Rich College Students Should Embrace Downward Mobility
By taking low-wage, high-impact jobs, wealthy students at top colleges can help the neediest while making room for others to climb the ladder.
Claremont McKenna College is known for many things: sunny SoCal weather, a tight-knit community, the Athenaeum, and a top free speech ranking. But what perhaps best distinguishes CMC, as with most elite US colleges, is its ability to take rich kids and make them even richer.
As my reader is likely aware, CMC has stellar outcomes. Nearly two-thirds of employed graduates enter the fields of tech, accounting/finance, business, and consulting, where base starting salaries can exceed $100,000. These strong earnings figures reflect, in part, the wealth of Claremont McKenna’s student body: As of around 2015, one-in-five students came from families in the top one percent, and one-in-twenty from the top 0.1 percent (incomes over $800,000). Similar levels of income inequality exist across nearly all selective universities in the US.
The most striking fact is that even among graduates of elite colleges, those from wealthy backgrounds earn more post-grad. Consider 30-somethings who graduated from Ivy-plus or other elite colleges, and focus on two groups: Those whose parents earned in the top five percent (“rich”), and whose parents earned in the bottom 40 percent (“working-class”). Data indicates that those who grew up rich are 18 percent less likely than their working-class peers to earn a bottom 40 percent salary. Wealthy-born elite-college graduates are also far more likely to earn top one percent salaries themselves.
Given that these students graduated from the exact same selective colleges, it’s hard to imagine that differences in skill or life circumstance could account for all disparities in outcome. Rather, this effect is driven by rich students at elite universities passing over lower-paying careers for more lucrative positions.
None of this is surprising, so why does it matter? First, wealthy students at elite colleges are the best suited to enter careers in public service and research that may not compensate well. While not universally true, affluent young people tend to receive substantial family financial support to cover the costs of low-paying internships and jobs. For a working-class student penny-pinching to afford a top college education, taking a $40,000 paycheck in San Francisco or New York may not be justifiable; for someone with generational wealth, it might be.
I’m not referring to just any low-paying jobs. Fields such as teaching, social work, nonprofit administration, and scientific research are critical to advancing the American Dream and improving the lives of the less fortunate. For disadvantaged students, having a “high value” teacher for even one year can significantly raise college attendance and lifetime earnings. College grads at AmeriCorps have supported millions of Americans through disaster recovery, environmental restoration, and public health programs despite being paid just $18,000 annually. Public defense lawyers carry out the critical work of upholding our Sixth Amendment right to counsel, yet accept salaries less than half of comparable private trial attorneys. STEM research labs, which demand large quantities of low-wage predoctoral assistants, generate vast innovation and billions in economic activity.
Another reason well-off graduates should enter lower-paying fields is to allow middle-class and low-income young people to climb the ladder. As Brookings researchers Richard Reeves and Kimberly Howard highlight, America has a “glass floor” problem: Those born into affluent families are unlikely to fall, even after accounting for their skills and drive as measured by child aptitude tests. This is a prime reason for declining belief in the American Dream. Exploding inequality has meant that even if children become “better off” than their parents, they are increasingly unlikely to climb the ladder on a relative scale, a signifier of intergenerational progress. To put it plainly, only one percent of people can be in the top one percent. A rich child that remains rich is preventing upward relative mobility.
I want to be clear that there is nothing inherently wrong with anyone, even the ultrawealthy, pursuing a high-paying career. In fact, rich students at top colleges help open the door for their working-class peers to enter lucrative professions. Research by Harvard economist Raj Chetty demonstrated that having cross-socioeconomic class friendships raised lifetime earnings for poor children, and the same could well be said for those of college age. Perhaps it’s no wonder that CMC has one of the nation’s highest rates of income mobility for students from the bottom 20 percent. I’ll admit that there is a balance to be struck here. But that balance is one where rich college students are at least as likely as low-income classmates to enter public service professions, if not more.
Some well-off students argue that earning large sums and donating — or “effective altruism” — better maximizes their social impact. While this approach is well-intentioned, consider two counterarguments. First, mentally committing in your twenties to make large charitable donations throughout life is flimsy. A 2019 survey of self-professed effective altruists (EAs) found that the median donation was just three percent of income, and even EAs earning in the millions rarely donated more than 10 percent. In other words, it’s just too easy to chicken out of charity when the paychecks roll in and the Lamborghini lot looks enticing.
Second, effective spending by deep-pocketed individuals requires that they know where dollars should be allocated for maximum value. To achieve this, it is critical that intelligent, motivated individuals with the best educations enter academia and grassroots advocacy, debating and determining where resources would make the greatest difference. This is exemplified by the philanthropic organization Coefficient Giving, which draws on academic research from philosophy, epidemiology, economics, biology, and psychology to inform $6 billion in grantmaking to date. The group has funded Chemistry Nobel Prize-winning vaccine research, saved 100,000 human lives through global health interventions, and improved living conditions for 3 billion farm animals. Yet again, the various university and nonprofit research roles necessary for this impact are best filled by financially comfortable college graduates.
With the enormous personal and societal benefits of rich students entering mission-driven work, why do so many neglect this path? One reason is family expectations: In upper-class households, entering a prestigious career path is often considered compulsory. The biggest culprit, however, is peer pressure.
At schools like CMC, where finance and consulting are considered the default, wealthy students going into advocacy or service work are quietly judged by their peers for leaning on “daddy’s money.” Instead, these individuals should be celebrated for using their position of privilege to make the world a better place. Higher education must look to colleges such as Pitzer, Oberlin, Wesleyan, and Carleton as examples of producing impact-minded graduates despite having well-heeled student bodies.
Ultimately, sending more affluent students into service-oriented professions will require a change of culture at elite colleges. Career service offices will need to direct more students towards nonprofits, social enterprise, and PhD tracks, actively connecting them with alumni in these fields. Affluent students themselves must be willing to sacrifice McKinsey and Goldman Sachs salaries, and instead join purpose-driven organizations desperate for talent. Most importantly, it will require all of us at Claremont McKenna and colleges around the country to demonstrate through our words and actions that lower salaried careers are not only acceptable, but venerable for top graduates.
