What does it mean to have a prestigious career in the 21st century?

It's time for a rebrand

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Mar 13, 2024

In a perfect world, all of us would have access to green jobs that pay well, align with our values, and help us move towards a better future. But that’s not the world we live in; it’s still difficult to find enough green jobs for everyone who wants one (although movements like the Youth Climate Corps are seeking to change this).

However, there are also another force at play. Many of us have the option to pursue impact-based careers but instead choose not to, driven by outdated notions of prestige which push us into careers that are lucrative but that often don’t feel intrinsically meaningful.

Professional services sectors continue to be the dominant career pathway pursued by graduates of the world’s most “prestigious” university programs. At Harvard, 40 percent of graduates end up in finance or consulting, a ratio similar to other Ivy league schools. Such overwhelming trends should give us pause. How is it that students at the world’s top programs, who could conceivably pursue any possible opportunity with their wealth of potential connections, end up flocking to the same few firms in the same few professional services fields?

High pay is not the only pull factor. Many of these firms pour millions of dollars every year into recruitment efforts designed to convince bright young students that these prestigious positions are the only way to jumpstart their careers. This positive messaging is ubiquitous and unavoidable. Students are told that elite jobs are how they will get to work with the smartest people while solving the world’s most pressing problems, gaining a diversity of skills and exposure to a variety of industries while unlocking a virtually limitless pool of global connections. Most people who enter these careers have little intention of staying for longer than a few years; what they are primarily interested in are the “exit opportunities” that become available to them when they leave these firms. In some sense, these companies can be seen as an extension of the elite university system, a veritable finishing school for the next generation of corporate brass.

Inside these firms, though, many young employees find that the positive vision they were sold is skewed. The hours are long and the work is stressful, and an epidemic of burnout is a serious problem. Taking a leave of absence for mental health reasons is disturbingly normalized. Many people feel that they lose touch with themselves or their friends and family, having little time outside of work for hobbies or relationships.

Moreover, the nature of the work itself can be an emotional burden, in which people have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that their projects are increasing pollution or widening inequality. Young bankers sleep five hours a night, report mental abuse from managers, and rate their job satisfaction two out of 10. Young consultants are told that they will work on vital problems of global significance, and then find that they have little choice but to be flown to remote mining towns for the purposes of reducing headcount, or measure tiny quantities of sauce to help fast food restaurants minimize their condiment-to-bread ratio. People who enter these jobs with enthusiasm and gratitude find themselves becoming jaded, uninspired, and checked out within a matter of months.

Part of the reason these careers are so attractive to young overachievers is because they offer “optionality,” providing exposure to a wide variety of industries without having to commit to anything. This is alluring because many people aren’t sure at first what they want to do upon graduating, so maximizing optionality seems like a strategic move. If after two years they find that they are still unsure, many of them will take the offer to go to an MBA program, where they will be surrounded by a global group of the same type of overachiever, many of whom joined the program simply to earn a spot at one of the same top firms. And the cycle repeats.

This pattern–maximizing optionality and exposure, waiting for the perfect exit opportunity–has sometimes been called the “prestige career trap.” It is a well-known path pursued by many young people who apply to their careers the same logic that they used to get accepted into a prestigious university: optimizing for whatever looks best on a resume, or will increase the perceived value of their personal brand in the eyes of whatever gate-keeping institution that they are hoping to impress.

The problem with this approach is that life is not school, and a fulfilling career is not the same as an overflowing resume. This is something that overachievers might find difficult to hear. What is necessary to find a fulfilling career is not maximum exposure or endless global connections, but critical self-reflection. Trying to get the most out of everything without committing to anything is a way to defer thinking about life’s most difficult questions, such as what kind of career we really want to have or what truly makes a meaningful life. In this way, the prestige career trap is less about purely striving for money, status or power than it is about something deeper–the attempt to avoid introspection.

The desire to derive meaning from our work is something that reflects a deeper psychological need. Victor Frankl, an Austrian philosopher and psychiatrist, writes about the innate need that all human beings have to feel that our lives are meaningful or purposeful, to feel like we are contributing to something larger than ourselves. In a culture addicted to work, where our lives can even become synonymous with work, the question of meaning in one’s career assumes an even greater significance. Everyone deserves to feel like their work is important, and should also have the time outside of work to pursue activities that they find intrinsically meaningful. What extractive careers do, instead, is prevent people from reaching a deeper meaning by feeding them promises about distant, future happiness (which they can supposedly only reach by “grinding” while they’re young), and then consuming all of their free time so that they don’t have enough mental space to figure out what a more meaningful life might actually look like.

