THE MORNING RANT: Harvard MBAs Are Struggling to Get Job Offers Amidst the School’s Ongoing Challenges

It’s time for a periodic checkup on how things are going at the most prominent of the Poison Ivy League Schools. As I documented at The Blaze a few months ago, Harvard is apparently experiencing a liquidity crisis, having to borrow from debt markets at high interest rates because donors have closed their wallets in disgust at Harvard’s toleration of anti-semitism. The problem was compounded by the plagiarism scandal that engulfed now-departed President Claudine Gay.

Harvard’s new President, Alan Garber, has his hands full. Aside from the financial damage, there is severe reputational damage, and there may be political damage too, as the Trump administration and Republican-controlled Congress mull over ideas that would inflict some pain on Harvard, or at a minimum starve the beast from receiving taxpayer money.

Regarding the reputational damage Harvard has suffered, its most recent class of graduating MBAs is having a hard time finding employment. Poets and Quants is a publication that covers the graduate business education market, with a heavy focus on the MBA programs of Ivy League and “near Ivy” universities. It recently ran this rather shocking story, “Nearly 1/4 Of Job-Seeking Class Of 2024 Harvard MBAs Couldn’t Find Work After Months Of Searching.”

There’s no sugarcoating it: Nearly one-quarter of job-seeking Harvard MBAs couldn’t find jobs this year, by far the largest portion of a graduating Harvard class to struggle in the market in the last decade — a decade, let’s remember, of widespread economic tribulation and pandemic.

These are students who graduated with their Harvard MBAs in May of 2024. By the end of 2024, 25% of the class still hadn’t found employment. By contrast, 95% of the Class of 2022 had received job offers within 90 days of graduation. The article noted that Harvard delayed the release of this poor jobs data until the Christmas holiday, which is a significantly later release date than the timing of the report in prior years, when the numbers weren’t so embarrassingly bad.

So who stopped hiring? A breakdown of the sectors where Harvard MBAs found work revealed that several sectors remained steady, such as tech at 16% of the class. But job offers in consulting were greatly reduced, with only 18% of the class of ‘24 getting jobs in that field, versus 25% for the Class of ’23. That would indicate there is a decreasing demand in the greater private sector to hire consultants inculcated in the toxic leftism that defines a Harvard education.

Meanwhile, President Garber is warning Harvard’s faculty that the university’s radical leftism is putting its massive endowment in peril. The Harvard Crimson reported in December that Garber, in a closed-door meeting, advised the faculty that they must re-think their messaging now with Republicans having won control of Congress and the White House in an “anti-elite repudiation by the American electorate.”

During the meeting, Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications Paul Andrew described what University officials consider to be key legislative threats to Harvard — such as an endowment tax, congressional probes, and threats to federal research funding.

The Crimson also quoted President Garber as stating that an increase to the endowment tax is the “threat that keeps me up at night.” As well it should. Harvard didn’t need to take a leadership role in the culture war against mainstream Americans, but it did. Malicious actions and poor choices have consequences. If Harvard didn’t want to suffer the consequences from being on the losing side of the culture war, it should have abstained from it.

In 2021, a speaker at a Claremont Institute conference on woke capital had this to say, “The biggest capital allocator, or at least one of the biggest capital allocators, in the world is that woke social-justice hedge fund known as Harvard University.” That speaker was citizen J.D. Vance, who would be elected Vice President of the United States three years later. Mr. Vance went on to say about Harvard’s endowment that it “funds some of the most destructive ideologies all across our country, and literally trains the next generation of priests in the seminary that’s dominating our professional class.” He added that Harvard’s endowment “is literally ammunition for the Left and we, through our public policy, have given that endowment more power.”

When citizen Vance became a U.S. Senator in 2023, he introduced a bill titled the College Endowment Accountability Act which would raise the excise tax on endowment net investment income from 1.4% to 35% for private colleges and universities with at least $10 billion in assets.

Fellow Republican Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill in 2021 that would levy a 1% annual tax on the value of mega-endowments held by the richest private colleges. In Harvard’s case, with an endowment of about $50 billion, the school would have to fork over about $500 million each year just for this tax alone.

These bills did not proceed to become law because Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House at the time, but Democrats were flushed out of power in the 2024 elections, so President Garber now has valid reasons to fear for Harvard’s endowment. It was used as a financial weapon in Harvard’s culture war against American values and against the majority of Americans who do not share its radical left-wing views. Harvard is now on the losing side of that culture war, and targeting its endowment is a legitimate response to disarm Harvard from ever going on offense against us again. In fact, Republican Congressman Troy Nehls has recently introduced a bill to increase the investment tax on the largest university endowments from 1.4% to 21%.

With its graduates becoming unhirable, its reputation shattered, its benefactors closing their wallets, its anti-semitism exposed, its indifference to plagiarism, and its general debasement of the academic inquiry that higher education once stood for, Harvard has taken a mighty fall. We must ensure that it never again regains the influence and esteem it once had.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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