I don’t mind at all if a kid enters college saying “I want to get rich,” and then pursues that path. (I may mind if a college accepts too many of those kids, but that’s a different issue.) And I certainly don’t mind if a kid who goes to college wanting to be a poet comes out understanding that he also needs a paying job. When I wrote what I wrote about Harvard, I was really thinking of four kids I know who went there in the past 15 years:
1 -- The best at everything, first in the class by a mile, natural politician. The kind of kid where the principal writes, "I've been here 30 years and this is the most impressive student I have met." Going into college, the stated career goal was to get an MD but also to be involved in politics and health care-related public policy. Solid middle-class family, immigrant parents with low-level professional jobs. Came out of Harvard an associate at an ultra-high-end private wealth management firm.
2 -- Incredibly impressive kid who immigrated to the U.S. at 14. English the kid's 4th language. Very, very competitive, outworked everyone. STEM-oriented, wanted to get an MD/PhD and cure cancer. Parents were academics in their home country, barely-getting-by blue collar workers here. Was accepted at a top-level MD/PhD program out of Harvard, completed her Biology PhD but only one year of medical school. Went into a McKinsey summer program at one point during graduate school, and took a full-time position there.
3 -- Rich, lefty kid whose parents were a history professor and a socially-minded housing developer. A wonderful writer, full of beautiful ideas about policy, philosophy. Very academic. Won a Hoopes prize for a senior history thesis on public orphanages in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, also a secondary concentration in studio art. Took a job at Bain, then cycled into Silicon Valley venture capital.
4 -- Resident alien from a high-income, professional Japanese family. Not the best grades, but the most impressive intelligence in the high school class. Beautiful, conceptual mathematician. Went directly from Harvard to law school, working as an international business lawyer.
To be fair, I know other Harvard kids in that generation who didn’t go for the bucks, who got PhDs in academic subjects. But none of the many other kids I know from my kids’ cohort had what seemed to be such sharp deviations from who they seemed to be before college. (Sure, I know, kids change majors all the time, but they don’t change personalities.) And in almost all other cases where a kid did something surprising out of college, it was a swerve away from the mainstream and comfort.
None of these kids had to worry about making a living. Rich or poor, they were (are) so far outside the norm in terms of intelligence and capacity for work that employability was simply never an issue. It is a little disappointing to see them cashing in on their talents so aggressively. Now, it may be unfair to say Harvard made them do it, but I just didn’t see that kind of flip in anyone who went elsewhere.
In contrast, I can think of four or five kids who went to LACs with “impossible dream” ambitions, and dang if 5-8 years out of college they aren’t out there pursuing those very ambitions, and with traction, too.