Julia Alvarenga ’26 applied to Harvard with the intent to study English. Yet, by her junior year, she had changed course, balancing Economics with consulting cases — all while wondering how she ended up there.
“I started doing case preps, and I caught myself just at my laptop, pulling up the documents,” Alvarenga, a former Crimson editorial editor, recalls. “Why am I doing this?” she asked herself.
Alvarenga’s first year was a blur of reading and writing, mainly in Humanities 10, an intensive seminar covering arts, philosophy, and literature and replete with training in critical writing and opportunities to attend a range of cultural activities. She knew nothing about consulting, finance, or “any of those fads.”
Her true passion was marketing — but peers had teased her about it in her freshman year for its perceived lack of difficulty. This summer, before starting her senior year, Alvarenga came back to what she had pushed aside several years earlier.
She began posting on LinkedIn often, sharing personal stories, including one that received hundreds of likes and comments. Her Jan. 2026 post titled “What Harvard (almost) stole from me” recounts her experience in the consulting and finance recruiting that dominates much of Harvard’s culture.
Last year, 52% of graduating Harvard seniors were planning on entering consulting, finance, or tech. The number is especially staggering, considering that research suggests the majority of students at elite universities have little idea what consulting or finance entails or even means before they get to college.
As Alvarenga wrote in her essay, “Nobody sat me down and said, ‘Julia, you should want to work at McKinsey.’ Nobody had to.”
This past fall, The School for Moral Ambition — an organization hoping to direct college students at elite universities into careers with meaningful impacts — started a fellowship program aiming to counter the pull of finance and consulting that Alvarenga wrote about. The university fellowship, exclusive to Harvard, provides 12 juniors with a stipend of $15,000 to spend the summer in “high-impact” nonprofit internships.
The School advertised their fellowship on bright red posters, plastered across campus. “YOU DIDN’T FIGHT YOUR WAY INTO HARVARD TO END UP IN A BULLSHIT JOB,” the posters read.
Fellowship director Laura E. Clancy ’02-’03 described the marketing campaign — composed of emails from the Assistant Dean of Civic Engagement and Service Travis Lovett, ads in The Crimson, and the bright red posters — as “edgy.”
Rutger Bregman, the co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition, says he is well aware of what he and his friends call “the Bermuda Triangle of talent” — the concentration of college students fed into consultancy, finance and corporate law.
Last year, he published his book “Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference.” The Dutch author has published several books and given TED Talks proposing ideas such as a fifteen-hour work week and universal basic income. In “Moral Ambition,” he calls on professionals to channel their presumed talent into solving the world’s most pressing problems.
Bregman soon launched The School for Moral Ambition, building on the foundations outlined in his book. The exact goal, The School wrote in its 2025 impact report, “was simple but radical: turn readers into participants, thinkers into doers.”
Moral ambition, according to Bregman, is rooted in the traditions “of the abolitionists who fought slavery, of the suffragettes who fought for women’s right to vote, the civil rights campaigners, of people who very often fought for things that they never saw happen during their own lifetime.”
Bregman’s biggest problem with consultants and hedge fund managers? They’re “boring,” he says. “We have such massive problems to solve, powerful dragons to slay,” he adds, “and then this is what you do with your career?”
So The School launched a series of European Union-based fellowships, with the first recruitment campaigns targeting Amsterdam’s business district. The objective? To “liberate these people from their cubicles.”
Then, last fall, they brought the School to Harvard, targeting what Bregman views as the “extraordinary concentration of talent” at elite American universities. To Bregman, Harvard represents perhaps the worst Bermuda Triangle outcomes — consulting, finance, and corporate law — for America’s best talent.
The timeline of the university fellowships application aims to directly overlap with those of finance or consulting, alluring students with “an invitation to choose a different path.”
Raadhay H. Patel ’27, one of the 12 chosen, completed a finance internship the previous summer and enjoyed his experience. At the time, he expected to pursue a traditional “Bermuda Triangle” job and maybe return to public service later in his career. The Moral Ambition Fellowship’s marketing prompted him to reconsider whether he needed to wait to do something more “impactful.”
Scaling impact is at the core of The School for Moral Ambition’s service philosophy. Bregman, Clancy, and fellows alike spoke of channeling the fellowship into the issues that can help scores of people at once. The application and interview process tested candidates’ ability to think “quantitatively,” and fellows will be paired with non-profits that are specifically “high-impact” by Moral Ambition’s standards.
“The most effective nonprofits can be 10,000 times as effective as their counterpart,” Clancy says.
