One of the frustrations that I consistently encounter when I visit college campuses is that most all of the companies that are recruiting look like each other. If you dont want to work for an investment bank or management consulting firm, theres not much there for you in career services.
There are six default paths if youre a smart kid right now (stats from Harvards class of 2011 used for illustration):
1. Finance (17%)
2. Law (20%)
3. Management Consulting (12%)
4. Med School (15%)
5. Grad School (9%)
6. Teach for America (4%)
For the average senior, its a pretty limited range of paths to choose from. Almost 80% of the class is accounted for before anyone has gone to work in industry, or any company thats not providing professional services. If you try to discern how many graduates are going to start-ups each year, its minuscule.
Professional services firms invest millions annually in recruiting our best and brightest. There is literally a Goldman Sachs room in Columbias career services building. Every top student knows the names of all of the big banks and consulting firms by their junior year.
But banks, law firms, and consulting firms all need clients – companies that hire them to transact. Even if your sole concern is the health of, say, financial services, youd recognize a need to have a robust group of smart people starting companies and working at start-ups each year. Someone has to grow and then hire the bank.
Additionally, professional service firms are congregated in a handful of cities (New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington D.C. being the most prominent). If our talent is similarly concentrated, it’s leaving most of the country to fend for itself.
Were training our smart people to analyze, process, assist, and transact but not build. We have blood flowing to the appendages but not to the vital organs.
Imagine if the same proportion of talent that is currently going to finance, consulting, and/or law instead went to start-ups and growth companies around the country. If you had 49% of Harvard graduates heading to biotech, renewable energy, Internet, green manufacturing, education technology, nanotech companies, etc. How long would that take to have an impact on job growth and national competitiveness? I believe it would take less than a decade to see hundreds of companies and thousands of jobs take form.
I obviously think that start-ups are a great place for smart people to go. The job changes, you have a chance to have an impact and believe in your work, and the reward is commensurate to what you produce and how much value you add. Youre trying to create something and bring it to the world.
But what I would LOVE to see would simply be a country where people do what they were meant to do. Where people choose to be bankers because they really enjoy putting prospectuses together and building financial models, not because it seemed like the thing to do or because Goldman has an effective recruiting arm. Same for law, medicine, consulting, education, start-ups, etc. Success needs to be defined by and for each individual.
Our country has the finest university system in the world. Tens of billions of dollars of public money and tax-exemptions go into it each year. What comes out should be more than a question of which organizations and industries have the savvy and resources to recruit effectively. If we were to allocate our talent more effectively, it would go a long way toward addressing much of what we’re concerned about economically and culturally.