Clinton’s evolution from embracing Johnson’s big-government activism in the 1960s to declaring the end of big government in the 1990s spoke of a turning in the culture whose effects were palpable in the Georgetown that Cohen discovered in the early 2010s. When she and her peers were stirred by a desire to change things, their own ideas and the resources available to them tended to steer them toward the market rather than government as the place where problems are best solved. The age-old youthful impulse to reimagine the world was now often molded and guided by one of the reigning ideas of the age: that if you really want to change the world, you must rely on the techniques, resources, and personnel of capitalism. In 2011, for example, Georgetown found itself with a $1.5 million pot of money intended for student activities that the administration no longer wished to administer. It allowed students to vote on how to use the money. Out of several proposals, they chose one to create a “student-run endowment that invested in student and alumni innovative ideas that do good in the world.” Cohen joined this Social Innovation and Public Service Fund as one of two students on its founding board of trustees. She served alongside a private equity executive and other businesspersons, as well as Georgetown professors. It was a perfectly laudable and well-meaning initiative, and it spoke to how many young people had been trained to think about change in an age dominated by a market consensus: as a thing that could be pursued by investment committee as much as by social and political action.
Boosters of business have done a remarkable job of reaching into campus life in recent decades and developing programs designed to coax students in their direction. In the early 1970s, for example, Georgetown received a gift from the family of the late George F. Baker, the founder of the bank that would grow to be called Citibank and the anchor donor of Harvard Business School. It was perhaps natural that the business school he had helped set up should have a Baker Scholars program, which recognized its most capable students. But it was even more deft to create a Baker Scholars program at Georgetown, focused on liberal arts students, offering them “a unique opportunity” to “learn about the world of business.”
Cohen applied to the program, less because she wanted to be a businessperson and more because she was starting to be convinced by the idea that the business world offered useful general-purpose training in being effective. Her application earned her an interview, which turned out to be a four-on-one grilling by trustees, “most of whom are or have been in finance/consulting,” she recalled. When she was asked to demonstrate her interest in business, she brought up the mall research she had done for her father. The interview questions, she said, reflected the tensions among older visions of changing the world, Georgetown’s Jesuit traditions, and the ascendant values of the marketplace. “I remember being asked in the same day to assess the trade-offs should profit ever conflict with ethical standards, to describe how I’d lived the Jesuit ideal of ‘women and men for others,’ and to come up with a clear articulation of my ‘personal brand’ in two sentences or less,” she said.
Her answers won her a berth as a Baker Scholar, and through the program she was treated to an inside tour of the business world of a kind seldom available to people interested in, say, legal aid. The program hosted regular meetings on campus and sent her on trips to other cities, where she visited companies such as Kiva, DoSomething, Kind, and NASCAR, as well as consulting firms, financial services firms, and companies in media and technology.
Even as the program sold liberal arts students on business, one of its trustees endeavored quietly to press a contrary message. He was a Jesuit named Kevin O’Brien, and he had been a Baker Scholar in the 1980s, which helped to prepare him for a career in corporate law. Then he had left that world for the priesthood. He hosted the nine Baker Scholars in Cohen’s cohort for regular dinners. “Having tasted and departed the world most of us were about to enter, he would gently pose questions that ended up being far more provocative than those of the more buttoned-up trustees,” she said. “He challenged us to think about our vocation more often and about being paid in the ‘currency of our soul.’ ”
Father O’Brien’s genre of advice was up against the tremendous force of corporate recruiters on campus—starting with the hawkers of internships. In the careerist culture that has overtaken many leading universities, productive summers that expose one to potential careers have become essential grooming for many ambitious students. Cohen pursued them. She began in 2010 with that internship on Capitol Hill, which many around her considered an old-fashioned way of learning how to make change. Starting companies and pursuing socially minded businesses like Toms Shoes or impact investment funds were more respected in her circles. While Cohen had trouble with this view, she didn’t exactly resist it either. After the Hill, she interned at an educational technology company. Then, in the summer before senior year, as Black Lives Matter was getting under way, she followed many other aspiring do-gooders to a summer job as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
It might seem an improbable choice for someone aspiring to help people. But it was not at all an unusual one in her circles. Cohen was hardly the first person to be impressed by an oft-heard view, espoused by firms like Goldman, that the skills they teach are vital preparation for change-making of any sort. Management consulting firms and Wall Street financial houses have persuaded many young people in recent years that they provide a superior version of what the liberal arts are said to offer: highly portable training for doing whatever you wish down the road. They also say, according to Cohen, “To be a leader in the world, you need this skill set.”