Quantitative approaches, efficacy, and measurable impact are all key tenants of The School for Moral Ambition’s service philosophy. These resonate with fellow David H. An ’27, who envisions a “good” nonprofit as working in “an evidence-based manner” that can track “how well you’re doing.”
An is a Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology concentrator and says that he has grown increasingly interested in public health through exposure to social disparities in underrepresented communities from various public health courses. He is in the decreasing number of Harvard students who never seriously considered consulting or finance as a future career — he’s always wanted to go to medical school. Yet, even he was once in Harvard Undergraduate Consulting on Business and the Environment, a campus consulting club.
The Moral Ambition summer fellowship runs alongside the more traditional public service options that Harvard already offers students through the Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship, including programs like the Arthur Liman Public Interest Law and Mindich Service Fellowships “I just want more opportunities for students, because, actually, there are limited opportunities,” Clancy says.
The university fellowship may face the same issue if next year is anything like the inaugural cycle. Eight percent of Harvard juniors, according to Clancy, applied for 12 Moral Ambition fellowship spots, meaning the acceptance rate was lower than 10 percent.
“For better or worse, prestige really matters to people, and we just have to be realistic with that,” Clancy says.
“We’re trying to say ambition can be a really good thing if it’s directed in the right way,” she adds. “You can be ambitious about making the world a better place.”
Considering that less than 4 percent of the class of 2025 entered public service after graduation, it’s possible that “doing good” might not be good enough for students. Bregman recognizes this challenge.
“At The School for Moral Ambition, we’re trying to make doing good cool as well,” Bregman says. “That’s why we spend a lot of time thinking about the messaging, the branding — how it looks.”
“One thing is that we’ve been really clear that this is only for the best of the best. It’s very, very hard to get into one of our fellowships,” Bregman adds. “It’s easier to get that placement at McKinsey or J.P. Morgan or whatever. It’s harder to get into the Moral Ambition Fellowship, because we think that these enormously neglected global problems really deserve the best.”
Traditional public service options face one other glaring challenge squaring up against the pull of consulting, finance, and tech. The top prize from the Center for Public Service rings in at $8,000 for a summer of work, but most only promise $6,000. The Moral Ambition fellows will receive $15,000 over the summer, a number specifically designed to attract juniors away from higher paying summer internships.
“I think it’s very unrealistic for students, especially those receiving need-based financial aid, to make, like $6,000, maybe $7,000, for the summer, especially if you don’t get housing support,” Clancy says.
Still, fellows would not be guaranteed the immediate flow of income that students witness upon entering a Bermuda Triangle career upon graduation. Many, like Alvarenga, feel pressure due to their financial background to enter fields where high-paying salaries are promised up front.
But Bregman and Clancy both feel that students may be overestimating the amount of money needed to live comfortably, and that the often punishing hours worked in finance and consulting jobs dilute the effect of making so much to begin with.
“The money consideration, it’s such a boring consideration — because come on, with your Harvard diploma, you’re going to be fine,” Bregman says. “And for me, it is so clear that money has fast diminishing returns.”
According to The Crimson’s Class of 2024 senior poll, the highest percentage of graduates entering finance were students with family incomes of over $500,000, with 33% going to finance and 63% going to one of the big three. Students with family incomes ranging $40,000 to $79,999, by contrast, only sent 8% of their cohort into finance and 42% of students overall into consulting, finance, or tech.
“If we sometimes talk more about people with privilege, it’s because we think they deserve a kick in the ass,” Bregman says. “Because I’m not in the business of sermonizing for plumbers or teachers. People who already have essential jobs, they don’t need to be lectured about moral ambition by me.”
With the fellowship still in its first year, it’s still too early to tell if Bregman’s lecture will yield results.
Patel, who is still considering finance, entrepreneurship, or a more public-service minded career, prefers to think that “there’s opportunity everywhere.” He has always wanted to pursue entrepreneurship alongside whatever career he chooses, and feels that finance and consulting are not “the only ways to make it.”
An, who has wanted to become a doctor since before his first year, hopes to bring innovative solutions to areas of public health that are still lagging in efficiency as he enters medical school.
“It sounds kind of corny, right? Like, morally ambitious, still sounds kind of corny when I say it,” An says.
As An joins the inaugural class of the Moral Ambition Fellowship, he is still figuring out what morally ambitious public health looks like in practice.
For now, An says that the call to moral ambition means “striving very hard to let go of these external thoughts of prestige, or the cultural influences of what you should do, and just trying to pursue what you personally think is the most important issue for the world at this point.”
—Magazine writer Mira M. Nalbandian can be reached at [email protected].