NINE
LIFE IN THE BUBBLE
SIX PATHS TO SIX PLACES
We’ve talked a little bit about what I’ve termed “normal” Americans. Before starting Venture for America, I spent six years running a national test prep company that served college graduates, so I’ve also been highly exposed to what highly educated Americans are doing. Their paths are quite predictable and consistent. Whether they realize it consciously or not, many educated Americans have been shifting their studies and career intentions toward paths that seem more sustainable amid a narrowing job market.
We joked at Venture for America that “smart” people in the United States will do one of six things in six places: finance, consulting, law, technology, medicine, or academia in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Washington, DC. Conventional wisdom says the “smartest” things to do today are to head to Wall Street and become a financial wizard or go to Silicon Valley and become a tech genius.
The finance and technology industries spend tens of millions each year to build massive talent recruitment pipelines. They hang out on college campuses and essentially stalk top prospects, throwing at them food, money, drinks, flights, prestige, status, training, network, peer pressure, and anything else that might be considered enticing. A friend in financial services estimated that her firm spends $50,000 per high-end hire just on sourcing and recruiting. One hedge fund paid Dartmouth students $100 each to tell them why they decided not to engage in its recruitment process. There is even a Goldman Sachs room at Columbia’s career services office. A friend of mine at a Wall Street bank commented that he felt funny recruiting PhDs from Caltech to write trading algorithms for him. “I feel like they should be working on the mission to Mars or something.” But he keeps doing it every year.
In Silicon Valley, many young people, generally from very good colleges, are making more money in a year than normal Americans will see in a decade. Even summer interns—non-engineers—at tech companies might make $7,000+ a month and get perks like free flights home to visit on weekends. Bidding wars and five- and six-digit signing bonuses are being paid out for freshly minted engineering grads; Google recruits the heck out of Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and other top schools, offering six figures to start, plus bonuses. Facebook sponsors hackathons at the top schools, stays in touch with professors, and invests tons of resources in order to be the most visible and obvious employer. Average salaries are inching close to $200,000 in Silicon Valley, to say nothing of the upside of equity-based compensation (aka stock options), which can be dramatically higher.
Don’t think that the smart kids haven’t noticed—the proportion of Stanford students majoring in the humanities has plummeted from over 20 percent to only 7 percent in 2016, prompting panic among history and English departments, whose once-popular classes no longer have students. One administrator joked to me that Stanford is now the Stanford Institute of Technology. Here’s the latest available data on what graduates of various high-end universities are doing after graduation:
Popular Job Destinations for College Graduates
School: Harvard
Finance: 18%
Consulting: 21%
Tech & Eng: 18%
Grad School: 14%
Law: 13%
Med School: 16%
School: Yale
Finance: 16%
Consulting: 13%
Tech & Eng: 15%
Grad School: 12%
Law: 15%
Med School: 17%
School: Princeton
Finance: 15%
Consulting: 9%
Tech & Eng: 9%
Grad School: 14%
Law: 11%
Med School: 12%
School: Stanford
Finance: 11%
Consulting: 11%
Tech & Eng: 16%
Grad School: 22%
Law: 6%
Med School: 17%
School: UPenn
Finance: 25%
Consulting: 17%
Tech & Eng: 15%
Grad School: 12%
Law: 9%
Med School: 13%
School: MIT
Finance: 10%
Consulting: 11%
Tech & Eng: 51%
Grad School: 32%
Law: 0.4%
Med School: 5%
School: Brown
Finance: 13%
Consulting: 10%
Tech & Eng: 17%
Grad School: 15%
Law: 9%
Med School: 17%
School: Dartmouth
Finance: 17%
Consulting: 14%
Tech & Eng: 8%
Grad School: 16%
Law: 10%
Med School: 14%
School: Cornell
Finance: 19%
Consulting: 16%
Tech & Eng: 18%
Grad School: 19%
Law: 9%
Med School: 17%
School: Columbia
Finance: 23%
Consulting: 11%
Tech & Eng: 19%
Grad School: 19%
Law: 12%
Med School: 16%
School: Johns Hopkins
Finance: 14%
Consulting: 19%
Tech & Eng: 13%
Grad School: 28%
Law: 7%
Med School: 31%
School: University of Chicago
Finance: 27%
Consulting: 11%
Tech & Eng: 16%
Grad School: 14%
Law: 11%
Med School: 11%
School: Georgetown
Finance: 23%
Consulting: 17%
Tech & Eng: 9%
Grad School: 7%
Law: 20%
Med School: 15%
School: Average
Finance: 18%
Consulting: 14%
Tech & Eng: 17%
Grad School: 17%
Law: 10%
Med School: 15%
Sources: The Career Services Office of the colleges.