She didn’t capitulate to these notions all at once. She considered jobs in the nonprofit sector that had been advertised on campus or online. Somehow, though, they felt risky to her. Sure, she would be cutting to the chase of making a difference, but wouldn’t she be forgoing the skill-building and self-cultivation offered by the big private-sector firms? Some of the NGOs she looked at seemed to have no career plan for a young person, no promise of a trajectory of growing responsibilities and impact. A lot of these places hired only one or two graduates per year and expected them to find their way with little structure, whereas the big firms recruited entire cohorts of them for entry-level analyst positions, referring to them as “classes,” subtly playing into their nostalgia for dorm-room days.
She was still an Aristotelian; she believed that money is not the end in itself that so many think it to be. But it was a means, and she had absorbed the belief all around her that one had to apprentice with money in order to make the world a better place.
The big firms did all they could to portray themselves not only as springboards for future change agents but also as laboratories for present-day ones. For instance, Goldman had launched an initiative called 10,000 Women, through which it invested in female business owners and mentored them. Doing so, its promotional materials said, was “one of the most important means to reducing inequality and ensuring more shared economic growth”—goals for which Goldman was otherwise not well known. While Cohen was a summer analyst there, Goldman had also been involved in an experimental (and ultimately doomed) $10 million investment in a prison program in New York. Under the terms of a new financial instrument called a “social impact bond,” it would profit if its investee, a prison education program, dramatically cut the recidivism rate.
Despite such efforts to win over people of Cohen’s bent, a summer at Goldman revealed it to be not for her. It was a little far toward the “doing well” end of the “doing well by doing good” continuum. A more moderate choice, she felt, was McKinsey & Company. She liked the idea of going to a boot camp for solving problems at scale, which is how the campus recruiters framed it. The overwhelming share of McKinsey clients are corporate, but the recruiters, knowing the mentality of young people like her, played up the social- and public-sector projects. Cohen said, only half joking, that it was possible to come away from the information session thinking that if hired, you woul
d spend most of your time helping Haiti with post-earthquake development and advising the Vatican.
Even as Cohen warmed to the idea, she feared she would be making “the least imaginative, most soul-sucking decision you can make,” going to work at a consulting firm after talking big about changing people’s lives. But McKinsey, like Goldman, had a persuasive story to tell her. It, too, was not just a springboard. It was a place where you could change the world now. A recruiting pamphlet from 2014, aimed at aspiring business analysts fresh out of college, seemed to cover all the right bases:
Change the world.
Improve lives.
Invent something new.
Solve a complex problem.
Extend your talents.
Build enduring relationships.
Lofty as the first three of these promises are, McKinsey tried to back them up. It had, for example, set up a Social Sector Practice, through which it published such insights as how “delivering financial services by mobile phone could benefit billions of people by spurring inclusive growth.” Rival consulting firms had done the same. The Boston Consulting Group pledged “to change the world for both our social sector and our commercial clients.” Bain & Company declared, “We’re aiming to transform the whole social sector.”
These firms were in fact channeling a widespread dogma: of the market as the place for world-changing and of market types as ideal world-changers. And so graduates like Cohen were bombarded not only by tales of economic woe and inequality, but also by an insistent message about how to defeat these scourges. They might have seen Morgan Stanley’s advertising campaign “Capital Creates Change,” in which it declares that “the value of capital is to create not just wealth but things that matter,” and that working for Morgan Stanley is tantamount to “giving, literally, millions of people a shot at a better life.” Like a reborn private-sector John F. Kennedy, it thunders, “Let’s raise the capital that builds the things that change the world.” They might have read influential books such as How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein, or come across articles such as “5 Companies Making a Splash for a Better World” in Forbes and “27 companies that changed the world” in Fortune. They perhaps agreed with Airbnb’s conclusion in a research report that businesses like it were not about money but love: “Most people who share, do it because they want to make the world a better place,” as Fast Company summarized the research. They might have seen a documentary like The Double Bottom Line, which told the story of two companies, D.light Design and LifeSpring Hospitals, that, like so many businesses now, merged two goals: to “change the world” and to “make a profit.” They might have heard of companies becoming B Corporations and signing on to a new “Declaration of Interdependence,” which committed them to using “business as a force for good” and fostering “the change we seek.”
And they might have heard thinkers whom they respected say that these new, market-based ways of changing the world were not just additions to the existing ways, but in fact preferable to them. For example, Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at New York University’s business school and a popular TED speaker, was a left-wing student at Yale in the early 1980s, but he had since turned against the kind of power-busting world-changing he believed in then. He articulated the new belief well in an interview with the radio host Krista Tippett:
People our age grew up expecting that the point of civic engagement is to be active, so we can make the government fix civil rights or something—we’ve got to make the government do something. And young people have grown up never seeing the government do anything except turn the lights off now and then. And so their activism is not going to be to get the government to do things. It’s going to be to invent some app, some way of solving problems separately. And that’s going to work.