This issue of our attitude towards the future is of fundamental importance. Ever since a very young age, youth are taught to organize our lives around preparing for the future. Clubs, competitions, and scholarships become a means to an end, a way to get to the next level of the game. The problem is that for some of us–the most extreme overachievers–this “end” never actually materializes. We go on accruing accolades and titles and connections and bonuses for… what, exactly? If each accomplishment is only done to set us up for the next accomplishment, what are we actually working towards?

This kind of circuitous logic is what our whole extractive paradigm is based on. We accumulate for the sake of accumulating, we chase status for the sake of chasing status. This is what happens anytime we replace an end with a means, such as when we confuse money, fame, or prestige with a meaningful life. Ultimately, when we prioritize these things, we are not doing them for ourselves but rather for others–to show them how great we are. We substitute external validation for true self-knowledge. We orient our lives around impressing others because it is easier than figuring out what we would actually do if we didn’t care what anyone thought. We create a mental image of how we think other people perceive us, and then we strive to become that person. This is the definition of what it means to live inauthentically.

The crisis of meaning created by this system is no accident. It is a feature of capitalism, as David Graeber explains in his book Bullshit Jobs. Extractive careers thrive on telling people that they need to suffer in the present if they want to be happy in the future. This future is always just over the horizon–so close yet impossibly far, a tantalizing mirage which keeps us locked into the path that we’re already on. People put up with burnout and stress and cognitive dissonance because they have faith that it will lead them to something better in the future–but ask them what “something better” actually looks like, and they go blank.

One of the biggest problems in our society is that too many smart, ambitious young people go to work in jobs that are maintaining the broken status quo. This is a problem which extends far beyond the climate crisis, being a symptom of a deeper issue with the highly unequal nature of our economic system.

In today’s world, the jobs which are afforded the most prestige and the highest pay are in professional services fields, such as finance or consulting, which are increasingly disconnected from the real economy. These fields are sometimes categorized as “meta-industries” because they exist as an accessory to value-creating industries, deriving revenue from fees and contracts without actually helping to create jobs and raise overall productive capacity. Some observers have even called these sectors “value-extracting,” for the increasingly large role that they play in exacerbating income and wealth inequality.

The financial sector is particularly to blame here. A study from the Bank of International Settlements has shown that financial sector growth tends to crowd out real economic growth, after a certain point. The financialization of the economy, a process in which ever greater segments of the economy come under the control of asset managers that extract rents from the companies they own, has been a major factor in the growth of monopolies, the decline of innovation, and the increasing concentration of wealth over the last 50 years.

Management consulting firms have also played an oversized role, popularizing executive compensation strategies that have led to soaring inequality even while recommending aggressive cost-cutting and downsizing strategies that have decimated the middle class. Together, these meta-industries have created a corporate culture in which short-term shareholder value must be maximized at all costs, a paradigm which is not only socially and environmentally destructive but can even erode shareholder value in the long-term.

Extractive companies do not only extract value from society and the planet, but also from the people who work for them. It is deeply ironic that our economic system is set up to produce this ever-expanding minority of people who are both so privileged yet often so unhappy. Far too many young people spend their time trying to emulate people who don’t even know what they want.

Alternatively, we could redefine what a prestigious career means–one that creates value for people, the planet, and for ourselves. We could put more resources into reinvesting in the real economy, into the skilled trades and colleges, instead of pouring our brightest youth into algorithmic trading or compensation consulting. Andrew Yang, founder of Venture for America, wrote a book titled Smart People Should Build Things, based on his dream of a world where young people spend more time starting companies and creating jobs than they do writing PowerPoint slide decks for private equity fund managers.

Call us utopians, but we believe such a world is possible–if we can allow ourselves to imagine it.

There are so many myths about impact-driven careers—that they’re poorly paid, hard to find, and require all kinds of specialized skills. This often isn’t true. There will be a massive increase in demand for green skills as the transition towards a clean economy takes off, and investing in such a career is one of the smartest moves young people can make right now.

For more resources, inspiration, and opportunities, check out our website at re-generation.ca.

The book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren A. Rivera explores the dynamics of privilege and power in the professional world, revealing how prestigious educational backgrounds often dictate access to top-tier careers.
The book Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz offers a critique of elite education, illustrating how it fosters conformity over genuine intellectual curiosity and personal growth.
In the article Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower, a former insider exposes the unethical practices of McKinsey & Company, shedding light on the consulting giant's controversial dealings and their impact on society.
In Consultants and the Crisis of Capitalism, Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington argue that the widespread use of consultants often leads to a lack of accountability, undermines organizational capacity, and perpetuates a cycle of dependency on external expertise rather than fostering internal capabilities for problem-solving and innovation.

All of these opportunities are listed on our brand-new job board (one for each sector), but we’ll include a shortlist at the end of each newsletter!

What does it mean to have a prestigious career in the 21st century?

It's time for a rebrand

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