Does Penn Represent Everything That's Wrong with America Right Now?
Its campus culture is decidedly left-wing. But half its graduates go to work in finance or consulting. Welcome to the elite university in the age of hyper-capitalism.
Over the weekend, Philadelphia magazine published an in-depth article of mine about the University of Pennsylvania’s recent troubles. While the piece is, in part, about the controversy over anti-Semitism that led to president Liz Magill’s ouster, it’s broader than that. I try to take look at how Penn has changed over the last 30 years, becoming more powerful and increasingly elite, and the contradictions that now exist within the institution.
I hope you’ll read the full story, but I want to focus here on one of those contradictions.
To its many critics — including Marc Rowan, the private equity exec who led the charge against Magill, and Elise Stefanik, the Trump acolyte whose Congressional questioning ultimately sank her — Penn is a quintessential bastion of the left, a hopelessly “woke” place intent on turning its students into an army of young Marxists.
While that characterization is hyperbolic and unfair, it is pretty hard to argue against the idea that Penn is a left-leaning place. According to one analysis, 99.7 percent of the political donations made by Penn faculty in 2021 and 2022 went to Democrats. According to another, liberal students outnumber conservatives 7 to 1. Meanwhile, Penn has put a heavy emphasis on DEI in recent years, and several people I talked to described a culture not exactly open to free expression.
But somewhat lost in the chatter about Penn’s hyper-progressivism is the fact that the university is, simultaneously, also a living advertisement for hyper-capitalism — a place that feeds and benefits from America’s ever-more-powerful finance sector.
Not only have Marc Rowan and his fellow Wall Street big shots given hundreds of millions of dollars to the school in recent years (with many of those dollars earmarked toward the study of finance at Wharton), but by my count more than half of Penn’s board of trustees work directly in finance (pretty lopsided representation in a university as expansive as Penn).
Just as significantly, according to reporting by The Daily Pennsylvanian, in recent years more than 50 percent of Penn undergrads have taken jobs in finance or management consulting right after graduation. We’re not just talking about Wharton students here, by the way. Some 47 percent of students in Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences followed a financial path, as did 34 percent of engineering students.
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So here’s the question: how can Penn be two things at once — both hyper-progressive and hyper-capitalistic? The answer is complex, but it lies partly in the have-have not economy America has created in the last four decades. We now live in a country where the top 1 percent controls as much wealth as the middle 60 percent.
On one hand, many Penn students — a brighter, more accomplished group than ever— look at numbers like those and see them for what they are: deeply messed up. Toss in our collective inability to deal with climate change, real and enduring disparities around race, and a Republican Party led by an autocrat, and it’s not hard to see why many students might lean left politically.
And yet, despite such leanings, 50 percent of them still head in the direction of Wall Street after graduation — in large part because (here’s the important part): that’s the rational decision.
As Penn professor Jon Zimmerman says, “The students understand that this is kind of a winner-take-all economy. The great middle got hollowed out. There’s just a precarity to the whole situation. Most of them are going to be able to recapture their parents’ status, but if you don’t, you’re kind of fucked. The job market is so bifurcated.”
Other Penn professors told me they’ve literally had students apologize to them for taking jobs on Wall Street. It’s not their highest calling or even what interests them. But it’s the path of success most available to them
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It’s easy to blame Penn for all this. But the university is part of a bigger system that’s been created over the last 40 years. Fixing it requires a political solution that’s beyond our grasp at the moment (see Republican Party autocrat, above). But I think it also requires a cultural solution — one in which we stop justifying every single thing we do, either on the public level or in our own lives, by saying “it’s good for the bottom line.”
One tiny place we might start? In recent years, there’s been a lot of focus on who gets into elite schools like Penn, and to their credit many of the schools (at least prior to the ending of affirmative action) have become more diverse.
I’d argue that it’s now time for equal scrutiny about where students go after they leave elite schools. If the answer is that the best and brightest are continuing to work for Marc Rowan and his brethren in private equity, rest assured: not a single thing is going to change.