The premise that underlies the entire business of management consulting—the in-vogue career option for Duke graduates—is that corporations run more efficiently and effectively when they listen to expert outside opinions. Indeed, the raison d’etre of the consultant is the notion that some problems can only be tackled by taking a step back and letting in a fresh pair of eyes.

Unfortunately, stepping back and appreciating the bigger picture is exactly the mode of thinking which is actively discouraged by the intense pressure to enter the consulting profession at Duke and other elite universities, starting with the recruitment process beginning in sophomore year.

Here at The Lemur, we believe in thinking critically about all our life choices. We’re not called The Lemming, and for good reason; sometimes following the crowd does lead you off a cliff. Consulting jobs—thrust in the faces of anxious undergrad overachievers by a cadre of zealous and well-compensated recruiters—do a disservice to many of those who seek them. Consulting work under-rewards the multifarious talents of those who aspire to it, and many of those who become consultants soon find that their extraordinary array of skills and interests are not adequately activated by their work.

If you are a Duke student who plans to go into consulting, take a moment right now to step back and let my outside opinion in to evaluate the problem and recommend a course of action. I won’t give you a 350-slide Power Point presentation explaining the protocol, and in fact my argument could be summarized in just one word: Don’t.

In this article, I am going to provide you with five excellent reasons to not go into consulting (and for those on the investment banking track, these apply pretty well to you also):

1. You are smart.

You are a smart person. I know that. You are naturally intelligent and you’ve got a strong work ethic and ability to think critically about the world and how you can shape it. You hear that consulting is the blue-chip job for smart people like you with stellar GPAs and glittering resumes, and you are excited to add another name-brand beside Duke on your CV: McKinsey, Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton (in finance, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, CS First Boston).

Indeed, this is part of how management consulting has become such a popular job option. It is pitched as the job for the smart Duke kids who were sensible enough to major in economics, computer science, or public policy (as opposed to the risible humanities or even math or physics)—the job can only be done by someone as smart as you, right? But does consulting value these skills, intrinsically? Do consulting firms want you because you are smart? Will you be using all your brainpower working for them? I don’t think so. Much as your financial econ coursework activates the parts of your brain that excel in following directions and inhaling received wisdom, consulting values other skills much more than intelligence. At the top of that list? Blind loyalty, paint-by-numbers direction-following, and ruthless ambition. These are skills that you may or may not have. Or may or may not want to have.

Sure, at McKinsey or BCG you will be told how smart you are: you are the best of the best, surviving a rigorous application process that defeated many of your peers. You will be treated like a high-flier, endowed with a handsome salary (six-figures), perks (Uber Lux at 5pm and omakase six times a week, if that’s your fancy), and the feeling that you now occupy the upper echelons of the American elite. But ask recent Duke graduates themselves who have entered consulting, and they will tell you their job makes them feel a curious emptiness that no amount of “smartness prestige” can fill. They paint a picture of a life of drudge work, with little time for hobbies, friends, or relationships, and an unshakeable feeling of missing college (oh, and those perks might be vanishing, too: due to recent hiring freezes at major consulting firms, the Wall Street Journal has written about a new “frugal environment where everything from office snacks to Uber rides are under scrutiny and travel for client meetings has scaled back”).

There are many other ways to feel smart and powerful than by working for a consulting firm (or on Wall Street). You could work for the government, for a law firm, or for a real business—you know, one that makes and does stuff other than nibble off the backside of other firms (although, granted, such corporations are becoming increasingly hard to find). And while none of these sectors is immune from the disease that consulting will give you—the problems with our managerial economy are structural and transcend consultancy—you are far more likely to find a niche of personal happiness and professional satisfaction elsewhere. 

2. You want to have a life.

Remember what I said about the recent Duke graduates who complain about having so little time for hobbies and dating? Consulting firms mandate infamously irregular and exhausting hours; the work also consists of a good deal of tedium and drudgery, most notoriously in the form of reams of spreadsheets and Power Point presentations. This work is becoming increasingly AI-assisted, further excising whatever components of creativity and independent thought it once had. While many jobs have tedious elements, most happy professionals tend to be able to overcome whatever drudge work they are required to do if their larger sense of purpose and enjoyment of their work is satisfied. 

