The Corporate Raid on Campus
Finance industry recruiters are starving critical fields of talent and steering an entire generation into soulless jobs.
From the April/May/June 2025 print issue of the Washington Monthly:
Finance industry recruiters are starving critical fields of talent and steering an entire generation into soulless jobs.
by Zach Marcus
Click here to read this article on washingtonmonthly.com
Like many incoming freshmen, Audrey arrived at Middlebury College without a clear plan for her future. “I knew pretty much nothing about finance,” she admitted. “I watched Succession.” But she was certain about one thing: securing a successful, well-paying career during college was nonnegotiable. After attending a high school with an “extreme amount of wealth” and now navigating a similarly privileged environment at Middlebury as a student on financial aid, she felt constantly reminded, “Shit, I need to make money.”
Although she had previously explored opportunities in public law—volunteering at a free legal center where she simplified legal documents to make them accessible for young people and interning at a court—at college it was hard to resist the pull of the finance recruiting machine. Jokingly dubbed the “Middlebury Mafia,” the school’s finance network is vast and the on-campus recruiting is intensive: newsletters, information sessions, networking breakfasts, and even curated trips to New York City, where students meet Middlebury finance alumni and get a taste of their world (parties included). “I signed up for all the career center materials, but finance was the only thing I saw,” Audrey told me.
As we sat at the campus café—the go-to spot for finance “coffee chats,” a thinly veiled audition where younger students feign interest in older ones, hoping for a future referral—Audrey explained that she had barely settled into Middlebury before feeling pressured to pick a path. Banks push for the earliest access to top talent, creating “an expectation that you go into your first semester and know exactly what you want to do.” And finance tells a compelling story: land an internship, perform well, and you’re set with a high-paying job and unmatched exit opportunities. So, with all her friends also getting involved, she decided to give it a shot, joining a student-run investment club, where she learned how to analyze a discounted cash flow and structure a leveraged buyout. Fast-forward a year, and Audrey’s now in the thick of recruiting season, hoping to land a coveted “bulge bracket” investment banking internship. (Because she doesn’t want to burn bridges with the big banks, she asked me not to use her real name.)
We at the Monthly have long raised alarms about the college-to-finance pipeline. Ezra Klein reported on the problem in 2012, and Amy Binder, the Johns Hopkins sociologist who has pioneered the study of career “funneling” into finance, warned in our pages in 2014 that corporate recruiters were making off with Harvard’s talent. Yet read those articles today and they feel almost quaint. Roughly one-fifth of students at highly selective universities now go into finance. The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2023 that the industry is beginning to recruit summer interns 18 months before they’re expected to start, in the first semester of sophomore year. Meanwhile Goldman Sachs announced that applications for its internships have increased sixfold over the past decade, with the bank only accepting .80 percent of those applicants—and a mere .33 percent of full-time job candidates. Students today are expected to join finance-related extracurriculars, build networks of hundreds of people, learn financial modeling, practice case studies, and prep for a series of technical and behavioral interviews. “It takes up more time than school,” Audrey confided. “It feels like if I’m doing schoolwork then I’m wasting time which should be recruiting focused.”
Some of this modern frenzy can be traced to student demand. The skyrocketing cost of elite college has forced many students to meticulously calculate the financial returns of their degrees. Housing prices in major cities are near all-time highs, pushing those who dream of living in glamorized metropolises toward the high-paying careers that make it possible. Finance, perceived as the most desirable and stable sector among 18-to-25-year-olds, has naturally become a focal point for competition. Beyond material pressures, there’s a deeper generational shift in how young people value money. The annual American Freshman Survey shows that a significant surge in students aspiring to become “very well off financially” occurred between the 1970s and ’80s. That trend has culminated, according to another survey, with Gen Z claiming they need nearly $600,000 to feel “successful”—about half a million more than older generations.
And yet, according to Binder, who has studied the finance pipeline at Harvard, the dominance of finance recruitment at elite universities isn’t just driven by economic or cultural factors. Instead, she identifies a phenomenon she calls “career funneling” as the real driving force. According to Binder, “student career aspirations are not simply the result of individual preferences but are heavily influenced by organizations and the actors inhabiting them.” Binder argues that finance firms leverage their clout with elite universities to create high-stakes “status tournaments,” where students—most of whom already spent their high school years fiercely competing to earn a spot at an elite university—come to see finance as the inevitable next rung on the overachievement ladder they’ve been climbing since childhood. Career funneling has long been a feature of elite universities, though the favored industries change over time. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, the most sought-after careers on elite campuses were at the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency—non-remunerative fields that complicate the functionalist narrative between top wages and job seekers. To Binder, the real allure isn’t the work or even the lucrative salaries but the “halo effect” of having beaten out the competition, a continuation of the hypercompetitive ethos that defines elite institutions. Audrey agreed: “I’m a competitive person. This kind of seemed like the next big competition.”
The effect of this recruiting system is to channel students into a field for which they have little genuine interest or aptitude. A 2008 survey by The Harvard Crimson revealed that half of the university’s students planning to go into finance or management consulting—an industry with a nearly parallel trajectory—would choose a different career if financial concerns weren’t a factor.
While it may be hard to muster sympathy for these students—after all, a privileged yet unfulfilling life is hardly the worst fate—the broader societal implications are far more concerning. Leave aside the fact that the modern finance industry is a force that exacerbates inequality, stifles corporate innovation, and inflates systemic risk. The bottom line is that it is also among the best paths to accumulate wealth, and today entry to this exceedingly remunerative career is largely saved for students who already come from the wealthiest backgrounds. Brilliant and equally qualified students at less selective colleges are not cut in on the riches. That in itself is an outrage.
But the loss to society is greater still. When a disproportionate share of the wealthiest and most academically credentialed graduates flock to finance, other vital professions are left starved of the talent and prestige they desperately need. For instance, at Harvard, more students in 2020 entered finance than academia, the health industry, public service, or government combined—some of which face looming worker shortages.
Thanks to the financial recruiting funnel, a whole generation of America’s most competitive and expensively educated students are missing out on a vast range of personally fulfilling, societally useful, and reasonably remunerative jobs. Instead of becoming junior analysts at Goldman Sachs, students could be getting in on the ground floor of microchip companies that are building new plants under the 2022 CHIPS Act. They could address the climate crisis by working on the cutting edge of battery storage, geothermal, and distributed energy—or by becoming federal energy regulators and helping to pave the way for electric transmission lines for solar and wind. They could protect the environment at the Nature Conservancy or defend women’s rights at EMILYs List. They could join start-up firms trying to commercialize lab-grown meat. They could do their bit to help solve the housing crisis by finding employment at real estate firms that are turning empty downtown office buildings into residences and constructing apartments on commercial strips in the suburbs. They could seek jobs at one of the many for-profit and nonprofit health care organizations trying to transform primary care for the better. They could go to work for blue-state attorneys general who are bringing lawsuits against the Trump administration’s unconstitutional actions.
Instead, they are being herded like sheep into jobs that are likely to put money in their pockets but suck their souls dry.
Click here to finish reading this piece on washingtonmonthly.com
Zach Marcus is a former intern at the Washington Monthly and a junior at Middlebury College.
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