Not only do grads from national universities do the same things, they also do them in the same places. Eighty percent of graduates of Brown University, my alma mater, moved to one of four metropolitan areas after graduating in 2015: New York City, Boston, San Francisco, or Washington, DC. Similarly, more than half of the graduates in the class of 2016 at Harvard University had plans to move to New York, Massachusetts, or California. Seventy-four percent of Yale seniors in the United States reported accepting jobs in one of the following places last year: New York, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC. MIT graduates preferred to stay in Massachusetts or move to California or New York. Stanford’s class of 2015 showed a strong preference for staying in California.
Our national universities are effectively a talent drain on 75 percent of the country. If you’re a high achiever from, say, Wisconsin or Vermont or New Mexico and you go to Penn or Duke or Johns Hopkins, the odds are that you’ll move to New York or California or DC and your home state will never see you again.
Most Popular States for Post-Graduation Employment
School: Harvard
New York: 24%
Massachusetts: 20%
California: 15%
DC: N/A
Total: 59%
School: UPenn
New York: 38%
Massachusetts: N/A
California: 11%
DC: 6%
Total: 55%
School: MIT
New York: 8%
Massachusetts: 44%
California: 23%
DC: N/A
Total: 75%
School: Stanford
New York: 7%
Massachusetts: N/A
California: 75%
DC: N/A
Total: 82%
School: Brown
New York: 36%
Massachusetts: 20%
California: 19%
DC: 8%
Total: 83%
School: Dartmouth
New York: 25%
Massachusetts: 16%
California: 15%
DC: 6%
Total: 62%
School: Georgetown
New York: 30%
Massachusetts: 3%
California: 6%
DC: 24%
Total: 63%
School: Yale*
Total: 74%
* 74.2% of the Yale seniors residing in the United States reported accepting jobs in one of the following states: New York, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC.
Sources: The Career Services Office of the colleges.
Financial services and technology are absorbing most of our top educational products. They are like twin cannons on opposite sides of the country continuously pushing for increased profitability and efficiency. The normal American is meant to benefit through increased access to technology, capital gains, and more streamlined businesses. Unfortunately these benefits are now being counterbalanced by a dramatic reduction in opportunities. Cheap T-shirts, a booming stock market, and a wide array of apps are cold comfort when you don’t own any stock and your local factory or main street closes.
Why are so many bright people doing the same things in the same places? They are driven by a desire to succeed, and there are only a few clear versions of what success looks like today thanks to the built-up recruitment pipelines. Money, status, training, a healthy dating market, peer pressure, and an elevated career trajectory all seem to lead in the same directions.
Also driving the uniformity is a pervasive anxiety and scramble that prioritizes credentialing and market success over all else, in part because failure seems to bring catastrophic economic and social consequences. Instead of seeing college as a period of intellectual exploration, many young people now see it as a mass sort or cull that determines one’s future prospects and lot in life.
One reason students feel pressured to seek high-paying jobs is the record level of school debt. Student debt levels have exploded relative to other forms of debt over the past decade in particular. Educational loan totals recently surpassed $1.4 trillion in the United States, up from $550 billion in 2011 and only $90 billion in 1999. The average level of indebtedness upon graduation is $37,172 and there are 44 million student borrowers. Default rates have crept up steadily to 11.2 percent.
Among children of even successful and highly educated families, there are sky-high levels of anxiety and depression. The use of prescription drugs is at an all-time high among college students, as is the use of college counseling offices, which report being overwhelmed. Demand for counseling increased at five times the rate of enrollment over the last 10 years. Waitlists to see a counselor at USC, a well-resourced private school, were reported as being 6 to 8 weeks long for non-emergency cases, and many schools had similar difficulty meeting demand. Julie Lythcott-Haims, a dean at Stanford, wrote a book in 2015 about the changing character of the students she was seeing, who had gone in one generation from independent young adults to “brittle” and “existentially impotent.” In 2014, an American College Health Association survey of close to 100,000 college students reported that 86 percent felt overwhelmed by all they had to do, 54 percent felt overwhelming anxiety, and 8 percent seriously considered suicide in the last 12 months.
