The Edge

From the outset, I have to acknowledge an irony in this week’s guest column about the perils of “early-birdism”: The author, David Wignall, had just graduated from Williams College when he submitted a very polished essay for our contest over the summer. With a background in financial journalism, another clip from a national publication (he has also written for The New York Times), and plans to go into management consulting, Wignall is very much living the early-birdism he describes.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen to him. I recognize the students Wignall describes from my visits to high-end universities — and I often worry about how these students, the caste of the nation’s future leaders, are internalizing the purpose and meaning of a career. (That concern is both for these elite students and for the people who might have to work for them someday.) Wignall’s essay also touches on some of the pressures students are facing on some campuses — like the competition to get into select campus clubs tied to a professional aspiration.

We rarely hear directly from students in the pages of The Chronicle, so it’s a pleasure to offer a platform to a recent college graduate here.

Why competitive college students feel they’re falling behind before they’ve even begun

by David Wignall

I first met James in October 2024, my senior year of college. I had just finished a summer internship at a management-consulting firm. James, a freshman who had set foot on the campus of Williams College barely a month before, wanted to learn more about my experience.

James and I soon became friends. He told me he desperately wanted to be an investment banker. He had already won admission to one of the competitive pre-professional finance clubs at Williams. Now he was working on securing a summer internship in private equity. Each week, he met with a large group of other freshmen to study accounting — the better to prepare for high-stakes interviews. His social media feed was full of finance influencers; his mind was, too.

But, James told me, he was worried. He felt he was falling behind.

For years, observers have been sounding the alarm about careerism on college campuses. At hyper-selective institutions, the numbers are huge: More than half of the graduating class at Harvard is going into consulting, finance, and tech. At Dartmouth, 49 percent of the class of 2023 worked in finance and consulting right after graduation.

Personally, I think concerns over career choices are overstated. I chose to pursue a career in consulting, and I know well the reasons why students follow such a path. Selective colleges are intentionally seeking out ambitious, hardworking, and competitive teenagers. Fields like investment banking and consulting offer high-paying jobs, a pathway to opportunity, and a fast track to new skills.

Crucially, they also provide an easy-to-understand roadmap. Investment bankers know, roughly, what role they’ll be playing two, four, even 12 years after graduating (analyst, associate, hopefully partner). Other jobs provide no such clarity. (After two years at a climate nonprofit, what then?)

‘Early-birdism’

But the rise of careerism is symptomatic of a broader trend: On some of today’s college campuses, students are learning that it pays to commit to a path as early as possible. It’s a culture of “early-birdism” — if you’re not early, you’re late.

It starts even before kids get to college. A teenager hoping to get recruited to play varsity baseball at Wesleyan should have started practicing while in elementary school — there are very few “walk on” athletes anymore. Admissions officers search for high-school seniors with “spiky” resumes: In other words, they want 18-year-olds who found their passion at age 14 or younger. Applicants are encouraged to apply early decision, or early action, or early decision II. The University of Chicago has even created a system in which high-school seniors can submit applications on September 1. (“Earliest decision,” anyone?)

Then, when freshmen arrive on campus, it’s often straight onto the career treadmill (Williams hosted its career fair on September 12 this year). Just look at investment banking, a field that employs a large share of Ivy League graduates. To land a job, students usually need to spend the summer after their junior year working at a bank. But applications for those internships are often due 15 to 18 months ahead of time. That means candidates start submitting applications in the fall of their sophomore year with the hope of landing a full-time job 30 months later.

(That isn’t even the most extreme example. I know women who participated in Goldman Sachs’s early-analyst program, which takes place after students’ sophomore year. Many of them started preparing for their interviews just months into their college experience.)

Corporate recruiting practices obviously contribute to the culture of early-birdism that hangs heavy in the air on some college campuses. But corporate careerism is far from the only culprit. Students hoping to join campus clubs had better join them fast: Many, like improv and mock trial, host highly competitive application processes in early September. And social media — LinkedIn and Instagram, mostly — allow teenagers to see in real time every milestone their most decisive peers attain, whether in investment banking, pre-law, or pre-med.

Academe isn’t blameless either. In my experience, the college-application process rewards students who present a compelling “life story” — a neat narrative that ties together their academic pursuits, upbringing, hardships, and extracurricular activities. But that often isn’t what the life of a teenager looks like. Young people naturally live scatterbrained lives; they develop obsessions and fall out of love with them just as quickly.

I worked as a private college tutor for many years. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Crimson Education, a leading college-counseling service, captures the sentiment expressed by the nearly $3-billion industry well: “Optimize childhood by starting to build skills and interests years before high school.”

Much of this early-birdism is a simple consequence of a highly competitive environment. As more and more students vie for a limited number of slots, it pays to have the best possible qualifications. The student who became interested in legal work at 22 will not have as lengthy a resume as the one who found the same passion at 18. Overwhelmed recruiters can expend resources to find the diamonds in the rough, but why not just pick from among the polished diamonds?

And, to state the obvious: This is a cultural phenomenon affecting a slim fraction of the populace. Forty-three percent of the nation’s undergraduates attend community college; 20 percent are parents; 26 percent take their courses exclusively online. The financial-services careers that hire early birds employ only a tiny fraction of the work force. There are jobs that aren’t ultra-competitive and there are colleges beyond the Ivy League.

But, as hyper-selective institutions come under increasing scrutiny, it’s worth considering what effect early-birdism is having on students cloistered in ivory towers who, one day, may help shape this nation’s social fabric.

First, early birds sacrifice breadth for depth. Time spent coffee-chatting, interview-prepping, and credential-amassing is time not spent wandering through the library stacks, attending classes, or having other formative experiences.

Second, early-birdism lessens professors’ ability to meaningfully shape the trajectory of their students’ lives, or at least their first steps in the broader world. If a student commits to her career in sophomore year, how can her senior-year instructors move her?

Third, early-birdism favors the privileged. I attended a private high school, and as a result of that education I knew to apply early decision to college — and I knew how to hit the ground running once I arrived on campus. For students who get to campus and struggle, the flurry of bewildering early deadlines — for both clubs and jobs — can just add to the mounting stress. A single bad grade from freshman fall means a lot when recruiters have only two semesters to examine.

Now, it’s still absolutely possible for latecomers to flourish while climbing the rungs of the meritocratic ladder. Many of the most successful people in the world came to their careers later in life, or stumbled into their passion by total coincidence. Life is long: Students who miss out on a sophomore-year deadline will still be okay.

My concern is cultural. The more early-birdism becomes embedded in campus culture, the more students will feel pressured to join the race. And as they enter the ranks of the early birds, campuses will have fewer latecomers, wanderers, and indecisives who may stumble into something great.

David Wignall was a member of the Class of 2025 at Williams College, where he studied history and economics. He has interned in finance and financial journalism and plans to work in management consulting.

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