Only 66 Percent of Harvard Graduates Make the World a Better Place

Management consulting may not be the most meaningful job in the world. That probably didn’t come as a surprise, but here’s something that might: even years after that two-year stint at Bain Capital, around one third of Harvard graduates struggle to find meaning in their careers.

In a survey of 1.4 million college alumni conducted by PayScale, only 66 percent of Harvard alumni responded ‘yes’ to the question, “Does your work make the world a better place?”. While we managed to outpace our usual competitors Yale and Princeton (65 percent and 57 percent respectively), a school’s prestige correlates little on this scale with the amount of future job satisfaction its alumni find.

Higher hopes for career fulfillment come from practical, skill-driven majors one is hard-pressed to find in the Ivy League: medical fields, nursing, social work, and education, to name a few. The schools that produce the highest percentage of satisfied alumni aren’t the ones you’d usually find on the cover of U.S. News & World Report: Loma Linda University, University of Texas Medical Branch, and Thomas Jefferson University topped the list with 91 percent, 88 percent, and 86 percent of alumni responding ‘yes,’ respectively.

In many ways, this study seems to have simply confirmed what we all already knew: it’s hard to find an inspiring, meaningful profession that brings in enough Benjamins to support that luxury cruise to Saint-Tropez that you’ve always dreamed of. And for those with the means to climb the corporate ladder, the opportunity cost of “wasting” Ivy League cred on an unglamorous career in social work seems too high to pass up the chance. Last May, 30 percent of Harvard graduates with jobs upon graduation went into consulting and finance. Countless more have just begun or soon will enter law school to prepare for a career that is tied with fast food cook for least meaningful profession.

Apparently, while a liberal arts education has ostensibly prepared us to choose a meaningful life path, it’s also given us the flexibility to walk straight in the other direction. Unless, of course, you’re a biology concentrator hoping to make it in a “medical field.” If there’s one lesson to take from this, it’s that the pre-meds are onto something.