Our Best and Brightest Bankers

Last Thursday, less than a week after Drew Gilpin Faust ended her 11-year stint as president of Harvard, Goldman Sachs announced that she was joining its Board of Directors. It’s the first post-presidency appointment for Faust, who is the third woman on Goldman’s board. But the first question that Goldman received from The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, was about her salary, not her gender.

“I mean, is that really what you’re going to focus on?” replied Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, who holds two Harvard degrees.

Um, yes. All of us should be focusing on that.

Over the past few decades, in fact, elite American universities have transformed themselves into recruiting agencies for the banking and consulting industries. We talk a good game about diversity and social justice, touting our growing numbers of female and minority students. But we channel everyone into a narrow occupational niche, which anoints future scions of the One Percent.

Nearly a third of Harvard’s graduating seniors in 2014 took jobs at banks such as Goldman Sachs or at consulting companies like McKinsey. And 70 percent of Harvard seniors submit résumés to financial and consulting companies.

At my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania, 42 percent of 2016’s graduates took a job in one of those two industries. You can see them walking to campus interviews every spring in their crisp business attire. But they don’t look very happy. According to research by the sociologist Amy Binder, most elite-university students who enter finance and consulting aren’t especially excited by those fields. They do it because it’s lucrative, and — most of all — because everyone else seems to be doing the same thing.

Banks and consulting firms pay big bucks to get access to students’ email inboxes. They buy the most prominent tables at employment fairs. They sponsor the most extravagant parties and dinners. Throw in the prospect of a six-figure-ish starting salary, plus the envy of their peers, and it’s too much for most students to resist. They’ve already been socialized to compete for the best colleges, the best grades, the best summer internships. The plum finance or consulting gig is the obvious next prize.

What’s wrong with that?

First, it defies the social-justice storyline that universities love to spout. Each year, at convocation and graduation, we urge students to make the world a better place. But does anyone honestly believe that funneling big fractions of them into banking and consulting will do that?

Ditto for our rhetoric about “finding your passion,” a mainstay of the upper-middle-class college-application essay. And yes, of course, colleges should help students discover what they love to do. But if we encourage them to take jobs that they do not and will not love, we’re doing exactly the opposite of what we say.

Most of all, though, the fetish of finance and consulting puts the lie to the liberal-arts ideal at the heart of undergraduate education. We require students to take a wide spectrum of courses because we want them to think critically about what Aristotle called “the good life,” the one that is worth living.

Then we go ahead and answer the question for them, by showering them with high-end amenities (see: climbing walls) and by rolling out the red carpet for the highest-paying employers. What’s a good life? The life with lots and lots of nice things, of course.

In an era of declining economic opportunity and skyrocketing student debt, we shouldn’t be surprised that more and more young people look to the bottom line. But we also shouldn’t be in the business of encouraging that, over other life goals.

If we teach students that more is better, they’ll be less inclined to select professions that aren’t as lucrative. And they’ll also be less likely to discover a path that sustains their souls, instead of just lining their pockets.

Which brings us back to Lloyd Blankfein, who scolded Harvard student journalists for inquiring about how much Drew Faust will be paid at Goldman Sachs. Instead, he urged, they should ask why she chose his firm in the first place. And the answer, he said, lies in the special history of Harvard and Goldman Sachs: Over the years, Blankfein noted, many Harvard students have worked at Goldman after graduating.

Well, duh. But why do they do that? If you think it’s because they want to change the world or find their passion, I’ve got $500,000 in restricted stock units to sell you. That’s what Drew Faust will receive each year from Goldman Sachs, along with an annual retainer of $75,000.

Nice work, if you can get it. And I’ve got nothing against Drew Faust, who has every right to enrich herself in whatever way she chooses. I just wish we weren’t teaching our students to do the same thing.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016).