Brown has a brain drain problem. A survey of the class of 2025 found that 44% of students marched from the Van Wickle gates into the loving arms of the finance, tech and consulting industries. One need not view these industries as villains to recognize that this number is too high. Brown fashions itself a school of creative free spirits, not corporate conformists. Further, many of these sectors — especially management consulting, hedge funds and investment banking — primarily exist to help rich clients become richer, contradicting our progressive values.
In response, an international movement known as the School for Moral Ambition was founded in 2024 by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, aiming to bring elite students into humanitarian work. The organization’s goal is to persuade talented professionals to stop “wasting” their talent in “boring” industries like finance, consulting and corporate law, which he dubs the “Bermuda Triangle of talent.” Instead, they should devote their skills to finding entrepreneurial solutions to global problems like climate change, world hunger and economic inequality. Students from at least nine universities, including Brown, have started Moral Ambition chapters. This fall, the SMA will offer $15,000 stipends to 12 Brown juniors and place them in internships with nonprofits dedicated to social impact. Last year, 8% of Harvard’s junior class applied to the fellowship. One of the Brown chapter’s goals is to scale up these fellowships so that the SMA is a force for good comparable in scale to the “Bermuda Triangle.”
I chose to write about the SMA because I agree with much of their mission. More Brunonians should choose public service careers. By virtue of our education and privilege, we have an increased responsibility to do good in the world. However, by leveraging ambition and status anxiety to incentivize moral careers, the group risks reinforcing the inequality it seeks to solve. What strikes me about Moral Ambition is its inherent contradictions — even its name is an oxymoron. A core value of the organization seems to be creating a more equal society: They want to redirect talented students from helping the rich to helping the poor; one of their first issue areas was progressive taxation; their role models are abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists. At the same time, the movement’s driving force is an appeal to elite ambitions for personal success and status, which is inherently exclusive and zero-sum. Social equality is one of their goals, but they are powered by social inequality. There’s nothing inherently bad about holding contradictory beliefs; many people do. But unless we critically examine these tensions, they can impede our ability to do good.
To understand the SMA’s diagnosis of the brain drain problem, I spoke with the founder of the Brown chapter, Mia Reyn ’28. In Reyn’s view, Brown students enter elite industries because they are our community’s definition of success. “It’s almost drilled into you that success equals landing a job at one of these firms for a summer … Many people wrote essays about wanting to change the world in their college apps, (but) I think the rules of the game change when you come into college.” Audience is important for SMA: Reyn stated that the fellowship aims to “poach talent” from finance, tech, and consulting, targeting students bound for those industries.
This strategy explicitly appeals to ego and status anxiety. To Bregman, the SMA’s founder, the quintessential example of moral ambition is the 19th century British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, a man with a “mix of idealism and vanity within him. He deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people, but he also likes to see himself as this historical hero.” Laura Clancy, the fellowship director, adds: “For better or worse, prestige really matters to people, and we just have to be realistic with that … We’re trying to say ambition can be a really good thing if it’s directed in the right way.” Ambition, as the SMA defines it, is a morally neutral “raw energy” directed towards success. Their goal is to reframe career success away from having a high income or an office on Wall Street towards having a quantifiable social impact, harnessing vanity towards good. In Bregman’s words, they seek to make “doing good fashionable once again.”
But this idea that ambition can be moral is where I believe the SMA is fundamentally wrong. By attempting to harness elite ambition, the SMA feeds the status anxiety that fueled this problem in the first place and arguably worsens it by sweetening it with talk of moral import.
The problem with prestige is that it is inherently exclusive. The SMA fellowship is prestigious because it follows the same logic as elite university admissions and corporate recruitment by having an extremely selective, merit-based application process. Only 12 students are accepted from each school; the acceptance rate for applicants from Harvard was less than 10%. The SMA intends to grow rapidly, taking more students from more schools, yet Bregman says part of the “branding” is that the fellowships are “only for the best of the best … it’s easier to get that placement at McKinsey or J.P. Morgan or whatever.” This selectivity is in tension with the morals of equality the SMA supports. If the SMA desires a more equal society, why does it operate as a selective clique for a privileged minority? In practice, the organization will have to keep its fellowships artificially scarce to protect their acceptance rate, limiting their social impact.
The other problem with prestige is that it’s easy to virtue signal — and elites are especially incentivized to do so. If the SMA succeeds in making “doing good fashionable” among elites, it will have only created a new status symbol that the “Bermuda Triangle” industries will co-opt to attract idealistic applicants and justify their extreme wealth and influence. Arguably, this is already happening: Many leading consulting firms and financial institutions tout their “social impact” as a key part of their organizational mission. In this way, SMA isn’t quite as revolutionary as they seem.
Another problem with Bregman’s goal of making humanitarian work fashionable is that fashion is definitionally fleeting. Just as corporations have rolled back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in response to right-wing political pressure over the last two years, a movement built on leveraging peer pressure will evaporate the moment that doing good becomes socially costly.
Ultimately, I do think the School for Moral Ambition is a net good for Brown, and for the world, in that their goal is preferable to the status quo. I encourage current juniors to apply to the fellowship by Oct. 21. But before jumping on the hype train, consider where your intentions come from. What would the world look like if we chose our own definitions of success — instead of accepting what is preached to us by peers, parents, corporations or Dutch philanthropists? The ethos of Brown’s Open Curriculum is that each of us has the autonomy to decide our own goals. What if we started using it?
Evan Tao ’27 can be reached at evan_tao@brown.edu. Please send responses to this column to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
