President Eisgruber should be commended for his noble words in “Something Transcendent” on The President’s Page in October. This was the president at his best. His excellent remarks, however, reveal a serious problem at our beloved university: People like him are delivering the right message, but when we see what our students do upon graduation, it’s clear that the message is seldom getting through.
Something goes extremely wrong between the day students first set foot on campus and graduation day. Too many of them stray far from the worthwhile outlook Eisgruber prescribes. He annually shares lofty thoughts to inspire new students to become people of character who contribute to the common good, yet among every recent year’s graduates, the second most popular next step is a career in finance, a field that has been doing truly virulent harm to society. For the Class of 2023, the percentage going into this career was approximately 25% of those employed at the time of the Princeton’s Center for Career Development survey. It’s likely higher because many of those choosing graduate school move into this field after that. Obviously, admirable, valid messages like President Eisgruber’s are not reaching them. Instead, they choose paths that are already creating unconscionable, growing levels of inequality and misery.
Evidently, too many of our graduates are choosing to work in the service of destroying the nation to enrich themselves, not “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity. “ We need to figure out why their values decay so much between entry and graduation and prevent it.
We Princetonians are better than this. The nation and humanity need us to be.
President Eisgruber should be commended for his noble words in “Something Transcendent” on The President’s Page in October. This was the president at his best. His excellent remarks, however, reveal a serious problem at our beloved university: People like him are delivering the right message, but when we see what our students do upon graduation, it’s clear that the message is seldom getting through.
Something goes extremely wrong between the day students first set foot on campus and graduation day. Too many of them stray far from the worthwhile outlook Eisgruber prescribes. He annually shares lofty thoughts to inspire new students to become people of character who contribute to the common good, yet among every recent year’s graduates, the second most popular next step is a career in finance, a field that has been doing truly virulent harm to society. For the Class of 2023, the percentage going into this career was approximately 25% of those employed at the time of the Princeton’s Center for Career Development survey. It’s likely higher because many of those choosing graduate school move into this field after that. Obviously, admirable, valid messages like President Eisgruber’s are not reaching them. Instead, they choose paths that are already creating unconscionable, growing levels of inequality and misery.
Evidently, too many of our graduates are choosing to work in the service of destroying the nation to enrich themselves, not “in the nation’s service and the service of humanity. “ We need to figure out why their values decay so much between entry and graduation and prevent it.
We Princetonians are better than this. The nation and humanity need us to be.