Relationships have changed as well. Gender imbalances on many campuses—women now outnumber men 57 percent to 43 percent in college nationally—have helped lead to a “hookup culture” that erodes a sense of connection. One in three students say that their intimate relationships have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle,” and 10 percent say that they’ve been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year. The academic Lisa Wade describes an environment where the prevailing norm is to downgrade your partner for days afterward to make sure that they don’t “catch feelings.” What was a couple generations ago an environment to find love and maybe even a partner is now a place where you prove yourself detached enough to ignore someone the next day.
When I applied to college in 1992, my parents were pumped that I got into Stanford and Brown, schools that had acceptance rates of 21 and 23 percent, respectively, at the time. Today, the acceptance rates at those schools are only 4.8 percent and 9.3 percent. What was once very difficult now requires planning and cultivation from birth. This competition breeds a need for constant forward momentum. “I feel this constant pressure to make something of myself,” relates one Venture for America alum who now works at a startup after interning at an investment bank. “Even during celebrations, it’s like we’re all plotting the next competition. My friends have a ton of ambition and no clear place to channel it. I get the sense that we’re all trading happiness to run a little faster, even if we’re not sure where.”
“If you’re not the cream of the crop, why be in the crop at all,” said a recent graduate of Northwestern who grew up in Westchester County.
Of course, some young people dislike the conformity and yearn for a sense of choice and exploration. One college senior at Princeton remarked to me, “Once you’re here, you become awfully risk-averse. It’s more about not failing than doing anything in particular.” Another said, “I’m so busy here. I’d love some time to think,” as if thinking and college didn’t belong in the same sentence.
In his book Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz describes the current generation of strivers as “driven to achieve without knowing why.” And then they become paralyzed when they’re not sure how to proceed. I remember when I was growing up, I’d study for days trying to get good grades. If I got an A, I’d feel elation for about 30 seconds, and then a feeling of emptiness. I called the hang-ups associated with a drive to succeed the “achievement demons.” Thousands of young people share the same thirst to achieve that I had—rising out of a combination of family pressures, alienation, and an identity that they’re smart or talented or special or destined to do something significant—all on top of a dread that failure to stay in the winner’s circle leads to an unimaginably dire fate.
You might be thinking, “Who cares if the coddled college kids are depressed?” One reason to care is that private company ownership is down more than 60 percent among 18-to 30-year-olds since 1989. The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled “Endangered Species: Young U.S. Entrepreneurs,” and millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in modern history in terms of business formation. It turns out that depressed, indebted, risk-averse young people generally don’t start companies. This will have effects for decades to come.
But more profoundly, there is something deeply wrong if even the winners of the mass scramble to climb into the top of the education meritocracy are so unhappy. They are asking, “What are we striving and struggling for?” No one knows. The answer seems to be “to try to join the tribes in the coastal markets and work your ass off,” even as those opportunities become harder to come by. If you don’t like that answer, there are very few others.
I tried to provide a new answer when I started Venture for America in 2011. The new path would be to build businesses in diverse places around the country. I thought that would be productive and character-building. Our mission statement read in part:
To restore the culture of achievement to include value creation, risk and reward and the common good.
Upon joining Venture for America, we ask our fellows to adopt the following credo:
My career is a choice that indicates my values.
There is no courage without risk.
Value creation is how I measure achievement.
I will create opportunity for myself and others.
I will act with integrity in all things.
The credo is awfully lofty and idealistic. When I stood in front of the first class in 2012 to discuss these values, I’ll admit to feeling a little bit self-conscious.
I shouldn’t have worried. Venture for America’s sense of purpose and community has been like water to very thirsty people. So many VFAers have developed close friendships and relationships based on shared values and trying to do difficult things together. Venture for America has filled a void in many people’s lives in supporting individual paths and choices. But for every person in Venture for America, there are about 10,000 other young people who want the same things.
LIFE IN THE BUBBLE
Even as I have been working with young people from around the country these past years, I’ve been living in Manhattan and Silicon Valley. I call those places “the bubble.” And we have strange lives and jobs in the bubble.
