The Old Ladders are Breaking

On the coming realignment of the elites in the age of artificial intelligence

For more than two decades the career funnel for graduates of the most selective universities has been unusually narrow. By most estimates for much of the last generation more than half of elite graduates have entered five sectors: consulting, finance, technology, entertainment and law. This was not accidental. These fields offered a potent combination of money, status, global mobility, and a promise—sometimes sincere, sometimes rhetorical—of meritocratic impact. The leading firms in these industries had the balance sheets to hire aggressively. Youthful generalism was an accepted qualification, if not a requirement.

These elite pathways are narrowing. The equilibrium that shaped a generation is shifting.

In Harvard’s Class of 2024 senior survey, 58% of seniors planned to go straight into the workforce – more than half headed to finance, technology, or consulting. Others join these fields several years after graduating. Harvard is a useful proxy for its peer set (Ivy‑plus and a handful of adjacent schools), with ~50,000 undergraduates graduating each year from the nation’s top schools. That means that every year on average ~15,000 of the country’s top graduates commit to consulting, finance, or technology.

Add two more prestige magnets: entertainment and corporate law. The numbers are smaller but not trivial—a few thousand elite graduates a year chase acting, writing, production, or adjacent media work on the one hand, or enroll in elite law schools on the other.

Together these five fields have absorbed ~20,000 of the most capable and credentialed young Americans annually, year after year. For a generation.

These fields are now evolving. The proximate cause is neither market cycles nor cultural fatigue. It is structural. Artificial intelligence (AI) is compressing white‑collar labor demand precisely where elite graduates have long clustered.

Start with consulting. In the 2000s and 2010s, firms like McKinsey and Bain hired large cohorts every year, promising rigorous training, engaging assignments, and hefty salaries. But a leverage model that once justified battalions of young generalists is under strain. A junior consultant with a sharp PowerPoint hand is less valuable when large language models (LLMs) can analyze datasets, summarize interviews, draft slides, and generate first‑pass recommendations in seconds. Firms will still hire in these fields, but the volume logic changes: fewer entry seats, and more pressure to arrive already formed.

Finance is also becoming more automated and less hospitable to fresh cohorts of inexperienced graduates. Trading floors are thinner as algorithms gain in fluency, adaptability, and complexity. Deal analysis at private equity firms can be largely handled by customized LLMs. Seasoned mathematics PhDs are more useful than inexperienced fresh graduates. Getting an offer to be an analyst at Goldman Sachs will still be desired, but it’s no longer a golden passport.

Large technology firms are similarly scaling back new hires. For years, Big Tech absorbed talent at scale, offering stock options, mission‑driven rhetoric, and campuses designed to feel like benevolent city‑states. Today, the story is fraying. Generative AI threatens not only junior coders, but product managers, marketers, and designers—the very roles that once allowed non‑technical elites to thrive inside technology behemoths. As advanced AI agents mature, Big Tech will adopt leaner structures and hire fewer junior staff. Nor is the new generation of AI upstarts, almost all of whom have highly concentrated business models that require relatively few staff, likely to lead to significant employment growth for new graduates.

The impact on the entertainment industry is even more extreme. For decades, Hollywood has absorbed a different slice of elite ambition—creative, charismatic, risk‑tolerant individuals drawn to acting, writing, and production. That ecosystem is breaking apart. Streaming shattered the old studio economics, and with it, the prospect of stable careers for thousands. AI threatens an even wider spectrum of related jobs. As opportunities in the middle tier—the working actor, the journeyman professional writer—shrink further, it will become harder to break into traditional entertainment careers. While a handful of aging stars and executives capture most of the legacy value, the rest must churn or exit.

The legal profession, whose traditional conservatism long insulated law firms from dramatic staffing shifts, is also evolving. Clients are less willing to pay $500 an hour for a junior lawyer when LLMs can do most core legal research and analysis nearly instantly. Except in the most specialized areas of law, the coming AI agents currently being trained and refined by LLM modeling firms like Mercor will become more reliable and much less costly than junior lawyers. At all but a few storied firms, the ranks of junior lawyers are likely to be decimated.

And what of the influencer market, which in recent years has captured such attention among the Generation Z market? Excepting a small pool of the best-known social media stars, returns on creative output are under pressure, with most influencers earning – on average – marginally less per post every year. For the vast majority of participants, the deployment of highly advanced AI influencer avatars in the next 1-2 years may diminish opportunities and returns even further.

The consequence of these irrevocable trends is a generational bottleneck. Multiple prestige pipelines are constricting at once.

This raises the question of whether such a profound shift in elite prospects matters to the nation at large. The answer is it does – because these five industries represent much that is wrong with the country’s economic and moral fabric:

