In the 1970s, one in twenty Harvard graduates went into finance or consulting. In fact, the fields of finance, consulting, and technology combined accounted for 53% of Class of 2025 careers. Princeton University similarly produces around twenty management consultants per thousand graduates. Elite colleges are pipelines to such careers, and that is no coincidence. More importantly, elite schools like Milton serve as the first stage.
To avoid any confusion, I would like to clarify that I do not believe ambition is the problem. A teacher who moves to a low-income district to build a program from nothing is ambitious. A public defender who takes on a case they know they will lose because principle matters more than record is ambitious. Ambition is simply the desire to do something difficult that you believe in.
On the other hand, prestige—a form of respect, admiration, and status that society awards—often wrongly disguises itself as purpose. Within the walls of an elite school such as Milton, students wrongly and discreetly strive for prestige, disguised in the language of “rigor” and “opportunity.”
To find out why so many choose to enter these industries, Simon van Teutem, an Oxford graduate who declined jobs from McKinsey and Morgan Stanley, spent three years conducting 212 interviews with bankers, consultants, and corporate lawyers. What he concluded in his book The Bermuda Triangle of Talent is both straightforward and devastating. Rather than money, social standing and the belief in “infinite choice” attract young professionals to prestigious companies. Van Teutem asserted that leading businesses have discovered how to exploit the psychology of the so-called “insecure overachiever”: a student who, throughout their life, has striven to rise to receive external validation and cannot stop, fearful of asking themselves what they truly want.
Additionally, an investigation by Slate into career choices at Harvard found that students described consulting not as a calling but as a “safety net.” In other words, consulting was a structured path that deferred the seemingly terrifying question of what to do with their lives for students, reinforcing the uncertainty Van Teutem alluded to. Moreover, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences found that 47% of college students change their primary major by graduation, a switch that underscores the idea that many may enter university with convictions shaped by conditioning rather than by curiosity or true passion. Thus, academic institutions may push students toward conventionally prestigious career choices.
By extension, prestige chasing becomes more than just a university problem. At schools like Milton, which “feeds” countless students to elite universities, the same gravitational pull operates years before any Goldman Sachs recruiter shakes a student’s hand. By the time a Milton graduate arrives at their dream university, they already have a fully developed instinct toward prestige and mastery over the ability to choose activities based on how they look rather than how they feel. After only two years at a school with so many successful and extraordinary students, I have already learned that some lives are worth more than others, not in the direct language of salary but in the softer languages of impressiveness and selectiveness. The filtering of young students by prestige begins in these hallways at Milton, long before the campus career fair in the senior year of college.
The industries that elite graduates flock toward produce the very inequality that Milton’s DEIJ talks and Harkness-table discussions critique. Chicago University Professor Steven Davis found that private equity buyouts result in average job losses of 4.4% within two years, while workers’ wages fall by 1.7%. Three years after a deal, employees at bought-out firms earn almost 18% less than comparable workers elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam) reported that global billionaire wealth surged to a record $18.3 trillion in 2025, and their wealth is growing at three times the previous five-year average; the twelve richest individuals combined now hold more wealth than the poorest half of humanity combined. The prestigious careers that Milton students aspire to build, manage, and sustain this concentration of wealth.
In a non-sentimental way, I implore students to dare to be unprestigious—to be unconventionally ambitious. The nurse practitioner serving a rural community, the public school teacher shaping first-generation students, the lawyer keeping a family in their home; these careers are not consolations for people who could not succeed in finance. They are careers that actively reduce inequality rather than compound it. Though not as economically appealing or conventionally prestigious, we must dare to want a life with a genuine purpose over one that is merely impressive.