I recently had dinner with a friend of mine who works for a real estate investment firm. We met at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. After catching up for a bit, I asked him if he’d bought any fancy hotels lately—he’d gotten me a discount to one a few years ago.
He responded, “Our appetite for risk has gone down. You know what we’ve been buying? Trailer parks.”
I became more interested. “Really? Why is that?”
He answered, “They’re good investments. Tenants pay to keep their mobile home in a space with water and utilities. All we really have to do is keep the place clean and keep the water flowing.”
I asked him if he ever had problems with delinquency.
“The delinquency rate is very low because first, they get a late notice on the day after their rent is due if they haven’t paid. We are very diligent about monitoring and everyone knows it. Second, there’s no place cheaper to live. It’s really these places or the street for a lot of people. They find ways to pay. It’s a nice stable investment for us.”
“Fascinating. How do you grow?”
He shrugged, “We’ll probably look at raising prices over time.”
This has nothing to do with automation but I thought it was a pretty good illustration of what we do. We maximize market efficiencies and take tolls.
Many of my friends work in technology and know that they are automating away other people’s jobs. For some of them, it’s a key part of their sales pitch. Many explicitly talk about how much cost savings will be realized by having fewer workers around.
The technologists and entrepreneurs I know are generally good people. If they were given a choice to “Do your job and eliminate normal jobs” or “Do your job and create abundant opportunities,” they would choose the latter. Most of them would happily even take a small hit to do so. But this isn’t a choice they’re given. They do their own jobs to the best of their ability and let the market do the rest. They may feel troubled at times that their success will displace hundreds or thousands of American workers, but they believe in progress and that their work is overall for the good.
You may find this objectionable. Here’s the thing—it is not the innovator’s job to figure out the social implications of what they do. Their job is to create and fund innovation in the market as cost-effectively as possible. This is itself a difficult job.
It is our job to account for society. That is, it’s the job of our government and our leaders.
Unfortunately, our leaders are typically a country away from these conversations. They’re trapped in cycles of warring press releases and talk show appearances and fundraising dinners. They also generally don’t understand technology so they’re reduced to lionizing innovators and trying to get on their good side. In turn, technologists often see government as a hindrance, to be ignored as much as possible, lobbied when necessary, and navigated around while they make things better/faster/cheaper/more automated.
This is a disaster in the making because technology is transforming society and our economy while politicians are left responding to the effects ineffectively years after the fact or, worse yet, ignoring them.
This is not to say that the people in the bubble have it all good. We are anxious about the path ahead, too. We feel stuck in place, competing at the top of the pyramid for the most resources for our children. We are constantly asked to choose between family and function, and fear that if we let up for even a little while our race will be lost. Women choose between time with their children—or having children—and keeping their job. Men choose between life on the road and being bypassed. Children get used to seeing one parent routinely, or maybe no parent at all. We talk openly with our friends about having someplace to fly to when things go south. We compare ourselves to our peers in our high-cost bubble and feel dissatisfied.
Occasionally we see people leave for a more hospitable or child-friendly environment. We envy them a little, while also patting ourselves on the back for sticking it out. Professional empathy is limited. We are fighters. Our organizations have little use or need for noncombatants. We work long hours and pride ourselves on being available and indefatigable.
In the bubble, the market governs all. Character is a set of ideas that comes up in the books we read to our children before sending them to test for the gifted and talented program, or a means of doing right by our bosses and reports, or a good way to burnish one’s personal network. On some level, most of us recognize that we are servants to the tide of innovation and efficiency. As the water rises, we will protest as we clamber to higher ground. We will be sure to stay out of the way and keep ourselves pliant and marketable to the extent possible. Our specialty is light-commitment benevolence. We will do something to help but not enough to hurt us or threaten our own standing. We know better than to do that.
In the bubble, many of us came up through the meritocracy and we’ve internalized its lessons. The underlying logic of the meritocratic system is this: If you’re successful, it’s because you’re smart and hardworking, and thus virtuous. If you’re poor or unsuccessful, it’s because you’re lazy and/or stupid and of subpar character. The people at the top belong there and the people at the bottom have only themselves to blame.
I know how deeply mistaken these premises are because of my own experiences. I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SSAT. I got into Stanford and Brown because I did well on the SAT. I went to law school at Columbia because I did well on the LSAT, which led directly to a six-figure job. I even became the CEO of an education company in part because I did well on the GMAT.
