Foundation Launches Summer Fellowship For Harvard Students To Buck Corporate Jobs for Vocations with ‘Meaning’

The School for Moral Ambition, a foundation that encourages young professionals to pursue meaningful careers, launched a summer fellowship last month for Harvard juniors aimed at shifting students away from careers in consulting, finance, and technology.

Twelve students will be selected to receive $15,000 for a 10-week fellowship at nonprofit organizations that tackle “problems that matter” and to learn how to start a career “grounded in moral ambition rather than mere achievement,” according to the foundation’s website.

The School for Moral Ambition is a non-profit with offices in New York City, Amsterdam, and Brussels. Originally founded to pull young Europeans away from careers in consulting, the organization has now set its sights on expanding across the Atlantic to the United States. The first step in the organization’s shift abroad: getting Harvard students to choose careers that serve the public good — not just corporate interests.

Jan-Willem van Putten, a co-founder and executive director of the organization, said he helped start the School for Moral Ambition after noticing that a vast majority of his college friends were selling out to take corporate jobs.

“It really started with frustration about my own friends from university,” van Putten said. “I think 90 percent of my talented fellow graduates went into banking, consulting, and law, and I was one of them,” van Putten said.

With higher pay than their nonprofit counterparts, corporate jobs are hard to turn down, van Putten said, especially as university graduates have become saddled with increasingly large student loan debts.

Harvard students are no exception. According to The Crimson’s latest survey of undergraduate seniors, more than half of Harvard graduates said they planned to work in the technology, finance, or consulting sectors after graduation.

Laura E. Clancy ’02-’03, the senior program manager of the foundation’s Harvard fellowship, said she hoped the fellowship would help change that pattern. The foundation’s goal, she said, is to “start to shift campus culture” so that the majority of Harvard graduates don’t throw themselves into the corporate world.

“At the end of the day, every year, some of our brightest students in the country — many at Harvard, also elsewhere — are recruited by these companies that are really optimizing for margin. They’re not optimizing for meaning,” Clancy said.

Clancy added that the School for Moral Ambition decided to launch the program at Harvard because elite institutions of higher education tend to send large cohorts of talented students to the corporate world.

“Harvard’s the start. We know it’s not going to be the middle or the ending of our work, but obviously there’s a huge symbolic importance to Harvard,” Clancy said

“We feel like if we can help even a small number of really strong students at the most prestigious school in the U.S., if not the world, redirect their talent towards solving real problems like climate change, inequality, AI safety, we think it can have a ripple effect,” she added.

The fellowship will match Harvard students with nonprofit organizations that fellows express interest in and that have a clear focus on novel, evidence-based solutions that aim to improve the world, according to Clancy.

“We’re looking for organizations that have really ambitious visions for how the world could be better, they’re doing something that’s really disruptive and different and maybe even counterintuitive, but evidence driven,” she said.

One of the nonprofits that will host at least three Harvard fellows is GiveDirectly, a platform that allows donors to distribute cash to people living in poverty. Since its founding in 2009, the organization has distributed more than $900 million to over 1.7 million people around the world, according to its website.

The Gambrell Foundation, a philanthropic group that funds a wide range of community programs, is partnering with the School for Moral Ambition to help fund the summer fellowship. Sally Gambrell Bridgford, the CEO of the philanthropy, said she is looking forward to supporting the fellowship’s vision of finding students fulfilling vocations post graduation.

The foundation’s co-founders are trying to“make doing the right thing cool again — like being good and doing good,” Bridgford said. “It fits in with some of the other things that we’re working with.”

The fellowship has already garnered significant attention among Harvard students. Clancy said that as of Tuesday afternoon, more than 170 juniors had started applications to join the program. The application window closes this Friday.

Rutger Bregman, another co-founder of the School for Moral Ambition, is also delivering a talk that day about pursuing careers that promote “moral ambition” and redefining success in a world that promotes climbing the corporate ladder.

Van Putten said he was excited about the early interest in the fellowship and optimistic about its chances for success, even though it was the group’s first attempt at incentivizing college students to buck the corporate world.

“There was, I think, someone from Yale who texted us and said, ‘We really need this idea. Why didn’t you start here?’” van Putten said.

—Staff writer Anneliese S. Mattox can be reached at anneliese.mattox@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Elias M. Valencia can be reached at elias.valencia@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @eliasmvalencia.