one could do, it was like, ‘‘Hey, I
just see that these are the things that people
from Harvard go do.’’
Nearing graduation from one of the top universi-
ties in the world, Bastian was unsure how to fulfill
his promise as a graduate of such an institution.
Like so many of his classmates, he reached for
a position that came prevalidated: consulting.
In a similar vein, Olivia, a middle-class, Asian
American engineering student at Stanford,
described how she and her classmates learned to
use the competitive recruitment system as a way
to evaluate one another’s success:
As soon as you enter the more senior
courses, [consulting] is what everyone is
talking about. And it sort of becomes this
affirmation for how you rank with respect
to your peers. . . . It sucks a lot of people in.
In the context of the highly competitive social
bubbles they found themselves in, both Bastian
and Olivia expressed doubt about whether they
measured up to their peers, and they grabbed the
clearest signals they could find—in their cases,
consulting. Kris, an upper-class senior, clarified
that the system works the same way for finance:
‘‘If you can get an investment banking job, . . .
like that’s an easy way to determine whether or
not you’ve had success in the job search process.’’
Pressed to say why that was, he explained quite
simply, ‘‘There’s a certain glamour that’s placed
on investment banking and management consul-
ting at Harvard.’’ Many of our interviewees,
including Bastian, were critical of these jobs’ sin-
gular ability to signal worth, but all acknowledged
that this means of assessment was a reality.
Fear of the future. In addition to finding
a sense of importance, affirmation, and glamour
in competitive first jobs, our interviewees said
that prestigious jobs also promise safety and secu-
rity. This sense of security may seem at odds with
the current cultural reverence for entrepreneurism
(and also the very real possibility of being ‘‘liqui-
dated’’ from a job on Wall Street; Ho 2009), but
many of our interviewees said that the safety and
security of established, heavily recruited-for jobs
was an important factor in their decision making.
Rahim, an international student whose family
lives in East Asia and who identified as working
class, spoke of the conservative turn he took as
he neared graduation:
Everyone has this ‘‘change-the-world’’ men-
talitywhentheycometoStanford....You
come in wanting to change the world and
then you leave wanting to work at McKin-
sey. So somewhere along the way what hap-
pens? You know? Something happens. You
get scared. You worry about security. You
realize you have a life that you have to build.
You get more selfish.
Kevin, the white, upper-class Harvard alumnus
who earlier described his recruitment season as
a ‘‘wild experience,’’ gave a remarkably similar
account of how concerns about future job security
pushed him and other students to define finance
and consulting as having high value:
The first week of freshman year, I don’t
think anyone ever says, ‘‘I want to work at
McKinsey.’’ But like it starts to be junior
year, and you start to worry about what
you’re going to do after college. Because
really, you don’t have any skills! Like,
maybe you studied English . . . I studied
economics . . . but it just starts to scare peo-
ple when you’re like, ‘‘I need someone
who’s going to train me how to do, like,
real things.’’ And that’s exactly what these
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investment banks and these consulting
firms are offering. They’re like, ‘‘We
know you’re smart. But we also know that
you didn’t study finance. So come here,
and we’ll teach you.’’ And that’s really
safe and appealing to a lot of people.
Nancine, a white, working-class classmate of
Kevin’s at Harvard who was about to enter her
senior year, painted the same picture. Worried
about what to do after graduation, she said,
One of the biggest draws is the financial
security that it brings. And I have to admit,
as a first-generation college student, the
temptation is there to start out at a consul-
ting firm, or a financial firm, and know
that there’s a great deal of security in that.
Although Nancine did not think she would enter
recruitment, she could empathize with other
first-generation students who did. That two low-
income students and an upper-class alumnus—dif-
ferentiated by university, gender, race, national
origins, and social class background—would talk
so similarly about the security of these jobs is
indicative of a prevalent discourse about the safety
of finance and consulting careers on elite cam-
puses that cuts across demographic lines.
