Opinion | Careerism Is Ruining College

When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

I never daydreamed about hiding in the library bathroom, crying because I had just been rejected from an undergraduate law journal.

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.

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. It is an inescapable part of the current college experience, like tailgating or surviving on stale dining hall food. It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

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. In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

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.

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.

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. 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.

When I doom-scrolled LinkedIn, I wished I was like my classmates, posting about their prestigious internships and gathering validating likes and comments. Unfortunately, I knew my state government internship was a scarlet letter of inadequacy. My classmates seemed to think the world comprised investment bankers, management consultants — and everyone else.

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.

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?

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?

I later learned that according to student lore, if you do well in microeconomics and macroeconomics, then get accepted into one of the selective finance clubs, you have a chance of internally transferring to Penn’s Wharton School, the most prestigious undergraduate business school in the country. A Wharton degree, popular superstition had it, was akin to buying a home in the Hamptons and sending your kids to one of the Phillips academies.

Responding to the pressure, I took microeconomics. When I did well on my first midterm, I realized that I could perhaps earn some respect from my peers by winning one of the few transfer spots into Wharton. Then I remembered I had no interest in business.

I wanted to go to law school, so I applied to Penn’s Undergraduate Law Journal. During my callback interview, however, I failed to prepare questions for my interviewer, wrongly believing questions would be a nuisance. When I got a rejection email, I was crushed. I felt like law school was now an impossibility.

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. 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.

There is some economic reality behind the madness.

Real wages have remained moribund since the 1970s, a hard pill to swallow in the face of the last several years of inflation. Today’s young adults feel worse off than their parents because their salaries no longer buy a suburban starter home with a picket fence. House prices have outpaced inflation, making homeownership a bigger challenge. Gen Z-ers have more student loans than millennials, and big, corporate salaries seemingly promise a salve for all one’s financial worries.

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. Almost two-thirds of college students have reported feeling “overwhelming anxiety” within a given year, and experts have pointed to the cocktail of coursework, pressure to participate in extracurricular activities and concerns over choosing a career as causes.

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. Job openings in the financial sector are similarly declining. Consulting firms have cut numbers of new hires and delayed start dates for undergraduates with offers.

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.

Then there are the parents, who have enormous influence on their children’s career choices. Take a deep breath. A kid’s first word doesn’t need to be “revenue” or his first language Java. It’s hard to not want the best for your children — and not to define it as them starting the next Amazon. But stop and think about what actually makes them happy and keeps them sane, not what you think will keep them safe.

As for me, I was wrong: My failure to get admitted to the law journal in college didn’t prevent me from getting into law school. I’m now a second-year law student and a member of my school’s law review, and still cannot confidently define management consulting.

But as soon as this essay is published, feel free to check out my LinkedIn post about it.

Isabella Glassman is a second-year student at Brooklyn Law School. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2023.

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