Business schools are very good at teaching students how to compete for desirable careers. We are much less comfortable asking what those careers are really for.
Rutger Bregman recently described talented students being funnelled toward McKinsey, Goldman Sachs and similar employers, while his Moral Ambition fellowships offer another path: $15,000 and a summer working on problems such as child poverty or AI safety. The interesting part is not whether consulting is bad and fighting poverty is good. That’s too easy.
The interesting part is the funnel.
Look at the signals surrounding students. Salary matters in rankings. Placement matters. Employer prestige matters. Career offices celebrate recognizable destinations. Students learn quickly what success is supposed to look like.
I see the same logic in business education. We spend enormous effort on employability, CVs, pitching, networking and career acceleration. Far less on choosing what deserves the acceleration.
That does not mean professors should tell students which causes are worthy or which employers are morally acceptable. That would be another kind of funnel. But we can create more moments where students articulate what they want their capabilities to do in the world, then expose them to paths beyond the default prestige ladder.
In my courses, I increasingly care less about whether students can reproduce a model and more about whether they can use judgement on a real problem, under constraint, with consequences, and succeed. And privately, I hope that some of what they become capable of doing is eventually used to help other people. Clay Christensen once expressed that idea beautifully. I have never really forgotten it.
Business schools do not need to manufacture moral ambition.
But we should stop manufacturing ambition without a destination.