Although one might expect to hear less talk
about job security among students seeking high-
tech jobs—especially at Stanford, where there is
a strong perception that students want to start their
own companies—we found this was not univer-
sally the case. Thad, a mixed-race, upper-
middle-class senior with a major in engineering
and a minor in a humanities field, was one of sev-
eral interviewees who readily dispelled that myth.
According to Thad,
There’s just, especially in tech, there’s a lot
of desire for stability. If you’re in tech, you
want to get paid a lot, and there’s a desire to
have that paycheck come in for longer.
Working for a startup can just be so unpre-
dictable, and you can be laid off in a month
or two months. And I think job stability
is—well, I know our generation is supposed
to not care about that, and not worry as
much as any generation previously. But I
still think it . . . is a large concern to have
a job that we know we can have for a few
years at least.
Thad said that although a lot of people come to
‘‘Stanford starry-eyed—hav[ing] heard of how
HP was started, and how Facebook was started,
and that’s what they’re going to be [doing]—in
a few years, with internships in the summer and
through their friends, they realize that like startup
life is indeed kind of crazy and kind of hectic.’’
Just as with finance and consulting, established
tech firms that were able to promise greater secu-
rity were a bigger draw to students.
Clear signaling of high status and security were
central concerns for students choosing their first
jobs, but they used a different definition to
describe their long-term goals. When we asked
students what they would like to be doing 5 or
10 years out, they said they leaned toward
‘‘impact’’ careers in health care, public service,
nonprofits, and education as well as careers that
foster independent lifestyles, such as journalism,
writing, art, or doing their own startup. Our data
dovetail with findings from the Harvard Crimson
survey of graduating seniors (Robbins 2014). In
that survey, students were asked which field they
were going into now and which field they planned
to be in 10 years from now. The top three ‘‘now’’
fields were finance (16.76 percent), consulting
(14.42 percent), and tech/engineering (14.81 per-
cent); the top three ‘‘10-years-from-now’’ fields
were health (15.92 percent), academia/research
(10.61 percent), and entrepreneurism (10.07 per-
cent). Finance and consulting, combined, consti-
tuted just 6.39 percent of jobs students said they
wanted in 10 years. In our sample, the belief
they could later get the career they really wanted
undergirded interviewees’ justifications for taking
jobs they felt compelled toward now—jobs that
shored up prestige and kept fears of the inscrutable
job market at bay. As Harvard’s Foster said,
‘‘More often than not . . . students say, ‘I’m going
to go work for McKinsey for two or three years so
that I have more time to figure out what I’m ulti-
mately going to be doing.’’’ Students’ fears of the
future led them to first jobs that pointed toward
clearer pathways—pathways that were intention-
ally laid out by their universities and a short list
of companies with the resources to do so.
Mechanism 4: Status Boundaries
Trigger Narrowing
Harvard and Stanford provide easy shortcuts to
ambitious students. They offer structured
Binder et al. 33
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recruitment for a handful of professions, leading
students to quickly learn about the existence of
these sectors. The intensive competition of this
recruitment creates a pervasive career prestige
system on campus that elevates the status of these
types of jobs.
The flip side of this career prestige system is
that students use it to measure the worth of all other
jobs they might have considered right out of col-
lege. By asking our interviewees to distinguish
between high-status and ‘‘ordinary’’ jobs—in
much the same way that Lamont (2009) pressed
professors to define ‘‘excellence’’ by inquiring
about research projects that lacked quality or dis-
tinction—we found that our interviewees used the
characteristics of high-visibility jobs to assess all
other jobs, even jobs in fields they felt passionate
about. We discovered that these assessments did
not simply mean avoiding distasteful jobs, as our
interviewees regularly reminded us that the jobs
considered most elite often carry unsavory undersi-
des—long hours, incessant Excel and PowerPoint
work, exploitation, and feeling like a meaningless
cog in the machine on Wall Street (see also Roose
2014). Rather, low-status jobs were those that stu-
dents described as ‘‘traditional’’ or that did not nec-
essarily require an elite education or, more to the
point, that did not recruit on campuses such as their
own. The boundary dividing high-status jobs from
ordinary ones was ‘‘incubated’’ on these two elite
campuses (Stevens et al. 2008); students were
mostly unaware of the line separating them before
they got to college.
