As a sophomore, I found myself interviewing for a position at Goldman Sachs with an enticing paycheck. I came to Stanford to study and fight the climate crisis, yet I was aspiring to spend my summer at a bank that has $19.44 billion in fossil fuel investments with an average 98-hour work week. 

Around the same time, I watched a friend who, less than a year prior, had vowed they would never work for McKinsey — suddenly applying for a McKinsey summer internship. I felt crazy, like we had been possessed to apply to jobs that fundamentally contradicted our values. 

You don’t get into Stanford writing about your dreams of becoming an investment banker, management consultant or military drone engineer. After all, the student quoted in Thursday’s controversial San Francisco Standard article said that “she didn’t dream of one day working in national security.” Stanford claims to want big thinkers, changemakers, do-gooders — people who will advance the founding mission of the University to “promot[e] the welfare of people everywhere.” 

Yet, the majority of us (54%) go into careers in technology, consulting and finance–fields known for their high salaries. 

Why is it that big dreams are cast aside for the salary and status that comes with work we don’t genuinely care about (or convince ourselves that we do)? What happens between the time that we write about our world-changing aspirations, to exiting Stanford with high-earning jobs in finance, consulting, big tech and defense?

It turns out that students at other elite institutions were calling out this same phenomenon almost 15 years ago. And 10 years ago, it got a name: career funneling.

Here’s how it works. As the “best and brightest” students, we are the crown jewels of the world’s most lucrative companies, be they Goldman Sachs or Palantir. These companies have developed sophisticated tactics to convince young career professionals that their jobs are the ones we want and deserve, and massive recruitment budgets allow them to monopolize attention on campus, outcompeting other employers — in the public sector, education and non-profits — who lack the same resources. 

High-wealth firms know how to capitalize on our uncertainty and anxiety about our futures, offering “stable” options with early recruitment cycles. They capitalize on our competitiveness with coveted recruitment spots and on our status-consciousness with competitive pay.

And if we make it to the final interview, they’ll fly us out to New York City to stay in luxury hotels and give us several hundred dollars to spend for the weekend: all to give us a quick taste of the high-roller lifestyle.

But they don’t do it alone. Our institution systematically advances career funneling. Stanford was one of the first elite institutions to establish corporate partnership programs (CPPs). CPPs give companies special access to Stanford students, especially ambitious yet unaware underclassmen who are compelled to get their hands on a high-caliber internship ASAP as newcomers to the ever-pervasive Stanford imposter syndrome. This special access comes with a high price tag that these corporations can afford to pay our University, while more impactful and less profitable organizations cannot.

Career funneling has far-reaching effects. The climate crisis, widespread inequality and an eroding democracy are issues that define our generation. How can we possibly tackle them as consultants, big-tech software engineers and private equity analysts strapped with 60+ hour work weeks?

Procrastinating your socially impactful career isn’t going to do the trick. Research has found no evidence that high-wealth careers hold any advantage as launching pads into impactful work. We are being streamlined away from positive social impact careers in a time when we need to be pursuing them the most.

Some of us choose jobs to support our families in need, but given the fact that more Stanford students hail from the top 1% than the bottom 50%, these students are in the minority. After all, my parents, first-generation Turkish immigrants, worked corporate jobs that enabled them to immigrate to America, financially enabling me to attend Stanford.

At one of our peer institutions, Harvard, students coming from the bottom 90% of the income distribution are 1.5 times more likely to choose public sector and non-profit careers compared to students from the top 10% of household incomes (based on the 2024 Class Survey and economic diversity at Harvard where roughly half of students also choose careers in finance, tech and consulting at a comparable rate (50%) to Stanford students). 

Your career choice is arguably one of the most important ethical decisions you will ever make. On average, you will spend 80,000 hours of your life working on whatever mission you so choose, which is not something to approach casually or surrender to the allure of a six-figure salary. You owe it to yourself to thoughtfully interrogate the forces that brought you to grind so hard to get into this school — and those that brought you to McKinsey, Meta or Palantir’s doorstep.

My friends who chose slightly unconventional paths — those founding nonprofits, launching edtech companies, developing solar tech for communities in the Global South, managing art studios, researching racial bias in AI and providing legal aid to underserved communities — have exemplified to me what it means to pursue meaningful work. Not coincidentally, they are also much happier than my friends working hellish weeks in finance and consulting.

The bottom line: we shape our campus culture through what we collectively value. Rather than celebrating the ivory tower experiences of high-earning summer internships, let’s celebrate how we and our peers contribute positively to society. The privilege of a Stanford education begs the question: as the fortunate few, how can we do better?

Nazlı Dakad ’24 M.S. ’25, Alyssa Murray ’26 and Sebastian Andrews ’25 are members of Students for Equitable Education at Stanford and organizers with Class Action, a national nonprofit organization founded by Stanford grad, Ryan Cieslikowski ‘23.