Why graduates end up in the same few jobs

Finance, consulting, tech. Year after year, graduates cluster in the same few industries, while schools and public institutions struggle to fill vacancies. Yeşim Topuz argues that what looks like free choice is in fact a system that universities help sustain.

Elite universities like to promise openness: endless options, limitless futures. But look at where graduates actually go? A disproportionate number end up in the same places like finance, consulting, tech. Meanwhile, the Netherlands deals with an immense shortage in sectors such as healthcare.

Sociologist Amy Binder describes this as ‘career funneling.’ What it points to is a system that puts students in certain directions while making other paths feel like detours.

On campus, prestige has a hierarchy. Some jobs carry weight; others don’t. Students pick this up quickly. It shows up in everyday conversations: who got which internship, which firms are recruiting, and what counts as impressive. Careers in teaching or the public sector aren’t dismissed outright, but they’re rarely treated as first-choice options. They sit somewhere lower in the pecking order.

That hierarchy is built into the university’s structure. Corporate recruiters are everywhere, offering internships, workshops, networking events, clear routes into well-paid jobs. The public sector has no equivalent presence. Fewer entry points, less visibility, almost no sense of momentum.

Many students tell themselves they’ll start in a high-paying field and later move into something more meaningful. It sounds reasonable. It also conveniently matches what the institution rewards. But studies have found that, in practice, most graduates who enter finance or consulting rarely make the leap to other sectors.

Years pass, responsibilities expand, and the move becomes harder to pull off. Anecdotes from alumni gatherings echo this pattern: people often admit they planned to make a shift, but found it easier to stay put. Whether that shift actually happens tends to be beside the point.

When large numbers of highly educated graduates cluster in a few industries, other sectors are left scrambling. Schools struggle to find teachers. Public institutions compete for talent they can’t match financially. None of this is new, but it is sustained, year after year, by the same set of incentives.

It’s often framed as a matter of personal choice. Students are said to be acting rationally, responding to debt, job markets, and uncertainty. There’s truth in that. But it leaves out how those choices are shaped long before graduation. What looks like an open field is already uneven.

Universities tend to present themselves as engines of mobility and a public good. But they are also closely tied to the industries that recruit most heavily from them. That relationship is rarely questioned.

The result is a system that doesn’t need to force anyone. It works by making certain futures feel obvious, even inevitable.

_Advertentie.