Work-life balance may sound like a cliché, but it is actually one of the most important concepts in contemporary society. Unlike the Gilded Age elites observed by economist Thorstein Veblen (most famously in his 1899 work The Theory of the Leisure Class), for whom it was a sign of status to enjoy free time off from work, today’s elites seem to pride themselves on how little time they have for leisurely pursuits (although they do like to consume just as conspicuously as their forebears, if not more so). In present day (rightfully described as the second Gilded Age), the leisure class has been replaced by a new American elite obsessed with overwork, one which has embraced the “I’m busier than you” paradigm. This ethos—with which you are almost certainly eminently familiar from the rat-race of a life that has gotten you to this point—is, let’s say, problematic. Overwork and “narcissism of small differences” hyper-competition contribute to paradoxically high rates of depression and unhappiness in our most well-off echelons of society. The only way to avoid the fate of our depressed, meaning-hungry corporate overlords is to refuse to subscribe to the notion that overwork increases your happiness. While we should not aspire to be the hardly-working rakes and “upper-class twits” of yore, we must recognize that it is not only idle aristocrats who suck the life out of society. We can do better than replacing old unproductive aristocratic paradigms with new ones: time spent on work should be no more of a metric for social utility than the size of someone’s estate. Time spent on work actually has a lot less to do with the value of that work than you might think: the fact that consultants work long hours and yet can scarcely describe to others outside the field what it is they actually do should be evidence enough of that. So while consulting will score you points in our anti-leisure elite work culture social credit system, it will not score you points with yourself. As a consultant, you will wish that you had more time for hobbies and other pursuits. In this sense, consulting is the so-farcical-it’s-almost tragic late-

capitalist apotheosis of the Protestant Ethic: there are so many other ways to work hard, and have it not even feel like work. It may sound like a cliché, but happiness truly does come from working smart, not working “hard.”

3. You are so much more interesting than that.

When you tell relatives and family friends about your latest interview with Goldman Sachs, perhaps they are excited for you, and proud of the meritocrat you are fast becoming. But do they pepper you with follow-up questions about the kind of work you’ll be doing? Does the name Morgan Stanley bring a gleam to your aunt’s eye beyond the momentary hit of Prestige Dopamine she gets, like the one when she heard you were going to Duke? It’s unlikely, and it’s something to consider. Ask your yourself: what is work you can do that will make you proud, that you will feel energized by discussing with others? Much of consulting work is theoretically quite interesting; these firms advise major corporations and governments on significant development and growth projects. You get to make decisions founded in the kind of risk analysis principles used by governments and militaries. But increasingly consulting projects are hardly exciting: it’s mostly mergers and acquisitions and various other modes of financial restructuring with little tangible connection to innovation or imaginative thinking.

4. You have values; they don’t.

Some consulting firms—most notably McKinsey—like to brand themselves as “values-driven organizations.” Make no mistake: if McKinsey is driven by values, they probably aren’t yours. After all, this is a company that has helped tobacco companies lie about nicotine content in their cigarettes and helped coal companies dramatically expand production; it helped formulate the Chinese Communist Party’s hyper-assertive Made in China 2025 plan, a major threat to U.S. national security; it helped Purdue Pharma push opioids through analysis of prescription data, and advised ICE to slash its spending on medicine and food (for an in-depth investigative account of these and other atrocious endeavors, I encourage you to read When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm, by New York Times investigative journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe). While individual consultants at McKinsey are theoretically allowed to opt out of a project that they have qualms about, it is in practice very challenging to do so: many former consultants describe an oppressive performance culture in which opting out is tantamount to professional suicide.

