Deming Calls Recruiting Timelines a ‘Collective Action Problem’ With No Easy Fix

Harvard College Dean David J. Deming said at an open forum on Thursday that he was worried about the pressure early recruiting timelines for finance, technology, and consulting jobs place on undergraduates, but saw no clear way to address the problem.

Deming said the compressed timeline — with recruitment for those industries beginning as early as sophomore fall and some students preparing as freshmen — was limiting Harvard students’ ability to explore other careers, especially those in the public sector, which tends to hire closer to graduation.

“There are some students who are open or curious to other careers, but because of this timeline issue, in that they feel the need for closure,” Deming said. “It’s like, ‘If I don’t have a job by my sophomore year, I’m cooked.’”

He said he had heard the concern from parents, students, and recent alumni, many of whom urged him to intervene.

“Many people, especially people from outside the student body, want me to do something about it. They want me to ban on campus recruiting or something,” Deming said.

But he said such a policy would be nearly impossible to enforce. If Harvard unilaterally barred early recruiting, he said, firms would simply hire more students from peer schools.

“If we ban recruiting and then — pick your hot company — OpenAI, or something, goes and hires a bunch of Yale grads, and doesn’t hire any Harvard grads because we didn’t let them on campus, people would have my head,” he said.

He described the situation as a “collective action problem” with no easy fix.

“I don’t have a strong sense that I’ll be able to solve it,” Deming said. “But I would like to.”

More than a third of seniors in the Class of 2025 reported entering finance or consulting after graduation, according to The Crimson’s senior survey — far outpacing the share going into public service or nonprofit work.

Deming said the imbalance was not, in itself, the problem. He said he had no interest in steering students toward particular careers.

“I would never presume to tell a student what they should do with their lives,” Deming said. “It’s your life. It’s your decision.”

Deming said Harvard could do more to expose students to a broader set of career paths, noting that many successful alumni had followed winding routes to the work they ultimately pursued.

“‘It’s not like they were like, ‘Okay, and then I went to go work at McKinsey, and then I did this and I made partner,’” Deming said. “They kind of floated around and figured things out, and then once they found the thing they were really good at and they loved, it was all systems go.”

Asked whether he had discussed the issue with his counterparts at the Ivy League deans’ conference held at Yale last weekend, Deming said recruiting had not come up in any depth.

“Not really, not that I can recall,” he said. “I don’t know that anybody has a solution.”

He said a coordinated pullback across peer schools would, in theory, benefit everyone.

“If we could actually say, okay, all of us collectively, ‘We’re gonna hold hands and promise, pinky promise, that we’re not going to recruit for the first two years of college,’ I think you would enjoy it. I think we would enjoy it — I think it would be better for everybody,” Deming said.

But he said antitrust law made such an agreement impossible for universities to reach in practice.

“Suppose at the Ivy Dean’s conference, we decided we were going to enforce some rule — that’s a violation of antitrust law, actually,” Deming said. “So we can’t do that. We can’t actually reach a binding agreement collectively, which makes it even harder.”

Deming said the strength of the market for Harvard graduates ultimately constrains any push for reform.

“The reality is, our students are very lucky. Our students are greatly in demand,” Deming said. “I acknowledge the problem and I wish we could do something about it, but I admit I find it daunting to actually solve.”

—Staff writer Sebastian B. Connolly can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at sbc.23. Follow him on X @SebastianC4784.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at ser.85. Follow her on X @summerellenrose.