As this column has argued for years, watch what college kids do, not what they say. Words are cheap, while actions are pregnant with real meaning.
Consider a recent Wall Street Journal front page article about summer interns for U.S. corporations. The story about top businesses recruiting Summer 2025 interns will hopefully calm all the anxiety on the right about college campuses supposedly brainwashing kids about the wonders of socialism.
To be clear, the companies recruiting are ones with names like Guggenheim Securities. About Guggenheim, it’s led by billionaires and centi-millionaires. Whatever the politics of those who run Guggenheim, it’s apparent from their earnings that they very much enjoy what they do, along with the wealth they attain for doing what they do.
Please think about this in light of all the pessimism within the conservative movement at the moment. Supposedly the most elite of elite schools have gone all “woke” (a more overused word would be hard to locate) thanks to the ideological makeup of the professors at those schools. Owing to the lack of ideological diversity at the front of the classroom, young people are supposedly learning all the wrong things, including that the capitalist profit motive is evil.
The good news is that either conservatives overstate the socialist ideological lean of college professors, the kids aren’t listening to their socialist professors, or both. Whatever readers want to believe about what’s happening on campus, it’s apparent that efforts by the professoriate to turn their students against wealth and prosperity have failed. Big time.
We know this because without once again knowing the ideological lean inside companies like Guggenheim, what we do know is that achievement inside Guggenheim, Goldman Sachs, KKR, BlackRock, and other world-leading financial institutions is very quantitative in nature. Put another way, returns are everything inside the firms mentioned. Precisely because money ruthlessly migrates to where it’s treated best, financial institutions worship at the altar of returns.
Back to internships, the best of the best U.S. corporations are presently at peaceful war with one another in pursuit of the kids on campus. At which point it’s useful to point out that they wouldn’t be in such hot pursuit of elite-educated students if those schools were molding tomorrow’s socialists. There’s no chance of it. In the world of business, returns are yet again everything. If colleges were producing passionate redistributionists indifferent to profits, then top U.S. businesses would be looking elsewhere for talent.
In other words, forget about the politics or the utterances of those who show up on campus, along with the ideology of their professors. Instead, watch what the college-educated do once they’re not in school. If recruitment efforts on campus are any indication, the college educated of today are the same as ever: they’re going to the best schools with a passionate eye on post-collegiate employment in order to earn enormous sums of money.
In short, the kids are alright. They’ve always been. They want what we now want. Just watch what they do, and what corporations do vis-à-vis students, to see that all the worry about college campuses is well overdone.
Republished from RealClear Markets
