Harvard’s class of 2026 is heading to the same three industries, again. Among seniors entering the workforce, nearly a fifth are going into finance, 17 percent into consulting, and 15 percent into technology, according to a senior survey from the Harvard Crimson.
Money appears to be the draw. More than half of Harvard’s respondents entering consulting or finance said “salary or prestige” drove their plans, compared with 13 percent of other graduates. Among Harvard seniors entering technology, nearly 58 percent expect to earn more than $130,000 and roughly 92 percent of those entering finance expect to make over $90,000.
Harvard is not alone. At Yale, 22.5 percent of employed members of the class of 2025 work in finance, insurance, or real estate, 11.9 percent in technology, and 9.6 percent in consulting, totaling 44 percent of graduates, according to the school’s First Destination Report. Among Yale graduates who started at $110,000 or more, 51.1 percent work in financial services and 25.5 percent work in technology.
Notre Dame’s undergraduate career office also tracks student first destinations. The Observer reported in May that Meruelo Family Center for Career Development expects two-thirds of graduates to be employed, 20 percent to pursue further education, 3 percent to enter service, and 2 percent to join the military.
Of Mendoza College of Business graduates in the class of 2023, 83 percent pursued jobs. Among them, 44 percent entered financial services, and 35 percent entered professional services, a category that includes firms such as PwC, Deloitte, and KPMG, which the college lists among its top employers. Just 4 percent enter technology sectors. The median reported salary was $87,000.
Anna Goncalves, a senior accounting major, is one of those graduates. She will start at Deloitte in Chicago after an eight-week internship there this summer. “My starting salary is $84,000 a year,” she told the Rover, “however, we do have an incentive bonus … if we complete our CPS in the first year of working there, we will receive a $10,000 bonus.”
However, Goncalves does not plan to stay at Deloitte forever. She wants to become an international tax lawyer, and sees Deloitte as a way to help prepare her for her dream: “A company as prestigious as Deloitte works with so many Fortune 500 companies which will allow me to make connections and learn very complex structures that will help me be a better lawyer in the future.” A two-or-three year stint at accounting and consulting firms like Deloitte is a common career entry.
Antonella Arana, a senior finance major headed to Microsoft, described a different route into technology. “My siblings are finance too,” she said. “I like tech and wanted to start there as the majority of finance majors use finance as a way to get into the tech business.” She also said that the finance path is “very common within Mendoza.”
The job market Notre Dame graduates are entering into is tough. By the Economic Policy Institute’s calculations, young graduates’ unemployment has climbed from a low of 4.0 percent in July 2023 to 5.3 percent in March 2026, about a full point above the overall rate of 4.3 percent. Moreover, according to The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 42 percent of college graduates ages 22 to 27 are underemployed, meaning they work jobs that typically don’t require a degree.
The Harvard Crimson’s senior survey found that 57 percent of the respondents viewed the job market as bleak and found the timing to be bad, mostly due to the rise of artificial intelligence. AI development has led graduates to change career paths for the sake of job security.
Economists who have studied the data are less sure AI is the cause. A June New York Federal Reserve Bank study attributes 64 percent of the rise in young graduates’ unemployment since the pandemic to remote work, which makes employers less willing to hire inexperienced workers they would have to train from a distance.
According to The Associated Press’ account of the study, the trend predates ChatGPT, and occupations’ exposure to AI had little effect on youth unemployment. The Economic Policy Institute adds that nearly all of the increase in graduate unemployment since 2024 comes from more young people entering the labor force and looking for work, not from fewer of them holding jobs. What the data does show is a slow market for new hires: the same analysis notes that the overall hiring rate has fallen to levels last seen in 2013 and 2014.
When entry-leveling hiring is thin, finance and consulting offer a path. Senior finance major Ethan Droski, who is set to work at investment bank William Blair, explained that one of the factors that drew him to Notre Dame’s finance program was its “ability to secure competitive jobs early in college.”
Not all Notre Dame graduates who enter these corporate fields remain in them. For example, Alex Jones, a 2015 Notre Dame graduate, and two classmates left lucrative jobs in Chicago to found Hallow, the popular Catholic prayer app.
More recently, Notre Dame graduates Joshua Haskell, Brendan McMahon, and Simon Pels turned down typical careers in finance and consulting to found Ethos National.
Ryan Willerton, former Associate Vice President for Career and Professional Development for the Meruelo Center, said to the Observer that a first destination “rarely defines an entire career trajectory.” That is true, and it is also what many 22-year-olds tell themselves on the way into a job they plan to leave.
Abigail Smith is a Program of Liberal Studies, Theology, and Latin major. She is still trying to figure out what it means to “do anything.” Contact her with ideas at asmith78@nd.edu.