High School Aspirations

Pleasant memories come flooding back when I open my dusty high school yearbook and gaze upon the younger, hopeful faces of my former classmates. It’s astounding how much I still remember about them: their voices as they cried out to assemble for our class photo still ring in my head, the inside jokes they scribbled in the margins in every color still crack me up.

Above all, I remember their future goals because exchanging them during graduation is my final memory of most classmates. Some of them wished to star as actors and actresses in films; some wanted to dedicate their careers to abstract math as professors; some dreamed of dee-jaying at raves and clubs; others yearned for professions from cooking to social work to competitive track and field.

Nowadays, I see my classmates’ faces most often not in my yearbook, but on the popular U.S. job networking website LinkedIn. And under each of their less hopeful, more artificial faces is some variation of the same handful of job titles. Financial consultant or analyst at some Fortune 500 powerhouse. Software engineer at Google, Facebook, or Apple. J.D. candidate at such-and-such top law school. M.D. candidate at such-and-such top medical school. That’s about it.

I’m serious, something close to 90% of my classmates are working or planning to work in finance, big tech, law, or medicine. That’s it. Out of hundreds of classmates, I personally know of only two others pursuing a career in education.

These are the kinds of future outcomes that high schools and universities love to boast about and that parents obsess over. But every time I log onto LinkedIn, I feel profound sadness. The faces I see don’t belong to strangers; I’ve debated these people during class discussions, cheered with them even when we lost the Spirit Day football game, and learned their most truthful aspirations back in high school. These dreams, most of all, were what made my classmates so colorful, so distinctive that my memories of them were emblazoned into my mind. And yet, here they are in front of me, each one virtually indistinguishable from the next with their cookie cutter job titles.

In truth, I have no idea what happened to my classmates. Some of them have dreamed of “making it big” and gaining high-status, high-paying jobs since high school, and they’ve made good on that. But for the many who had individual, unconventional aspirations, what happened along the way that doused them with cynical practicality and compelled them to sidetrack or completely abandon their goals? I don’t believe for a second that many or even most of the 90% of my classmates in finance, big tech, law, and medicine genuinely find their professions fulfilling.

There’s something fundamentally flawed with our education system when the vast majority of our country’s best and brightest graduates believe financial security is the paramount end goal and only a select few professions are worth pursuing. Having attended the best high schools and universities, my classmates and I represent the people most privileged by education. Buttressed by our diplomas, most of us could’ve feasibly chosen to pursue almost any career we desire. The fact that the vast majority of us have (at least for now) opted for a life of financial comfort over public service, artistic or athletic achievement, or basically anything else is truly a travesty.

As rising economic inequality continues to cleave apart our society’s haves and have nots, the common, albeit overly simplistic narrative of the bottom 99% versus the top 1% is frequently invoked in public discourse. But as Matthew Stewart writes in “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy,” an especially illuminating article in The Atlantic, the top 9.9%—yes, these are your finance guys, tech guys, lawyers, and doctors—are the best positioned but least incentivized to fight against economic inequality. That’s not surprising, given that so many socially mobile graduates seem more determined to ascend to the top 1% than promote fairer, more even distribution of wealth.

As I reflect on the paths chosen or abandoned by my former classmates and myself, I sincerely hope you resist our education system’s conformist influences and lend greater weight to your own aspirations.