Colin, a white, upper-class alumnus of Harvard
who had recently begun graduate school in a social
science field, said,
All right, I’m self-aware enough to know I
sound like an asshole, but jobs that people
did not look highly on was, like, my one
friend who went and just got like a normal
CPA [certified public accountant].
Colin also described ‘‘just being’’ a teacher or
a social worker, or taking a job in a nondescript
business for a no-name company, as being low sta-
tus. Edward, a Harvard student from a working-
class Latino family, put a similar spin on jobs con-
sidered beneath the level of his university, saying,
‘‘It seems like I’m not reaching my, sort of, capac-
ity if I just go to, like, a more traditional job.’’
Izzy, an upper-class, white woman who had
just graduated from Stanford, reported what it
felt like to be on the receiving end of the prestige
system that Colin and Edward invoked and in
which she, too, reluctantly participated. As a stu-
dent who majored in a nontech discipline and
who was going into a nontech field, she felt over-
shadowed by her classmates:
I don’t bring anything to the table. I’m
unqualified, I didn’t do CS, like I don’t
have a skill like CS, or I’m not an engineer.
Like, I’m useless.
Continuing this train of thought, Izzy described
how the career status system at her university
caused her to abandon earlier plans for what she
would do after college. ‘‘I care deeply about edu-
cation and education equality,’’ she said, ‘‘but I
didn’t go into a [teacher] credentialing program
[after graduation] because I feel that pressure as,
like, ‘You can’t just be a teacher after graduating
from Stanford.’’’ Despite not wanting a tech
career, the co-construction of prestige on her cam-
pus created insecurities that led her to recraft her
options. Her plan now is to get a master’s degree
so she can work in a foundation or manage a char-
ter network.
Another characteristic of ordinary jobs was,
quite simply, that they did not recruit on elite cam-
puses. Franklin, a white, upper-class rising senior
who had not yet decided which career path he
would follow, said, ‘‘To be honest, Harvard is
inundated with so many top-tier consulting firms
and stuff, I’m not even sure I’d know what a medi-
ocre firm is.’’ He added that a ‘‘mediocre’’ firm
would probably be the ones that don’t come
to Harvard. Like, just like your standard
office job. Maybe even some boutique con-
sulting firms I would say would be consid-
ered . . . a more mediocre position. To be
honest, any firm that recruits at a state
school I tend to be more skeptical of.
According to Franklin’s candid assessment, presti-
gious firms were firms that competed in fall
recruitment season; ordinary firms were those
that did not. Before coming to college and observ-
ing his senior classmates, Franklin did not know
about this difference.
In summary, students constructed some jobs as
prestigious and others as beneath the level of their
interest through a combination of four mecha-
nisms. Students entered college with little career
34 Sociology of Education 89(1)
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knowledge but quickly picked up signals across
campus about a few key industries and companies.
This was amplified by the structured recruitment
frenzy each fall term, during which younger stu-
dents watched their older peers compete for cov-
eted positions. Students’ observations of others
obtaining prestigious positions triggered their
own insecurities about doing highly valued things,
especially as graduation neared. Eventually, many
students went through the structured recruitment
process for these select industries, but even if
they did not, all students learned the status bound-
aries between what is elite, what is acceptable, and
what is simply too ‘‘ordinary’’—effectively com-
pleting the process of career funneling that limits
the options of many students from elite schools.
CONCLUSIONS
The mechanisms we outlined here have several
major implications. First, we found that student
career aspirations are not simply the result of indi-
vidual preferences but are heavily influenced by
organizations and the actors inhabiting them. Sec-
ond, this construction process takes place in large
part after admission to college, which means uni-
versities are the organizations exerting key influ-
ence on specific job trajectories. Third, this is
not simply a structural story of the effects of orga-
nizational ‘‘pushing’’ or job market ‘‘pulling.’’