That a scholar like Haidt could compare inventing an app to the civil rights movement gives a sense of the intellectual atmosphere around wavering graduates like Cohen. Maybe it wasn’t a soul-sucking decision to go corporate, after all. Such a thought might be reinforced by the rampant talk among Cohen’s peers about “social” everything—social innovation, social business, social enterprise, social investing. Indeed, during Cohen’s final semester at Georgetown, the university launched on campus the new Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation, which was designed to promote the increasingly influential private-sector approach to world-changing that she was contemplating, and which highlighted its temptations and complications.
The center was founded thanks to a $10 million donation from Alberto and Olga Maria Beeck, who made much of their money in the mining business in South America. Wealthy donors such as they often had a financial interest in the world being changed in ways that left things like taxation, redistribution, labor laws, and mining regulations off the table. And Georgetown, like other universities, was happy to oblige. The new center’s executive director was Sonal Shah, who had the perfect résumé for it as a veteran of Google, Goldman Sachs, and the White House, where she established the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation under President Obama. That office, according to its website, was “based on a simple idea: we cannot drive lasting change by creating new top-down programs from Washington.” It was a striking statement from a liberal government—but not an uncommon one in an age dominated by market thinking—and it reflected a theory of progress that the rich and powerful could embrace.
Shah later built on the notion in an essay whose intellectual and pecuniary origins reflected the rising profile of private solutions to public problems. It was coauthored by Jitinder Kohli, who ran the public-sector practice at Monitor Deloitte, and it appeared as part of a think-piece series sponsored by Deloitte, the Skoll Foundation, and Forbes. The essay argued that the new private world-changing, led by people and entities like these, was preferable to the old-fashioned public, democratic way:
In a bygone era government was solely responsible for addressing the Nation’s biggest problems, from building the interstate highway system to the New Deal social programs. However, today’s challenges are more complicated and interconnected than ever before and cannot be solved by a single actor or solution. That is why government has an opportunity to engage with the actors in the Impact Economy from non-profits to businesses.
It was curious to see the U.S. government, arguably the most powerful institution in human history, reduced to being a “single actor” among actors, one inadequate to modern problems. Building a continental highway network or waging a New Deal was easy, according to this view. But today’s problems were too hard for the government. They had therefore to be solved through partnerships among rich donors, NGOs, and the public sector. There was no mention of the fact that this method, by putting the moneyed into a leadership position on public problem-solving, gave them the power to thwart solutions that threatened them. If your preferred way of solving big problems requires my money and gives me a board seat on the initiative, I may not encourage solutions involving inheritance taxes or the breakup of companies like the one from which I have made the money I am giving.
There are also subtler forms of influence to be reaped from the private push into world betterment. The promotional materials put out by the new Beeck Center illustrated, for example, how business language has conquered the sphere of social change and pushed out an older language of power, justice, and rights. The purpose of the center is to “foster innovation and provide a unique skill set.” The center “engages global leaders to drive social change at scale.” It provides tools to “leverage the power of capital, data, technology and policy to improve lives.” The press release promised that “through the new center, students will learn how to design, organize and raise funds for careers in social impact, and be introduced to global leaders who will help with the incubation of their new ideas for small businesses or nonprofits.” The solution
of public problems through public action—changing the law, going to court, organizing citizens, petitioning the government with grievances—went all but unmentioned. Rather, the university promised a new focus on the “entrepreneurial spirit” as the solution to “some of the world’s most pressing problems.”
So when Cohen received her offer letter from McKinsey that year, it was possible to feel, as she did, that it was a dull and cynical choice; and it was possible to feel, as she also did, that it was an invitation into the new way of helping people. A meeting of another program she belonged to, known as Capstone, illustrated that she was far from alone. The program brought together small groups of college seniors to discuss the anxieties of the final year and future plans, with a professor’s help. The host of the ninth meeting of Cohen’s cohort, held in late March, circulated by email some readings to prime the discussion, one of which was a piece from The Georgetown Voice, a student-run newsmagazine founded in 1969 by former Hoya editors who objected to that newspaper’s hesitancy to cover the Vietnam War. The article asked a question that Cohen was asking herself in those days: “Why Are So Many Georgetown Graduates Taking Jobs in Banking and Consulting?”
The article reported the striking fact that more than 40 percent of Georgetown graduates from the class of 2012 who found full-time work had gone into consulting or financial services. The writer observed that the trend “can seem contradictory for a University that prides itself on Jesuit values.” It attributed the glut to the high salaries, the debt burden that many students take on, and a “culture that holds financial services and consulting jobs as prestigious.” One student interviewed by the magazine added that “many fields that her friends are interested in do not realistically have entry-level positions available that do not require a few years of business experience.” Other lines of work seemed to be internalizing the consulting and financial firms’ tale of themselves as gateways. Cohen and her friends discussed the article that day, which mirrored her own agonizing over what to do about McKinsey. She says she sought an extension of the deadline for accepting the offer five times before deciding to join.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 3