In a recent New York Times article, a Harvard student told reporters that “Everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard.”

This attitude may help explain why, despite so many admissions essays about creating a better world, 50% of the 2024 Harvard graduating class immediately entered careers in finance, tech and consulting. The article reports that students commonly said they “just want to sell out.”

This phenomenon is not unique to Harvard. ‘Career funneling’ happens everywhere: the process by which high-achieving young people gradually give up on their dreams of creating a better world and instead choose from a narrow set of jobs in extremely high-paying fields.

The problem with these fields is that they typically do not positively impact society in any way. In many cases, they waste public resources or do some other form of net damage.

There is something suspect to the Harvard student’s idea that doing anything meaningful is simply ‘too hard’. Meaningful work through nonprofits, groundbreaking research or high-impact political work is no more difficult than a job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.

The real difference is that ethical work has lower prestige and lower pay. The work offers meaning in a far more important way — advancing society. It offers the potential to do something that materially improves the lives of your fellow human beings.

For the world’s brightest and most ambitious young people, one’s future career is not just a personal choice, but a moral one. The world needs moral ambition — high-potential people using their talents to change society for the better.

Empty and often evil jobs

Jeffrey Hammerbacher, a data scientist who formerly worked for Facebook, put it best. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

One may think their career choice is an individual one, a morally neutral act that the rest of society has no business weighing in on. This simply is not true.

In sociology, a commonly referred to term is the “sociological imagination.” It is the ability to think about oneself in relation to the rest of society. Our experiences are not random; they are shaped by broader social structures. Our actions are both impacted by and impact our entire society.

Even if someone takes a “less harmful” job in big tech, investment banking or corporate consulting, the fact remains that it is a lifetime of potentially world-changing work lost. An incredibly bright person is reduced to a paper-pusher, a cog in the machine, who helps make the rich richer.

It isn’t only judgmental opinion columnists who think this. Many young consultants themselves said they are “doing work where they feel they add little value to the world and lack a sense of personal growth, community and purpose.”

A lot of the jobs in these sectors don’t just generate profit for the already-wealthy. They actually cost the public money, such as the “too big to fail” banks that have been bailed out by taxpayer dollars.

A 2017 study by economist Benjamin Lockwood showed that a corporate lawyer does an estimated $30,000 of damage to society each year. A commercial banker does more than $100,000 worth.

Far more sinister than financial harm is the ethical harm some of these jobs can cause. Think of consultants for Big Tobacco, who advise their companies to put more smoke shops and targeted advertising in low-income neighborhoods. Or the social harm of attorneys fighting to defend Exxonmobil and Shell from climate lawsuits, or young engineering graduates who go on to design bombs for companies like Lockheed Martin.

Some students say they want to temporarily sell out: go into a corporate job with the plan to donate much of their earnings, or to eventually leave and work for a nonprofit. The thing is, the corporate world and the lifestyles of elites have a way of sinking their teeth into you.

Mihir Desai, a professor at Harvard’s business and law schools, said, “You spend 15 years at the hedge fund, you’re going to be a different person.”

Moral ambition

Dutch author and historian Rutger Bregman coined the term moral ambition. It is what you get when you combine the work ethic and talent of high strivers and combine it with a genuine desire to improve the world.

There is a litany of pressing problems that moral ambition should be directed towards — ongoing genocide, rampant child hunger, decimation caused by easily preventable diseases and the looming climate crisis.

In his book, Bregman cites the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson and his 61-year commitment to the fight to end slavery. He cites less-privileged heroes as well, like Helen Keller’s advocacy for people with disabilities and Malcolm X’s role in the struggle for civil rights.

Moral ambition must not necessarily lead only to politics and advocacy. Doctors, teachers, researchers, caretakers and artists are all essential to society, and all can find ways to maximize their moral ambition within their own field.

My personal hero of moral ambition is Sophie Scholl, a college student in 1940s Germany who helped found the White Rose. The White Rose was a small group of students who distributed secret writings encouraging German citizens to resist the Nazi regime. Thousands of their pamphlets were distributed throughout Germany before the group was caught and turned over to the Gestapo.

Sophie Scholl had the courage and the moral ambition to see herself not as an individual simply fighting for her own interests, but as a part of the broader fight for good. Her contributions to history and her commitment to opposing injustice were even more important to her than her own life.

Sophie Scholl’s last words were, “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

I don’t mean to imply that we must all take risks as big as Scholl’s and the White Rose’s. But if a twenty-year-old student is willing to put so much on the line for a better world, we owe it to society to aspire to more than just a guaranteed path to wealth.

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@samreaganslc.bsky.social