• Consulting: the core service of firms like McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bain is judgment, and over the last decade or more judgment is exactly what many of these firms have repeatedly failed to display. McKinsey, the most heralded, paid $650 million in 2024 to resolve a US criminal investigation connected to its work advising Purdue Pharma on how to boost opioid sales. This came on top of earlier opioid‑related settlements. The details of those investigations are a kind of modern-day parable on human avarice. Nor was McKinsey unique – BCG, for example, was found to have bribed Angolan government officials and gave up millions in earnings. The lesson is not that some consultants are villains – it is harder edged than that: a profession built on judgment has demonstrated, repeatedly and at scale, systemic moral failure.
• Finance: for some time it has become harder to plausibly frame the finance industry as socially neutral, let alone beneficial. The ledger records repeated crises, scandals, and settlements, including the 2008 global financial crisis sparked by rampant mortgage fraud. Alongside this: benchmark manipulation, sanctions violations, inflated credit card fees, money laundering, and heavily leveraged buy-outs resulting in mass layoffs and bankrupted companies. By one estimate, between 2005-2015 the 25 largest financial firms paid more than $285 billion in fines. Then there is the Epstein scandal, which laid bare the greed and sycophancy of dozens of senior executives. The deeper question is not whether AI will reduce headcount, but whether it will restrain or amplify the risk-seeking culture that produced so many scandals in the first place.
• Technology: the technology goliaths now face their own reckoning. Despite employing more lobbyists than any other industry, Big Tech is increasingly in the sights of regulators: the European Commission, for example, fined Google €8.25 billion for antitrust violations, while Meta paid a €1.2 billion fine for illegal data transfers. But the deeper indictment is not monopolistic behavior or privacy violations – it is social corrosion. The smartphone and social feed are now inseparable from a worrying erosion of youth mental‑health: in 2024 the CDC reported that 53% of teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless,” up from 35% in 2011. Causality is complex, but few criticized the US Surgeon General for recently warning that social media is unsafe for children. The political environment has suffered too: Big Tech did not invent polarization, but their social platforms industrialized online outrage.  The dawn of the AI age may well thin the ranks of Big Tech staff, while rendering it even more socially corrosive.
• Entertainment: for decades Hollywood generated a medium that soaked up at least five hours a day for average Americans while largely dictating the nation’s cultural mores and trends. Beyond that, for some 20 years thousands of the country’s best minds were employed in developing, with rare exceptions, an unending litany of ever more derivative and morally dubious series and movies. The exposure of systemic abuse during the MeToo movement, which spotlighted a number of powerful directors and agents, revealed the danger of concentrated cultural power combined with deeply ingrained misogynistic behavior. The broader implication is even darker: the powerful directors and agents who were brought down in the MeToo movement abused their positions while setting the tone for much of the nation’s popular culture for decades. But even this insight doesn't capture the full measure of the cultural calcification spurred by Hollywood. With rare exceptions, entertainers in earlier ages were considered vagabonds and dissolute characters; perhaps the most curious and damning facet of Hollywood’s influence is how the industry’s celebrity culture enabled actors to become something much more than adults pretending to be other adults.
• Law: the US has, along with Italy, the highest proportion of lawyers per capita of any wealthy country. Yet the legal system in the US is increasingly un-navigable, or simply too expensive, for most citizens – the number of Americans in legal disputes with no lawyer is at a historic high. There is also a widespread perception that the legal profession is, far from a mediating influence on society, the primary cause of excessive regulations and stifled innovation in many fields. Judicial appointments have become increasingly politicized, diminishing public trust in legal proceedings and enforcement. Moreover, legal practices such as tax and trade law have expanded notably in recent years, often in support of large corporations bent on evading taxes and minimizing employee obligations.

It has been said that a generation of the US military’s best soldiers were squandered in pointless never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – sending the cream of the nation’s graduates into careers in a small number of morally compromised industries is a quieter, bloodless tragedy.

If the five pillars of elite careers are tottering, where does that leave future elite graduates?

Historically, American elites have adapted by re‑sorting into new domains. In the late 19th century, law and railroads absorbed them. In the mid‑20^th century, government, industry, and academia did. The post‑Cold War era was unusual in its financialization and managerial homogeneity. That phase, which is in the process of ending, will be replaced by something new.

There is a strong case that the reallocation of elites could strengthen the country. Scarcity clarifies values. When the obvious paths close, talent disperses. Already there are signs of renewed interest in fields long dismissed as impractical or second‑tier: applied science, advanced manufacturing, education, and skilled trades augmented by technology rather than replaced by it. Depth may again become a defining competitive advantage.

And while some may cling to a vision of the well-trod credentialist path gated by elite universities, more students may look anew at universities and the point of four years of higher education.

There is also a creative upside. When, for example, entertainment becomes less alluring, serious art may detach from celebrity culture and return to smaller, more durable forms. Writers who cannot expect a Hollywood deal may build readerships slowly but more durably. Actors may dedicate themselves to theater, teaching, or hybrid careers. The glamour recedes – patient devotion to craft remains.

None of this guarantees virtue. Elites are adaptive, not inherently benevolent. Some will doubtless arbitrage new forms of rent‑seeking. But the weakening of the dominant legacy ladders is nonetheless healthy: concentrated ambition, which is distinct but complementary to the notion of elite overproduction, tends to corrode societies from within.

A society arguably functions best when its most capable citizens are distributed across diverse domains rather than stacked in a few towers of privilege. The past 20 years rewarded credentials over acquired skills, and material gain over responsibility. AI, for all its dangers, may be accelerating a rebalancing.

The future American elite may earn less in its twenties, move upward more slowly, and operate closer to the ground. It may look less glamorous on LinkedIn. That may well be a correction.

Therefore, if at great things thou wouldst arrive,
Get riches first, get wealth, and treasure heap,
Not difficult, if thou hearken to me,
Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand;
They whom I favor thrive in wealth amain,
While virtue, valor, wisdom sit in vain. 

—Milton, Paradise Regained (Satan tempting Jesus)