Being good at these tests, however, has very little to do with character, virtue, or work ethic. They just mean you are good at the tests. There were many people who studied much harder than I did who didn’t do well. I remember one classmate crying when we got our test results back because she’d studied so hard for it.
We say success in America is about hard work and character. It’s not really. Most of success today is about how good you are at certain tests and what kind of family background you have, with some exceptions sprinkled in to try to make it all seem fair. Intellect as narrowly defined by academics and test scores is now the proxy for human worth. Efficiency is close behind. Our system rewards specific talents more than anything. I got pushed forward for having certain capacities. Others had their horizons systematically lowered for having capacities that our academic system had no use for. I’ve seen countless people lose heart and feel like they should settle for less, that they don’t deserve abundance.
J. D. Vance wrote in his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about growing up in Middletown, Ohio:
The message wasn’t explicit: teachers didn’t tell us that we were too stupid or poor to make it. Nevertheless, it was all around us, like the air we breathed: No one in our families had gone to college… Students don’t expect much from themselves, because the people around them don’t do very much… There was, and still is, a sense that those who make it are of two varieties. The first are lucky: They come from wealthy families with connections, and their lives were set from the moments they were born. The second are the meritocratic: They were born with brains and couldn’t fail if they tried… To the average Middletonian, hard work doesn’t matter as much as raw talent.
The people of Middletown have gotten the message. The SAT came into its own during World War II as a way to identify smart kids and keep them from going to the front lines. Now, every year is wartime.
One of my sons was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum a couple years ago. He has a particularly mild, high-functioning form and will, I believe, lead an amazing and fulfilling life. We are in a fortunate position to be able to provide a lot for our son at the right time. There are families around the country who are not as fortunate.
The meritocracy was never intended to be a real thing—it started out as a parody in a British satire in 1958 by Michael Young. At the time, a world where “intelligence fully determined who thrived and languished was understood to be predatory, pathological and far-fetched,” observes journalist David Freedman. Today, we’ve made it real and embraced and exalted it. The logic of the marketplace is seductive to all of us. It gives everything a tinge of justice. It makes the suffering of the marginalized more palatable, in that there’s a sense that they deserve it. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that they often agree—they think they deserve it, too.
They’re wrong. Intelligence and character aren’t the same things at all. Pretending that they are will lead us to ruin. The market is about to turn on many of us with little care for what separates us from each other.
I’ve worked with and grown up alongside hundreds of very highly educated people for the past several decades, and trust me when I say that they are not uniformly awesome. People in the bubble think that the world is more orderly than it is. They overplan. They mistake smarts for judgment. They mistake smarts for character. They overvalue credentials. Head not heart. They need status and reassurance. They see risk as a bad thing. They optimize for the wrong things. They think in two years, not 20. They need other bubble people around. They get pissed off when others succeed. They think their smarts should determine their place in the world. They think ideas supersede action. They get agitated if they’re not making clear progress. They’re unhappy. They fear being wrong and looking silly. They don’t like to sell. They talk themselves out of having guts. They worship the market. They worry too much. Bubble people have their pluses and minuses like anyone else.
When I was a kid I just wanted to belong. As a smart person I was taught to leave others behind. We have to snap out of it and start remembering our own humanity. We’re all the same people we were before we got sorted and socialized. We’re all mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers above all who want the same things for ourselves and our families.
We’re running out of time. In coming years it’s going to be even harder to forge a sense of common identity across different walks of life. A lot of people who now live in the bubble grew up in other parts of the country. They still visit their families for holidays and special occasions. They were brought up middle-class in normal suburbs like I was and retain a deep familiarity with the experiences of different types of people. They loved the mall, too.
In another generation this will become less and less true. There will be an army of slender, highly cultivated products of Mountain View and the Upper East Side and Bethesda heading to elite schools that has been groomed since birth in the most competitive and rarefied environments with very limited exposure to the rest of the country.
When I was growing up, there was something of an inverse relationship between being smart and being good-looking. The smart kids were bookish and awkward and the social kids were attractive and popular. Rarely were the two sets of qualities found together in the same people. The nerd camps I went to looked the part.
Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower.
Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that “the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.” If we’re going to fix things to keep his vision from coming true, now is the time.