Rather, we argue that much like Willis’s (1977)
analysis of how young working-class men come
to construct the meaning of factory work as desir-
able jobs, students in elite universities must
actively construct the meaning of certain jobs as
‘‘prestigious’’ before they can pursue them in
such large numbers. The essential insight in Wil-
lis’s (1977:103–104) classic ethnographic study
of low-status jobs in blue-collar towns, that
‘‘labouring—itself meaningless—must therefore
reflect aspects of the culture around [it], if it is
to be valorised,’’ pertains equally to locally con-
structed understandings of high-status jobs in elite
universities. This cultural construction primarily
manifests in the peer prestige system that develops
on campuses, with its ranking of careers and com-
panies as well as its drawing of the collectively
understood lines that delineate ordinary from
high-status jobs.
In short, college campuses are central in career
formation, at least for initial forays into the labor
market. We do not deny the influence of class
background on students’ career aspirations. How-
ever, we think it is imperative to recognize that
campus environments, or university fields of
power, have a large, independent role in the pro-
duction and reproduction of social inequality.
We have shown that students on the same campus
narrow their aspirations to a select few careers,
even though these students come from diverse
backgrounds. Ignoring or downplaying universi-
ties’ influential capacity limits our ability to
explain social inequality.
In particular, we show how institution-level
similarities facilitate student chartering to
similar-status-level career paths across our two
campuses and across class lines. These institu-
tion-level similarities arise because Harvard and
Stanford are situated in the same dominant stratum
in the broader fields of occupations and higher
education and share strong isomorphic tendencies.
The insights of inhabited institutionalism and
other cultural-organizational approaches to higher
education underscore the centrality of these pow-
erful institution-level forces, but they also point
to the power of local contexts to alter meanings
of prestigious pathways, even if only subtly. Har-
vard students still slightly favor finance and con-
sulting careers over tech; the reverse is true at
Stanford. But even this difference may erode in
coming years, as the arms race toward tech contin-
ues to mount.
The jobs that particular cohorts view as the
most valuable change over time—for instance,
elite students no longer aspire to careers in law
in as great numbers, and interest in finance has
decreased postrecession. Yet the mechanisms we
describe suggest that the few professions that stu-
dents construct as the most prestigious are gener-
ally the same across campuses that share parallel
positions in the higher education field, even if
they vary somewhat from one site to the next.
We chose to focus our analysis on elites. This
design limits our ability to say much about how
colleges shape career paths at other types of higher
education institutions. Nevertheless, this narrower
focus on elites is important, because it shows how
culture and organization combine to create defini-
tions of worthy careers at one of the key sources of
occupational stratification—elite campuses, where
elite educations are leveraged into elite
occupations.
In addition to providing an understanding of
how students construct shared meanings of career
prestige at elite universities, we also outline an
Binder et al. 35
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important component of how the reproduction of
class inequality is sustained at the highest levels.
Occupations function as the leading construct
undergirding class divisions in the United States
today (Weeden and Grusky 2005). Finance, con-
sulting, and high-tech careers are well represented
among the highest compensated individuals in
society, including in the top 1 percent. The fact
that a huge number of elite college undergraduates
end up in these few powerful and highly compen-
sated jobs reproduces patterns of power and priv-
ilege. Leaders of top firms in these fields often
preferentially recruit alumni from their own alma
maters because they value the signaling
cachet—to clients and competitors—that comes
from employing alumni associated with top cam-
pus brands. Placing their graduates with top corpo-
rate firms also benefits campuses—from both
a marketing and a philanthropic position. Both
sides benefit from a circular process of mutual
brand status baptism. Companies that want to
break into this cycle have to overcome the existing
inertia.
The issue goes beyond industries and incomes.
We find it problematic that a very small group of
extremely well-resourced companies (e.g., Mor-
gan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bain, McKinsey,
Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) can gain such
outsized influence on the cognitive landscape of
elite college students, precisely at the point when
students are just shaping their career aspirations.
