‘Dores, it’s recruitment season again.
Walking around campus, you’re sure to see it: the black and navy-clad swarms, resume workshops packed to the brim, group interviews and LinkedIn updates. It’s a mania, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. Not just why so many people want to join certain pre-professional fraternities or clubs, but why they are passionate about their chosen fields.
Think retrospectively: why do you do what you do? What gets you up in the morning? What do you hope to accomplish?
Gets you thinking, right?
When I ask those questions to my classmates and friends, there is a sort of non-response that prevails. A response about the flexibility in the industry they are going into. Or, more often:
“Optimization; versatility; career advancement.”
That is when I shift gears and ask them instead what they wanted to do before coming to Vanderbilt. When they were green and new to campus. And this is where I start to get real, non-stock answers.
Maybe they wanted to build something. Solve a particular issue. Be a teacher. Create a foundation. Raise money for a cause. Write a novel. Save lives.
So, what happened? It is clear that for some, somewhere between then and now, a sense of purpose was lost. Something happened to make us — and yes, I say “us,” because I’ve experienced this dilemma too — reprioritize away from our true passions in the direction of stability and “career advancement.” And I am going to go out on a limb and say that that something is productivity culture, a craze that has swapped out our generation’s definition of a life well spent for a life well optimized, regardless of what field you are in.
This is not to say that wanting success and money are inherently bad things. As a first-generation student who comes from a working-class background, I am the first to acknowledge the importance of money and that I also actively aspire to it. Wanting to be paid well for your work is not a moral failure. But that is not the issue. The issue is that our generation has stopped treating “does this pay well” and “does this actually matter to me” as separate questions and has instead started substituting the former for the latter.
That is where we start running into problems.
There are a couple of useful terms for what’s happening here, and they essentially describe the same phenomenon from different angles.
The first comes from the historian Rutger Bregman, who calls it the “Bermuda Triangle of talentIn his view, there are certain industries that swallow up talent in the form of ambitious college graduates from elite schools. A Bermuda Triangle where potential goes to die. The second term was coined by sociologists at the University of California San Diego, who call it “career funneling.” After interviewing students and recent graduates at Harvard and Stanford, they found that many arrived on campus either with big dreams or none at all, only to be aggressively recruited by finance, consulting and technology firms. Eventually, they not only began to aspire to those jobs but began to view other careers — like teaching, public service and social work — as bene
What Bregman and this team of sociologists all recognize is that ambition does not disappear in college, but it certainly gets redirected. Where it gets redirected to is often a matter of time, socialization or field of study. But the funnel itself is consistent across all of these factors. The problem is that there is something key that falls out of the funnel.
So, what is it?
Bregman calls it moral ambition.
Moral ambition is not a synonym for low pay, and it is not a requirement to sacrifice stability. Instead, it is the drive to use your skills and career on problems that affect society on a broader scale.
Contrast that with the current state of the workforce. According to a study by Dutch economists fittingly titled “Socially Useless Jobs,” roughly 25% of workers in 47 of the world’s wealthiest countries either doubt the meaningfulness of their job or outright admit that it is meaningless. What troubles me more is that this level of awareness exists at Vanderbilt, too. People already sense this lack of meaning for themselves. Ask around and you will find plenty of people willing to call their own job, major or five-year-plan nonsense.
When we think about the word “ambition,” perhaps it once held connotations of being capable, being useful, being impressive. But it seems that our generation is suddenly more concerned with being capable, useful and impressive looking. People will spend real effort workshopping a LinkedIn post about the “key lessons learned” from an internship they privately think was pointless or try to quantify their impact on a resume when they secretly think their work has no value at all.
Who cares about actually growing or helping others around us, right? If there’s no number or bullet point we can ascribe to it, it might as well be dead weight. This is the prevailing mentality within higher education and the workforce.
A quote from the aforementioned UC San Diego study describes this phenomenon of bypassing one’s values perfectly.
“Everyone has this ‘change-the-world’ mentality when they come to Stanford…. You come in wanting to change the world and then you leave wanting to work at McKinsey.”
And hey, there is no inherent issue with wanting to work at McKinsey. But is that what you actually want to do with your life? If the answer is yes, then carry on. And yet, something — probably the frenzy of recruiting, career fairs or info sessions — tells me that, for some, a given career path is more about going through the motions than wanting to do something meaningful.
If you need further convincing, just look towards these industries’ turnover in students’ long-term plans. Vanderbilt’s 2024 senior survey indicated that 17% of graduates going into the workforce would pursue finance, 15% technology and 11% healthcare. Similarly, Harvard’s 2025 senior survey found that 21% of graduates would immediately go into finance, 18% into tech and 14% into consulting. But when those same seniors were asked where they saw themselves in 10 years, only 8% said in finance. Fewer than 1% said consulting.
When I first saw this, I was appalled. How could it be that the industries people fight tooth and nail for have such awful retention? Admittedly, there is some nuance — these fields famously operate under an “up-and-out” model, wherein you are basically expected to leave if you don’t get promoted. But I can’t help but wonder how long people are meant to stick to the script.
Maybe it is smart to put your passions on the backburner, but is that really reliable? What happens when we condition a generation to measure success via numbers and promotions and then pivot into fields that don’t use the same metrics? Moral ambition has no quantifier. There is no salary threshold that tells you that you’ve contributed something meaningful, no measure for whether you’ve changed somebody’s life or grown as a person.
To the Vanderbilt community: I am not asking you to reject the internship offer or delete LinkedIn to go and start a nonprofit. All I ask is that you interrogate why you want what you want. If you want to work in finance, why? If you want to become a doctor, lawyer, professor or engineer, why? If the answer always goes back to prestige or the fact that everyone around you keeps telling you to do it, maybe sit with that discomfort for a while.
So, by all means, recruit. Put on the navy suit. Go to that coffee chat. Apply for the internship. Dammit, go make a lot of money! Be disgustingly well-educated and successful. But please do it because you want to. Don’t get so good at climbing the ladder that you forget who you are or where you’re going.
