Today's Article (14/10/2025)
How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery
The “career funnel,” a phrase coined by sociologists Amy Binder and Daniel Davis, describes the mechanism behind the crowding of elite college graduates into three high-paying fields. For instance, the Harvard Crimson’s annual survey of graduating seniors revealed that more than half of the class of 2025 had taken jobs in finance (21 percent), tech (18 percent), or management consulting (14 percent).
At their core, elite colleges—which sociologist Charlie Eaton has estimated receive a collective $20 billion a year in tax breaks—are machines that perpetuate status and wealth. It’s well known that admissions policies favor the rich, but that’s only part of the story. Elite colleges also steer their students into high-status, high-paying professions that further drive the cycle of inequality.
Binder, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who has dedicated most of her career to studying college students, argues that the career funnel deeply affects our broader society—and our democracy, now under attack by an administration determined to disparage and defund any institution that refuses to do its bidding. “When elite universities send an inordinate number of their graduates to narrow corporate career tracks, they intensify inequality and divert young people away from serving the common good,” she told me.
At least two students told him and Binder they simply couldn’t stomach a job like teaching. “I care deeply about education and education equality,” one interviewee said, but “you can’t just be a teacher after graduating from Stanford.’’
Granted, the soundtrack for stories of highly compensated but miserable Ivy Plus alums might be played by the tiniest of sad violins. But the question of who is drawn to these jobs—and who stays—has broader societal implications. In her book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, sociologist Rivera shows that recruiters from management consultancies, white-shoe law firms, and top-tier investment banks favor candidates with leisure pursuits and presentation styles similar to their own, thereby favoring the already affluent over the high-achieving poor. The interviewers she studied tended to seek “buddies,” “formidable playmates,” and colleagues who “could actually be your friend.”