"Now that I have college-age kids myself, I’m once again seeing these dynamics firsthand. Corporations recruit students as early as freshman year, offering high-paying summer internships that are hard to resist. Preprofessional programs—such as Harvard’s Undergraduate Consulting Group, Princeton’s Tiger Capital Management, and the Blue Chips at the University of Chicago—seek out students, some even before college, and socialize them into these tracks as soon as they set foot on campus. Other organizations don’t have the resources to compete, making them less visible to students and less prestigious.

Despite their lofty mission statements about developing civic leaders, few schools push back against this corporate career funnel. Most colleges profess to be neutral when it comes to first jobs—but they benefit from the funding streams provided by prospective employers, who pay colleges thousands of dollars a year, and in some cases upwards of $20,000, to promote themselves to students through career-services offices.

Many students today are, understandably, anxious about the rise of AI and its effects on entry-level roles. But this development could also give us an opportunity to change the norms around first-job choices. Many corporations will soon need fewer staffers straight out of college to do routine work, but they will still need people among their senior ranks with strong leadership qualities.

Companies will therefore have every incentive to push back their recruiting timelines and encourage young people to acquire crucial human skills first—the kinds of skills that can best be developed by working in communities to tackle social problems. And young people themselves, even those who might want to run a major company someday, would benefit immensely from devoting the early years of their careers to such challenges."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/first-jobs-graduates-predict-future/685892/

#FirstJobs #Schools #HigherEd #JobMarket #WageSlavery

When I was growing up in India, you had to score certain percentage across board during your 10th grade exam to be able to get into science stream which in turn allowed you to get into either medical or engineering stream or graduate as just Bachlor of Science. if you couldn't score needed percentage you tried for commerce stream which meant you could be a CPA, CGA, CA etc... worst case was if you didn't score enough percentage there in which case you were relegated to arts college. In 1982 when I finished my 10th grade, although I scored high on math and science my overall grade was barely enough to make it to science stream. my father was simple govt employee and would not have been able to pay for private engineering/science school. so he urged me to take commerce stream instead. However as consolation price he agreed to let me take a computer programming course at a private institution. I learnt how to program in BASIC on Tandy TRS-80 computer. I will be forever grateful to him for that. For although I was an utter failure in school having lost all interest in studies, I took to programming like fish to water. School where I learnt hire me as teaching assistant to teach 10-12yr old kids right after I finished my course which allowed me to keep learning. I convinced them to pay me only half the salary ( equivalent to $12/mo at that time ) and let me sit in on COBOL programming classes instead. Only condition was that paying students got first priority when it came to booking computer time for actual coding practice. So I used to just write my code on coding sheets by hand and keep it ready. classes used to close at 10 and usually teachers used to stay on for another hour and half or so. so I used to get my keyboard time in during 10pm-11:30pm and usually had to be shooed out so that school could be closed for the night.

How did you get started in IT?

#firstjobs #itcareer