Earlier this fall, Isabella Glassman wrote a compelling opinion piece for The New York Times entitled “Careerism Is Ruining College.” Glassman, a 2023 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, defined pre-professional pressure as “a prevailing culture that convinces many of us [undergraduate students] that only careers in fields such as computer programming, finance and consulting, preferably at blue-chip firms like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey or big tech companies, can secure us worthwhile futures.” Glassman suggested pre-professional pressure has permeated college campuses pervasively enough to replace many of the folkloric positive associations we might otherwise have about the pursuit of an undergraduate degree: interesting classes, love stories, new friendships, sunbathing on green quads, late-night parties, collegiate sports.
Glassman isn’t alone in her assertion that pre-professional pressure is dampening the college experience. Lily Halbert-Alexander, a first-year student at Princeton University, authored an essay in November for The Daily Princetonian asserting that “excessive careerism” is preventing students from pursuing their intellectual interests in the humanities. As Halbert-Alexander wrote, “When we choose our majors based on a rigid career or income goal, any setbacks present a threat to the entire future we’ve built in our heads. Struggling academically doesn’t just represent misunderstandings or a need to seek help. It gets blown up to the scale of a complete career failure.”
I haven’t been able to stop mulling over the contents of these essays, for two main reasons. First, the experiences these young women describe (particularly Glassman) are unrecognizable to me. (Two caveats: I did not graduate from an Ivy League college, and more than a decade has passed since my graduation.) I disbelieve, emotionally, that today’s students won’t get to do what I did—which was, indeed, as Glassman describes in her opening paragraph, listen to Taylor Swift and overanalyze class crushes. I pursued a major in the humanities and, in hindsight, I would describe my undergraduate education as the four-year period I spent learning—mostly about myself—and confronting the reality that one day I would have to make important decisions about who I want to be in this world. Incidentally, my undergraduate studies weren’t devoid of pressure—I agonized over an honors thesis, graduated summa cum laude and applied to Ph.D. programs during my senior year of college—but pressure is not my prevailing memory.
The second reason I can’t shake these essays is that, intellectually, I believe both of them. I work at an Ivy League institution with students who are actively contemplating their professional goals, and the pressure is palpable. For example, this past summer, I received dozens of emails from newly admitted freshmen who wanted my advice on what they could be doing “now” to set themselves up to successfully participate in the program I manage, which supports their completion of internships. Each time I receive an inquiry like this, I cringe internally at the idea that these incredible young people feel the pressure they must feel to write such an email. The summer before my freshman year, I’m pretty sure my greatest stressors were choosing dorm room posters, making friends who didn’t go to my high school and setting a good example for my amazing younger sister.
How do we account for the gulf that lies between my experiences and the ones described by these young women? Is the Ivy League a pressure cooker? Did the culture of my state school—complete with sports, Greek life and friends who wanted to enjoy their time on campus—serve as a valve for releasing pressure? Do my parents deserve the credit for sending me off to college with lessons about how my personal best is always good enough? Or have we seen a shift these last 10-plus years that has altered college?
If Jennifer Breheny Wallace, author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, is to be believed, Glassman and Halbert-Alexander’s points about pre-professional pressure tie into a larger narrative, as many of today’s college students grew up “increasingly absorbing the message that they have no value outside of their accomplishments”—a message that, she argues, is “spurred by increasing income inequality and dwindling opportunities.” In this context, I can’t help but wonder how demand from both students and parents has impacted shifts on higher education campuses to attend to achievement after graduation. Have those shifts turned up the volume on the pressure students feel?
In defense of careerist shifts: We cannot ignore that the vast majority of undergraduate students will spend most of their adult lives working about 40 hours a week. “Work” can be mysterious to students, and the contemporary higher education institution can certainly play a role in making many of the unwritten rules of searching for employment written. It may well be ill-advised to advocate for a cultural return to imagining college as a bracketed space where concerns about work and personal finances are a problem for another day, especially in light of the contemporary economic stressors facing young people, as persuasively described by Glassman.
In my job, I’m faced with the professional challenge of how to attend to this web of variables in a manner that is student-centered. I advise young people who are motivated to complete prestigious internships because the experience will boost their résumés and serve their larger career ambitions. I’m the instructor of an internship practicum class in which I make pedagogical decisions about how to teach someone to be ready for their future workplace. My students spend a semester with me in Washington, D.C., away from the main campus, and I look for ways to emphasize that not all growth has to be professional. My hope is that I can reduce (or at least not amplify) the pressures undergraduate students face while also not ignoring the reality that surrounds them.
The best answer I’ve found for this professional challenge lies in prompting students to grapple with three things:
- The notion of a job as a vocation, in that it is something they feel called to do.
- The elements of work that are underdiscussed in careerist circles, such as work-life balance and where students may wish to live.
- The value of setting and achieving goals that are personally meaningful even if they don’t make for inspiring LinkedIn updates.
The Notion of a Job That’s Vocational
We should teach our students that answering vocational questions takes a lifetime. We are plastic beings, and as we change, so does what feeds us. If stressful jobs have been shown to be worse for an individual’s mental health than unemployment, then the stakes of helping our students find their way are high.
Many of the careerist decisions, majors, concentrations, internships and jobs students consider make their short list because of how a student perceives they will be able to mobilize that accomplishment later. When is later? If we can help our students contemplate the later, we may inadvertently find the makings of a vocational job in the conversation.
Similarly, if our students are receiving cultural messages that there is only one achievement-oriented path that will lead them to something that resembles happiness and self-actualization, then we must undercut that narrative and encourage them to explore alternative paths. Exploration can be theoretical and conceptual and doesn’t need to take place as a series of three-month internships scattered across organizations, job functions and fields. As staff and faculty on university campuses, we can use well-placed questions that suggest to students they could find work addressing the problems they care about. Similarly, follow-up questions (like “How do you know that?” and “What would happen if the opposite were true?”) are great for nudging students towards an exploration of their assumptions.
The Underdiscussed Elements of Work
The process of homing in on professional goals can be based on a myriad of variables that don’t include prestige or salary. For example, a career trajectory could be built on an affinity for specific tasks. If our students enjoy meeting new people, organizing things or solving puzzles, they could explore sales or fundraising, managing complex events and analyzing data, respectively. We could advocate that students search for a job that optimizes for the tasks they always seem to knock out first on their to-do lists.
Many of the students I work with have never considered that they might make a career decision based on how it facilitates their ability to control their time or where they live. I’ve known people who are very diligent about pursuing employment not because of what it might afford them later but because of what they know it facilitates now. Hobbyists (or semi-professionals, like athletes or musicians) will select jobs with hours that are optimal for balancing multiple goals. People and place are also very valid variables for charting career courses. After all, it’s important to enjoy our surroundings and the company we keep.
Setting and Achieving Personally Meaningful Goals
While jobs can be vocational, there are also important lessons we can share with our students about putting life before work. Simone Stolzoff, author of The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work, advocates for disentangling our jobs from our identities. It strikes me that students may need this lesson today more than ever.
This semester, my students set goals for their time in Washington, D.C., that were unrelated to their academic or pre-professional pursuits. Some of them wanted to learn how to cook, others wanted to visit an impressive list of cultural sites and one of them challenged herself to spend one-on-one time with every other member of the cohort. As a staff member who finds value in attending to their holistic development, I make a point of holding them as accountable to those objectives as I would to their academic or pre-professional goals. And next semester, I’ll probably share Glassman and Halbert-Alexander’s essays with my students and ask them how else university faculty and staff can push back against the cultural tide of careerism and the pressure it creates for them while they are under our care.