The Yale Herald wonders why so many Yalies go corporate:

Every year, 1,200 of the world's best and brightest students arrive
at Yale as freshmen, expecting to spend the next four years of their lives
immersed in critical scholarship. They are talented individuals with
wide-ranging interests, but when the senior year job rush sets in, many
students make career choices that have little to do with their program of
study. Four years ago, more than one-fifth of Yale seniors went into
investment banking; still today, 13 percent follow in their footsteps. What
is it within Yale's career culture that drives students from the wide-open
world of academia to the corporate haven of Wall Street?

Certainly, "career culture" has something to do with it - Yale repeatedly hammers into students' skulls (as in Gary Haller's now infamous assertion in the Spring of 2002, at a labor panel he had refused to award "Master's Tea" status, that to be a dining hall worker was not a valid career choice for a Yale undergraduate, which sent one longtime JE dining hall worker into tears) what kinds of jobs we must take, what kinds of paths we must follow. Yet this doesn't explain everything - this elitism privileges academia and public service as much as the corporate world, and, indeed, there is a very long tradition, beginning with Edward Logue in 1942, and continuing to the John Wilhelms, Lou Weekses, Nick Allens, Laurie Kenningtons, Grace Rollinses, and Abbey Hudsons, of Yale grads joining the labor movement as organizing or research staff.

What makes Yalies go corporate - or union (whether as dynamo staff organizers, muckraking researchers, or grad student teacher/researcher militants,) it seems to me, strikes (pun intended) from a much deeper structural condition of the Levin-era "Global University" in which what Levin terms the "work of the university" and the accumulation of capital are virtually indistinguishable. (Thank you, Bayh-Dole act.) On the most superficial level, we learn from the best. But really, this is a condition which arises from the manner in which Yale understands student, teacher, and schooling. While rejoicing that with the NLRB mandate, graduate teaching can now return to its "traditional role" witihin the university, the administration attempts brutal cost-cutting and taylorizing measures aimed at streamlining and gaining ever more administrative control over the production and transmission of knowledge. The laboratories increasingly resemble high technology sweatshops in which Principal Investigators, and really the university's licensing department and a handful of pharmaceutical, and/or biomedical engineering corporations reap the benefits of the grueling labor of low-wage graduate researchers, often immigrants, with only a slim illusion of substantive career advancement. In the wake of last fall's contract settlement, they laud a corporatist notion of the university as the human body, evoking biological metaphors of community even as they move to lay off workers, claiming a ned to cut costs only a handful of months prior to announcing that the endowment has indeed leapt by nearly twenty percent. Is it really any wonder, then, that the Director of Career Services refers to graduating students as "product?"

"The banks are focused on getting what they think is best, and
their perception is that the level of the product they get from us, [the Ivies,
and schools such as MIT and NYU], is higher," said Director of Career Services
Philip Jones.