An immense share of elite college graduates funnel into the same handful of jobs, and the ones who don’t take those paths earn considerably less. Hedge funds, private equity firms, and top technology companies all recruit the same way. Elite colleges select students the same way. The whole system is a mirror, and it reflects one thing: prestige begetting prestige.
Most people, if you ask them, will deny that prestige drives their decisions. But many employers don’t bother denying it.
According to the American Sociological Review, evaluators at top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms favored candidates from a restricted pool of prestigious universities, with criteria prioritizing cultural fit, social grooming, and extracurricular prestige over analytical skills. The study found that grades count less than culturally appropriate extracurriculars, and educational prestige is treated as a barometer of “social, intellectual and moral worth.”
So what these organizations are looking for isn’t your GPA, what you actually learned, or what you built during your internship, but simply whether your internship had the right name attached to it. The work itself is almost beside the point, and this is often known as the “prestige trap.”
Of course, the logic feels intuitive on the surface: competitive opportunities signal quality, selective spaces attract talented people, name recognition opens doors.
As the study showed, to some degree, this is true. With prestigious hiring firms focusing primarily on the prestige of a candidate’s prior work experience, not the tasks they actually performed, it’s obvious that the gatekeepers of elite industries reward the chase, so naturally, students keep chasing.
But with this trap comes the loss of the experience of actually doing something.
At large, prestigious companies, interns often find their roles are confined to narrowly defined tasks, and many report that the work feels like “busy work” rather than something meaningful, such as simply copying papers or running mundane errands.
Meanwhile, people writing copy for a local newsletter, managing social media for a small nonprofit, or running front-of-house at a family-owned restaurant get to directly engage in skillsets more relevant to their interests or career and experience being genuinely needed.
Research consistently shows that task variety, feedback, and real chances to interact with professionals are significantly related to students’ self-efficacy and career development, outcomes that are often easier to find in smaller, less glamorous settings precisely because there is no one else to do the work.
Some will argue that prestige-chasing is simply rational. In fact, studies have shown that upper-middle-class students are better able to stack multiple high-status internships, pulling ahead of peers in the graduate labor market.
But this counterargument proves too much. It assumes the goal is to optimize for the next opportunity rather than to actually learn something, and it assumes that prestige reliably tracks skill development, which the evidence does not support.
Poorly designed and executed internships can have negative consequences for students, including too much time commitment, not enough real work, low-quality supervision, and projects that aren’t truly engaging or challenging.
There is also something worth noting about what prestige-chasing costs students who cannot afford such a chase. The stress of competing for elite internships fosters an inequitable and toxic academic and social environment, where students from less privileged backgrounds frequently experience imposter syndrome and feelings of inadequacy. If we continue treating only selective opportunities as legitimate, we reinforce a system that decides whose work counts.
The resolution here is obviously not to stop being ambitious, but rather to expand what ambition looks like. Whether it’s a local ice cream shop where you manage a Saturday rush alone, a small law office where you get to draft documents, or a community paper where your name actually makes it into a byline, it’s important to recognize these are not, by any means, consolation prizes, but authentic training grounds that teach what it feels like to be responsible for something and to fail where it matters, an experience no brand name can replicate and one that is more than worth having.
This editorial reflects the views of the Editorial Board and was written by Naomi Hsu. The Editorial Board voted 12 in agreement, 3 somewhat in agreement, and 3 refrained from voting.
