Harvard Students Hate Capitalism — Until Recruiting Season

The food is bad, the weather is worse, the Wi-Fi cut out for eight seconds during lecture, and late-stage capitalism is coming for all of us — Harvard students love to complain.

But beyond the everyday grumbling, I’ve noticed a deeper kind of pessimism among my classmates — one that goes well beyond undercooked dining hall chicken and chaotic course registration. It’s a worldview that treats our biggest social and economic problems as immutable facts of life.

While this negative outlook is not necessarily true, it is certainly counterproductive. If you genuinely believe that something is unjust, actively work to change it instead of giving up and accepting your corporate fate.

Part of the explanation for our collective gloom is structural. Our generation grew up online, swimming in a social media ecosystem that thrives on negativity. Research finds that emotionally negative posts appear to spread faster and farther than positive ones, shaping how we think long before we ever apply to college.

Because of our constant exposure to media presenting so many institutions as inherently bad, it can become easy to think that this is the way things always have to be. In this frame, extractive capitalism, systemic racism, or entrenched patriarchy (pick your favorite) are so deep-seated that bad outcomes become the norm, good outcomes the exception, and the only rational response securing the best possible position within an unfair system.

If life is rigged, the thinking goes, why not make sure it’s rigged in your favor?

This attitude shows up in a particularly familiar campus contradiction. Many students express sweeping critiques of capitalism and systemic injustice, yet proceed to recruit into the very industries they claim to distrust.

And it’s not just anecdotal. Sociologists studying elite-college recruiting have noted a similar posture. Amy J. Binder, professor at Johns Hopkins University, describes students who see the professional landscape as essentially rigged, creating a cohort that distrusts the system even as it resigns itself to taking the safest, highest-status jobs.

The Mignone Center for Career Success described how many students frame recruiting as a struggle between giving back and selling out. A recruiter at a major investment bank even referred to Harvard undergraduates as the “save the world students” — the very students who then go into investment banking.

The data reflect a similar pattern.

According to The Crimson’s senior survey, a large share of graduates continue to enter finance, consulting, and tech even as a majority identifies as progressive or very progressive. National polling also finds that young Americans express more skepticism toward capitalism and greater openness to socialism than older cohorts.

To be clear, this is not an indictment of individual students. There is nothing inherently immoral about finance or venture capital — both can, in principle, allocate resources productively and spur innovation. I hardly expect every undergraduate to renounce the private sector and live in a commune.

The more troubling issue is the resigned posture that many take, positing that because the whole system is corrupt, it is in one’s best interest to simply take their cut. That logic is not progressive. It’s defeatist.

Lynn E. Barendsen, a project manager at the Graduate School of Education, has interviewed over 1,200 people for research on students entering their first jobs. She told The Crimson in 2013 that young people often go into high-paying corporate careers because they don’t think what they do has an impact. Without evidence to suggest otherwise, it’s difficult to imagine much has changed since then.

Such a view converts genuine moral concern into hollow despair and makes inaction into a virtue. Worst of all, it presumes that the world is something that happens to you — not something you can change.

To find this mindset at Harvard of all places is especially strange. Our graduates disproportionately end up at institutions that wield real power: regulatory agencies, courts, major nonprofits, universities, research labs — and yes, firms trying (imperfectly) to steer capital toward more socially useful ends.

Of course, I don’t expect a 22-year-old to singlehandedly dismantle systemic racism or reform global capitalism. But if you sincerely believe an industry is fundamentally exploitative, it’s worth asking whether your talents might be better used shaping the rules that govern it — in law, policy research, journalism, or even within the sector itself. Structural reform doesn’t require monastic purity. It requires people who refuse to confuse critique with surrender.

Healthy skepticism is a virtue. Cynicism masquerading as realism is not. The world is full of genuinely intractable problems — but very few that are truly hopeless.

Harvard should be a place where big problems become intellectual and moral challenges, not excuses to disengage.

Benjamin Isaac ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Quincy House.