Also, because the vast majority of those who start their careers in consulting do not finish them there, association with these increasingly tainted names can hurt your post-consulting professional endeavors. In fact, Pete Buttigieg, a former McKinsey consultant, found himself having to answer difficult questions in his 2020 presidential bid due to his past work at McKinsey, even though the work itself was revealed to have been fairly mundane. Buttigieg’s presidential aspirations certainly were not helped by his consulting provenance. So even if you think, “oh I’ll just work there for a year or two to get some money before I start my real career,” think again. As these firms become more out of step with the American public during an era of anti-globalization, chances are that the name will go from being a star on your resume to a stain. And even if you think you can avoid disrepute by avoiding controversial projects and simultaneously take advantage of the professional network, you must accept the loss of your right to free expression should you wish to call out your employer. Being “neutral” at McKinsey is almost a built-in impossibility. And unless you remain silent, that network you were hoping to tap into, may be ripped out from under you. Take the words from Bogdanich and Forsythe’s book:

“…a McKinsey consultant never really leaves the firm. The formidable alumni network, institutionalized at McKinsey keeps people tethered to the firm for decades after they leave, with emails, reunions, and, most important, job prospects. Speak out against the firm and you risk being cut off from a lifetime of networking opportunities” (161).

The golden handcuffs are real. With that in mind, consider this: most experts believe that the heyday for consulting firms has already passed. As the United States economy turns away from ESG, decarbonizes, and reacts against globalization—and international financial markets along with it—it is possible that the “golden age for CEO whisperers may be coming to an end,” as The Economist suggested in a recent article. For example, many legislators, wise to McKinsey’s extensive consulting for China, are now calling for the firm to be barred from contracting with foreign governments.

Throw in the impact of AI on consulting work, and this all adds up to a bleak picture for consultants-in-waiting: “newbie consultants at a number of firms complain that there is too little work to go around, stunting their career prospects.” The generative AI revolution may gut the consulting workforce, and “up-end [the ] industry.” Investment banking could be even worse, by the way. According to a recent New York Times article, by Duke grad and finance reporter Rob Copeland, the heads of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are currently debating how much they can slash their junior workforce (perhaps by as much as two-thirds), and plotting AI-justified pay cuts. Yikes. The yellow-brick road may not lead to Oz anymore.

5. You deserve more time to figure things out.

College is supposed to be the time when you have the freedom and time to figure out who you are, what interests you, and what you want to do next.  When you embark on the consulting or IB path as early as your first or second year, you are missing the chance to really figure out who you are and what you are doing on Planet Earth. And, look, maybe that is working in consulting, banking, or finance. Consulting done right does have the potential to yield value to our economy, and if you truly think you can do God’s honest work from the inside, I won’t knock you for trying (Godspeed). Theoretically, financial markets and large corporations can and should create value for a well-run economy, even if their influence has been inflated out of sensible proportion since the heyday of corporate raiding in the 1980s. But not everybody has the passion to work as an investment analyst at the age of twenty, and not every child alternates between dreams of being an astronaut, fire fighter, and personal wealth manager. At least, I don’t think so. If it’s really the case that 2,500-3,000 Duke graduates every year have a deep-seated desire gnawing away at them to cut operating costs and trade derivatives, then my argument is in shambles. But I really, really doubt that. And you deserve time to figure out what you are best at, and what you want. Anyone who tells you otherwise is doing you a disservice. The consulting firms and investment banks are not interested in you or your future: it is simply in their interest to hire young, preferably attractive, people from name-brand universities to please their clients, who have no expectation that you will actually produce real and meaningful work. Most of these firms’ clients do not, in fact, do real and meaningful work. It’s a match made in heaven, or rather, in hell. And you’re just invited to that club briefly—you’re chewed up, spat out, and forgotten—I suppose, until you accumulate enough capital to rejoin on the client side, that is.

I know from anecdotal evidence and more conversations than I can count that many Duke students applying to these jobs are ambivalent about doing so. Op-eds in the Chronicle indicate that some students may be having doubts about consulting, but why is the mania showing no signs of subsiding? That’s what we wish for at The Lemur—nothing less than the end of the “pre-wealth, by any means necessary” culture which is eating away at Duke.

Let’s make that wish come true. Let’s make good on the promise that college is for the formation of your self, not your resume. We’ll be a lot happier and, I am certain, no less rich. Money can still make the world go ‘round in the direction that you actually want to be spinning.

By Zachary Partnoy