Celebrated, Competitive, but Constrained: Elite Students’ Construction of Prestigious Careers at Harvard and Stanford

• In Event: 226 - Regular Session. Elites

Abstract

A growing body of literature describes the “new” elite. Drawing on this literature, paired with scholarship on higher education and organizational culture, we argue that the process of student career selection at elite universities is dependent on both a wider institutional culture that spans elite campuses and local campus cultures that define “prestigious” jobs. Many elite students enter college without well-developed career plans. Their classmates share ideas of prestige by talking about a few select industries, and students feel a good deal of pressure to “live up to” their universities’ and their peers’ expectations. These career pressures, reinforced by the modern elite ethics of “hard work,” “merit,” and “talent,” create anxiety in students, and lead them to use a small group of metrics—recruitment, risk, and salary—to judge and justify potential career options. Using interview data from Harvard University and Stanford University, we show that the ways these metrics are applied, and the eventual careers students select, vary in some significant ways on the two campuses, depending on the specific local conceptions of prestige. In essence, elite careers are constructed, not selected.

Authors

• Amy J. Binder, University of California-San Diego

• Daniel Davis, University of California-San Diego

• Nick Bloom, Duke University