We debate the world’s challenges in tutorials.
Why do we still get funnelled into careers that don’t address them?
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Building a career is not simply an art of stacking CV items with impressive internships, prestigious awards, and a first-class degree. It’s about determining what your one working life will add up to. Your career is built by a series of consequential choices that reflect the use of your ambition, energy, and time. Will these precious resources be spent maximising clout and compensation, or tackling the problems that define the twenty-first century?
Here at Oxford, we talk a big game about consequences. Oxford students are perhaps more familiar than any other student body with the major challenges that define our world. In seminars, we learn to think critically, question inherited systems, and strive for a better world. In the Unionʼs debate hall, weighty questions are addressed by world-renowned experts, from heads of state to intellectual giants. Our university even houses institutes dedicated to global poverty and the governance of AI. Oxford is, after all, the birthplace of “effective altruism”. In theory, we are fluent in the language of global problems.
But theory only gets us so far.
I saw this paradox in miniature at a formal hall recently, where I overheard a fresher PPE student discuss investment banking as the most obvious option available to him after graduation, while another student asked why this destination was taken for granted before the search even began. That fresher’s “default” is powerful, and it gets reinforced every Michaelmas term when the recruitment cycle begins in earnest. The milkround events at the Examination Schools present a powerful, pre-packaged version of ambition. The pull towards the City, Magic Circle law firms, and corporate consulting is immense.
This isn’t to say that Goldman Sachs is Mordor. In fact, taken as a two-year ”launching pad” to gain skills, working at one of the prestigious firms that aggressively recruit Oxford students can be a smart bet. The problem is that most talented students don’t treat it that way. The career funnel is exceptionally good at just one thing: channelling talent towards the path of least resistance, where a two-year plan quietly becomes a ten-year career. It’s subtle. Nobody arrives at the University declaring a lifelong dream of reformatting pitch decks. In fact, most of us come to Oxford with an eager aspiration to change the world through our chosen field, whether it be medicine or literature, philosophy or computer science. Yet, the data from the Saïd Business School’s 2023-24 MBA class shows that a combined 52.7% of graduates went into just two sectors: finance and consulting. Of course, not everyone is an MBA or PPE student. The point isn’t that everybody at Oxford is going into “evil” industries, but rather that when making career decisions, we get brilliantly good at walling off our conscience. We allow the career funnel to replace the internal compass that got us to Oxford in the first place.
This is the Oxford Paradox: We attend a university packed with the intellectual capital to solve global problems, but whose graduates are actively funnelled away from working on them.
While we refine our CVs and network with consulting firms, the problems we discussed in seminars are still happening, left unresolved. Almost every minute, a child dies from malaria. This is a preventable death. It continues because a system to deliver a five-pound bed net isn’t a global priority. Industrial factory farms inflict suffering on billions of animals. This system persists because it’s simply easier to delegate cruelty than to confront our own choices.
And the worst part of it all? We can know all of this, feel a flicker of discomfort, and then return to our job applications unfazed. We treat it as something sad, but fundamentally irrelevant to our own lives. The inertia of comfort and privilege is stronger than the discomfort of conscience.
The real risk isn’t failure. Odds are, you’ll succeed eventually; after all, you graduated from the University of Oxford, one of the best universities in the world. The real risk is succeeding — brilliantly, lucratively, and completely — at something that simply does not matter. The outcome is success that feels more vaporous than advertised. Securing the job offer can look like arrival, but it too often settles into a rhythm of work that is stable, well-paid, and oddly empty. The risk is looking back after a long career to find you’ve skillfully optimised your 80,000 hours for something impressive and quiet. Work that, at best, did nothing to stop the world’s largest harms. At worst, it subtly reinforced them.
After years of chasing the prestige or scholarships and degrees, it can be easy to forget a crucial fact about our own lives: Seeking personal gain for its own sake does not lead to fulfillment. Instead, the deepest gratification in life comes from acts of service to others. Consider the careers of Donald Henderson, who led the eradication of smallpox, or Norman Borlaug, whose agricultural innovations saved over a billion people from starvation. Their careers show what happens when intelligence is aimed at the scale of suffering that actually exists, rather than the scale we find it convenient to acknowledge.
With these stories, I am not asking you to become an epidemiologist or crop scientist. Rather, I am challenging you to be serious. Think about your life and your potential. Who do you want to become, and why?
We are living in one of the most dangerous centuries in human history. The risks of pandemics, climate collapse, nuclear escalation, and misaligned artificial intelligence are accelerating. We cannot let Oxford’s talent be captured by a funnel that prioritises corporate prestige over these critical challenges. This concentration of intelligence needs to be aimed at the problems that will determine our future. Almost none of the smartest people you know are working on them, because the funnel got to them before they realised they had a choice. And yes, many people do not have a choice. But if you are graduating from Oxford University, chances are, you have more options than you realise. You can direct your talent and ambition towards solving problems that you truly care about, not just dreams that you’ve been spoon-fed by marketing campaigns and status comparisons.
The challenge is to reject the pre-packaged definition of success and ask a harder question: What problems are worth a lifeʼs work? This is the driving question behind a new student-led initiative for peers who sense that careerism isn’t the same as seriousness. If you’re one of them, we invite you to join the conversation. You can share your perspective and learn more about the project via our brief survey at https://tally.so/r/ob60oX. We would love to hear from you.