As Ivies push graduates toward careers in consulting, finance and technology, Class Action organizers are questioning their schools' corporate partnerships.
Nathan Hale statue in front of Connecticut Hall on the Yale University campus.
(Arnold Gold/Getty)
What percentage of Harvard College's applicant pool comes from low-income families? The dinner debate over this issue, led by Professor Evan Mandery of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, quickly led to a broader debate about what kind of actors elite institutions were, who they served, and how complicit they might be in the erosion of social mobility. In 2022, Manderi published Poison ivybook addressing the growing wealth inequality in America's elite academic institutions, and he co-founded Class action next year. The organization asks students, academics, and everyone in between to consider what elite universities owe to students and their communities.
Of course, Mandery is not alone in asking these questions. In 2015, Daniel Davis, Nick Bloom and Amy Binder, a member of the Class Action board of directors,studied results of postgraduate employment of graduates of Harvard and Stanford universities, revealing the pattern of the “career funnel”. Despite the variety of majors and initial career aspirations, graduates of elite universities were disproportionately willing to accept offers in the fields of consulting, finance and technology.
For example, in Princeton, between 2016 and 2024, the school career center reported that the largest industry to which graduates are sent first is finance, followed by technology and consulting. At Harvard, about 64 percent of the Class of 2024 are pursuing careers in these fields.
This pattern surprises many students who don't consider themselves tech bros. “I didn't even know there was such a strong channel for funding and advising. I think that's true for a lot of students,” said Zane Keery, a first-generation Amherst College Class of 2024 graduate and student at Princeton Theological Seminary. “You’ll meet a few people who come in and are going to work in finance,” Keery said, but that’s not the norm at all.
In 2026, graduates will likely enroll in worst college job market in the coming years, and for many, this career may seem like the safest path to financial stability.
Stanford, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, serves as a major recruiting center for companies located nearby. Mandery explains how these universities exchange job contacts and host these types of job fairs, allowing companies to establish corporate partnerships early on. “When Goldman comes to town, there will be a reception at the Charles Hotel,” Mandery said. “And that is not the case if you are interested in working under the New York Urban Teaching Fellows program.”
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This trend didn't happen by accident, and it's not that elite universities only recruit students who are already interested in these fields: there's a broader pipeline pushing unsuspecting students into these careers as soon as they set foot on campus. “Working in conjunction with universities, employers in banking, consulting and high-tech are selling students on the path to an elite lifestyle,” says Class Action, “selling their students to the highest bidder.”
This pattern prompted Kiri, as well as Emily Hettinger, a Yale graduate, and Turner Van Slyke, a Stanford sophomore, to begin organizing group activities. In November, these students gathered at Yale to “reimagine the academic-social contract” during the organization’s second annual conference, “Reimagining Elite Higher Education,” which followed its first conference at Brown University last year.
The class action proposes a new “social contract”—an exchange between elite institutions and the communities they serve—“that restores public trust by placing inclusivity over exclusivity, public service over private gain, and opportunity over inherited advantage.” Because the public provides tax breaks, prestige, and federal funding, these schools should be held accountable for developing leaders, promoting innovation, and serving the public good in return. While the Trump administration's war on higher education is certainly undermining—and perhaps irrevocably destroying—this historic contract, these universities still retain enormous power over the creation of indicators of the status and educational aspirations of the people who attend them.
However, through group action, students are organized so that these schools can do much more than just produce management consultants. Their priorities include ending career funnels and legacy applicants, and creating a fairer admissions system overall. “America’s trust in these institutions has plummeted,” Class Action writes. “Now, outside actors are exploiting public distrust for political gain, threatening academic freedom and the ability of universities to promote critical research and open intellectual exchange.”
As one of the first students from her high school to attend Yale, Hettinger described coming to the university from public school as an “incredibly disorienting experience.” Students who enter these universities with the promise of a premium education instead find it tainted by elitism. “I quickly realized that something was missing between Yale’s stated ‘mission’ of spreading goodness and creating leadership in the world and actual student outcomes.”
Students like Van Slyke, who came to Stanford hoping to make a difference in their communities, often find that public service careers are pushed under the rug in favor of those represented by leagues of prominent corporations on campus. Hettinger described how she had just looked at Yale University's career portal, where students could find resources for internships and jobs. Almost all articles are devoted to technology, finance and consulting. “There is not a single article about how you can pursue a career in public service.” Instead, these students are funneled into business development associations, consulting clubs, and finance and technology clubs, which provide “the status that comes with admission… and promise huge profits to people working in these sectors,” Van Slyke said.
For freshmen entering college with experience in a variety of extracurricular and creative projects, these pipelines limit what success looks like and what metrics prove a student is successful on these campuses. “Many people seek to validate their position and the institution of higher education by seeking to join the student groups or organizations that have the most influence and are the most well-known on campus,” Van Slyke said.
While it might be easy to assume that students from lower-income backgrounds now have a chance to find pathways to wealth mobility through these institutions, this is not always the case. Mandery explains that “when investment banks and management consulting firms recruit, what they're really looking for is drinking buddies and playmates.” In fact, the types of students that are recruited and offered are disproportionately large. from rich families.
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After the November conference, the next step for participants is to bring what they have learned back to campus. Although the movement has brought together students from all over the country, its goals are much more local. “The reason people are so disappointed with these universities,” says Hettinger, “is because they don’t serve the cities they live in, don’t pay taxes, and don’t support local ecosystems.”
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