Selling Out

To veer off the traditional (and lucrative) career path is an anomaly for the average Harvard student. It is the unfortunate case that even in the Harvard schools that specifically cater to those looking to do the most good, most notably Harvard Law School (HLS) and the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), students often choose the easier, more visible road to immediate monetary success.

HLS and the KSG have both taken measures in recent years in an attempt to reverse the trend, but it is not yet clear whether these steps will be enough to stop students from moving away from jobs whose primary appeal is helping society. Indeed, as experience shows, it is difficult to lure students away from the so-called “sell-out” track.

STICKING IT TO THE MAN

To the delight of its administrators, HLS has actually seen an increase in the number of students who choose to pursue public service in recent years. But it is still nowhere near the majority of graduates, most of whom still take jobs at corporate firms.

“The majority of the numbers of [HLS] graduates go into corporate work and always have,” says Joan E. Ruttenberg, director of the Heyman Fellowship Program (HFP). On the other hand, she adds, “the number of HLS grads going into public law has been going up in the past 10 years.” In an effort to provide incentive, HFP currently distributes grants to graduates going into any federal job aside from clerkships.

Indeed, HLS has been putting a great deal of effort into steering its students towards more public-service related work. For example, HLS has instituted a pro bono requirement, which requires that students to do a minimum of 40 hours of public-service related legal work, such as legal research or working for non-profits, (a requirement which, according to Assistant Dean for Public Service Alexa Shabecoff, is greatly exceeded: the average HLS student performs an impressive 400 hours of public service before graduation). And on top of an already-generous loan forgiveness program, HLS just announced an unprecedented initiative to not charge third-year tuition to students who commit to public-service careers.

Such measures have encouraged more and more Harvard graduates to use their law degrees to help people who really need legal services, but may not have the cash to pay. The traditional five or six percent of HLS graduates going into public-service law has now doubled to about 12 percent.

But even with this new trend, both Ruttenberg and Shabecoff note that to graduates, a position in a private sector job often is easier and has a greater economic payoff: the salary at a typical law firm starts at around $160,000, compared with an average salary of $45,000 in public interest work.

Regardless, HLS hopes that their efforts in funding, like guaranteed funding for summer work, will help continue the increased interest in service-related jobs.

A ROUGH ROAD TO TRAVEL

While those studying law are working in public service in greater numbers, their friends in the government sector seem to be heading in the opposite direction.

Though it has prepared graduates for careers in many fields, the KSG traditionally aimed to place students at agencies like the Foreign Service, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department. But in recent years, that aim has been overtaken by the allure of private sector careers.

Clyde I. Howard, a 1991 graduate of KSG’s mid-career program and a consol general in Barbados, details the difficulty in becoming a member of the Foreign Service. To be eligible, applicants must sit for an exam (designed to eliminate 90 percent of applicants), go through an interview process, and attend a series of individual and group exercises. For Howard, this process took close to two years to complete.

It is these two years without good hours or pay that drive people away from the Foreign Service. During this time, “a lot of people who are the kinds of people [to go into Foreign Service] will have other opportunities,” Howard says.

Howard also believes that the decrease in public service numbers is due to a lack of interest and recruiting at KSG, adding that most students with a particular interest in the Foreign Service generally attend schools geared towards those careers, such as Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

“The impression I got was that there wasn’t that much interest among the students that I knew in international careers,” Howard says, adding that he believes recruitment efforts are more focused on finding minorities outside of the Northeast to improve diversity.

Sandy Hessler, however, director of professional development at KSG, attributes the waning involvement in the public sector not to KSG recruiting techniques, but to the government’s lack of growth in the past 10 to 15 years. “A lot of the private sector jobs have job responsibilities that used to be public sector,” she says.

Additionally, according to Hessler, because applicants are notified of their acceptance earlier in the private sector, they often take these positions before hearing back about government jobs. And because Harvard students typically have a higher hiring rate to begin with, the public jobs they choose not to accept—like the Foreign Service, which used to be dominated by graduates of the Ivy League, and Yale in particular—have seen a recent decline in the number of Harvard alums.

It would seem that with all the opportunities available to Harvard students, and all the incentives to use a Harvard degree to give back to the community, more graduates would choose to go into these public sector jobs, regardless of a few years of low-pay. But, if the recent upward trajectory in HLS is indicative of upcoming trends, there may be a reversal of this corporate pattern, and possibly an increase in the number of Harvard grads looking not just for money, but for fulfilment as well.