What Harvard Should Learn About Moral Ambition

Harvard students shouldn’t need to swim against the tide to choose public service.

This fall, The School for Moral Ambition announced a fellowship that seeks to draw students away from lucrative corporate careers by offering $15,000 to 12 Harvard juniors to work at “high-impact” nonprofits. In the words of co-founder Rutger Bregman, high-paying careers in finance, consulting, and corporate law constitute a “Bermuda Triangle,” with a large concentration of college students inevitably being sucked into one of these three elusive trajectories.

We agree: Too often, students take these jobs for the security and clear routes they provide — but no one should sink into the “Bermuda Triangle” for the sole reason of safe passage. Harvard should take heed and cement pathways to assuage students of the instability of public service.

As it stands, a career in finance is a relatively stable, well-trodden path available to Harvard students. An internship in the summer after junior year — often secured as early as the fall of sophomore year — can lead to a return offer after graduation, providing students with financial security and peace of mind only weeks after they declare a concentration.

A career in public service on the other hand, does not always showcase such a stepwise trajectory. Finance and consulting recruit early — both in the internship application cycle and a student’s four years. Public service opportunities, on the other hand, require students to take a risk by waiting longer to know where they’ll spend their summer, and longer to know where they’ll work after college.

If students want to pursue finance because they love spreadsheets and generating capital, that’s one thing. But research suggests students often enter college without any knowledge of finance or consulting — indicating that these firms are simply better at preying off of student insecurity.

When students choose a “Bermuda Triangle” career only because of better advertising, Harvard has the opportunity and responsibility to intervene.

The School for Moral Ambition offers a model for action. A well-paying, trademark internship occurring the same summer that your peers are working at their future finance firms levels the prestige gap between public and private pursuits. If the application numbers are any clue — apparently 8 percent of the junior class — the fellowship is at least nudging Harvard students towards careers in public service.

So even though the fellowship is limited in scale to a select few students, we welcome its work to divert talent from the allure of finance or consulting. Harvard’s existing attempts at competing with the corporate world could learn from the fellowship’s visibility and its engagement of students’ desire to be impressive.

Still, the fact that it takes large sums of money, exclusive admission, and fancy branding to attract Harvard students is indicative of the larger cultural issues of Harvard’s careerism: prestige for prestige’s sake and money for money’s sake.

There are a number of common-sense reforms that Harvard can implement to reign in this careerism, some of which already have begun.

First and foremost, recenter rigor. When classes aren’t rigorous, students spend their time on high-commitment pre-professional organizations. That’s in part because the devalued grades drive students towards extracurriculars as means of proving themselves. Should attempts to disinflate grades succeed, careerist clubs will find it harder to steer students towards finance and consulting before they have had the opportunity to explore anything else.

From the jump, the admissions office should prioritize students committed to public service. In order to do this, the office must examine what actually predicts the likelihood of students entering public service rather than trust that Common Application essays always tell the truth.

Other changes could include utilizing the Mignone Center for Career Success to guide students towards — and meaningfully support — careers in public service. Harvard should add more public service fellowships to give students a clear entryway into valuable careers while partially mimicking the stability that the corporate world offers.

After all, Harvard should already be a school for moral ambition.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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