Opinion | LinkedIn, Goldman, Econ: Careerism Is Destroying College Culture - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The recently publicized tensions on college campuses, particularly those in the heavily scrutinized Ivy League, are among many forces at play for students today. But there’s another that has not yet captivated the news cycle.
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It’s called pre-professional pressure: a prevailing culture that convinces many of us that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures
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This pressure is hardly exclusive to Ivy League students. In the 2022-23 academic year, 112,270 students majored in computer science, more than double the number nine years earlier.
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It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.
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Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.
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Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.
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In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.
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The interview process for Cornell’s Undergraduate Asia Business Society includes entering a pitch-black lecture hall, having a projector light shone in one’s face and yelling responses to questions. Getting into Yale isn’t enough: Its investing club turned away 236 applicants in 2022.
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Once one snags a spot in a club, it’s straight to LinkedIn. Nearly 20 percent of people on the site are between the ages of 18 to 24, making the platform an incubator of young adult FOMO
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I wondered how I missed the memo that I needed to take microeconomics. This fall at Penn there are 672 seats in the course; as of Monday, only four had not been taken. Does everyone like economics that much?
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When I first got to the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, it felt like a daily pop quiz, one where I was graded on a language I still struggle to speak.
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I heard students say things like: I think I want to work in mergers and acquisitions. Do you have any interest in that? It’s very competitive, just so you know. And: Unless it’s Goldman or J.P. Morgan, who cares?
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There, we stress over whether our headshots look too high school (at the age of 18) and race to the coveted over-500-connections designation.
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It sounds silly — in hindsight, it was — but that is how I felt when I was surrounded by thousands of intelligent classmates competing for the same handful of results. I’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. from the recurring nightmare that I didn’t land an internship my junior year summer
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I heard people, maybe friends, endlessly discussing the “only way” to be successful. I consoled a sobbing roommate after she failed to land the job her parents expected her to get.
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But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020.
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Naturally, when thousands of students rush into the same handful of majors and professions, supply cannot possibly meet demand. That’s particularly true now, as openings for postgraduate tech industry jobs advertised on the student job board Handshake decreased about 30 percent this spring from the prior year
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Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.