This is particularly true at universities like Har-
vard and Stanford, which many students dream
of attending their entire lives. Currently, Harvard
and Stanford facilitate structures and environ-
ments that encourage students to enter sectors
that have all-too-recently demonstrated their lack
of concern for other people and for society itself.
Moreover, emphasis on these careers systemati-
cally puts smaller companies and startups at a dis-
advantage on elite campuses, even within the same
sectors. This crowding out may be stunting the
innovation and growth of these fields by funneling
some of the nation’s top students elsewhere. The
current system also pulls students away from other
professions that may provide greater fulfill-
ment—public service, arts, education, and tradi-
tional corporate management, to name a few.
There may be some change on the horizon. The
director of the Career Development Center at
Stanford, Farouk Dey, in a recent interview with
a reporter from the Stanford Daily (Svoboda
2014), said that he recognizes the problems
created by structured recruitment for finance, con-
sulting, and high tech:
Students tend to go into these sectors
because of their interests . . . but also some-
times because those are the opportunities
that come their way. We recognize at the
career center that there are underrepresented
fields in the career centers in terms of job
postings and representation. . . . We are cur-
rently redesigning our program in order to
meet these demands. Within a couple of
years you should see different numbers.
Only time will tell if Dey’s optimism will pan
out. If it does not, elite private universities, such as
Harvard and Stanford—which have been complicit,
if not outright active, in funneling inordinate num-
bers of students to a narrow band of high-wealth
jobs—will continue to curtail their own students’
creativity, leech talent away from other sectors,
and contribute to economic and social inequality.
RESEARCH ETHICS
Our research protocol was reviewed and approved by the
University of California, San Diego, Institutional
Review Board. All human subjects gave their informed
consent prior to their participation in the research and
adequate steps were taken to protect participants’
confidentiality.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to the Kauffman Foundation, the Spen-
cer Foundation, and the University of California, San
Diego, for their generous support of this project. We
would also like to thank Steven Teles, Paul Glastris,
Kevin Carey, Phil Longman, Jessi Streib, Lauren Rivera,
Kim Weeden, Mitchell Stevens, the anonymous
reviewers, and Rob Warren for their comments.
NOTES
1. Student self-selection into organizations does not cre-
ate a substantive methodological bias in this case, as
the vast majority of students at elite universities
belong to organizations. Because these campuses do
not offer business majors for undergraduates, stu-
dents with business interests must use campus organ-
izations to express and develop those interests.
2. For example, a respondent who is considering both
tech and consulting would count for each career.
Similarly, many respondents had double majors or
coterminal master’s degrees (at Stanford). Students
36 Sociology of Education 89(1)
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with majors in two separate areas (e.g., humanities as
well as science, technology, engineering, and mathe-
matics) count for both percentages. Students with two
majors/degrees in the same area are not double-
counted for that area.
3. Aiden, like all other names of interviewees, is
a pseudonym.
4. Unfortunately, a close historical account of how
firms’ recruitment activities evolved at Harvard and
Stanford is beyond the scope of this article.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
The online appendix is available at /soe.sagepub.com/
supplemental.
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Author Biographies
Amy J. Binder is a professor of sociology at the Univer-
sity of California, San Diego. She is the author of multi-
ple articles and two books, including Becoming Right:
38 Sociology of Education 89(1)
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How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (2013) with
Kate Wood. Her research centers on the intersection of
group culture and organizational structures in education
institutions and other organizations.
Daniel B. Davis is a PhD candidate in sociology at the
University of California, San Diego. He was previously
a research fellow with CREATE (the Center for
Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teach-
ing Excellence) at the University of California, San
Diego, and is the author of The Adjunct Dilemma
(2015), a monograph exploring the labor conditions of
adjunct faculty members at teaching institutions. His
research interests are in the areas of higher education,
student career formation, and organizational culture.
Nick Bloom is a graduate student in the Department of
Sociology at Duke University. He studies the interdepen-
dence of individuals, organizations, and institutions.
Binder et al. 39
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