The Old Ladders are Breaking

On the coming realignment of the elites given the unfolding impact of artificial intelligence

For roughly two decades or more, the career funnel for graduates of the most selective universities has been unusually defined. By most estimates for much of the last 30 years more than half of elite graduates have entered three sectors: management consulting, finance, and technology. 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.

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.

Now 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 been absorbing ~20,000 of the most capable and credentialed young Americans annually, year after year. For a generation.

That equilibrium is now breaking.

The proximate cause is neither moral awakening nor cultural fatigue. It is structural. Artificial intelligence (AI) is compressing white‑collar labor demand precisely where elite graduates have clustered. At the same time, the reputational, legal, and political costs of these industries have risen sharply. Margins are under pressure. Hiring is slowing. 

Start with consulting. In the 2000s and 2010s, firms like McKinsey and Bain hired large cohorts every year, promising rigorous training, engaging assignments, hefty salaries, and a kind of life ticket to leadership in business. 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, more selectivity, and more pressure to arrive already formed.

Finance is also becoming more automated, more regulated, and less hospitable to fresh cohorts of inexperienced graduates. Trading floors are thinner as algorithms gain in fluency, adaptability, and complexity. Deal analysis at a private equity firm can be largely handled by customized LLMs. Seasoned mathematics and computer science PhDs are more useful than fresh graduates with little business experience. Risk is centralized. Compliance, not creativity, is becoming more dominant in many firms. Getting an offer to be an analyst at Goldman Sachs used to be one of the most prestigious benchmarks for ambitious elite graduates. It 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. In some cases, senior executives are being reassigned from developing new markets to drafting plans to reduce staffing – once advanced AI agents are ready – by 10-20%. Large scale tech layoffs in recent years were not just a cyclical blip; they were a signal that steady headcount growth is a historical artifact. 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 grads.

The impact on the entertainment industry is even more extreme. For decades, Hollywood and its satellite industries absorbed a different slice of elite ambition—creative, charismatic, risk‑tolerant individuals drawn to acting, writing, and production. That ecosystem is now breaking apart. Streaming shattered the old studio economics, and with it, the hope and prospect of stable careers for thousands. AI threatens these core roles as well as many others, including voice work. As opportunities for the middle tier—the working actor, the journeyman professional writer—shrink further, it will become commensurately harder to break into traditional entertainment careers. While a handful of aging stars and executives will 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, and at a fraction of the cost of a recent Columbia law graduate (whose legal education required three grinding years and ~$300,000 in debt). 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. The pathway to a gilded corporate law partnership is narrowing.

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 coming 1-2 years will only hasten the downward trajectory of this sector.

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 – in an odd way 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 judgment is exactly what many of these firms have repeatedly failed to display. McKinsey, the most heralded, offers a striking example: in 2024 it paid $650 million to resolve a US criminal investigation connected to its work advising Purdue Pharma on how to boost sales of the opioid OxyContin. This came on top of earlier opioid‑related settlements. Reading the details of those investigations is a modern-day parable on human avarice. Nor was McKinsey unique – BCG, for example, was found to have bribed Angolan government officials and gave up $14 million in earnings. There are numerous other examples. The lesson is not that consultants are villains – it is harder edged than that: over the last two decades a profession built on judgment has demonstrated, repeatedly and at scale, that profits came before basic principles of propriety and legality.
• 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, benchmark manipulation, sanctions violations, money laundering, and buy-outs resulting in thousands of lost jobs and bankrupted companies. Then there is the moral abyss of the Epstein scandal, which laid bare the greed and sycophancy of dozens of credentialed finance executives and the institutions they represent. By one estimate, the 25 largest global financial institutions paid more than $285 billion in fines and penalties in the decade of 2005-2015. That is far from a rounding error. It is hard to avoid concluding that much of the financial industry has graft, excessive risk and incompetence deeply embedded within its operating system. There is moral failure here. At an industry-wide scale.
• Technology: the technology goliaths now face their own reckoning. The largest firms are increasingly viewed as monopolistic, predatory corporations that must be tolerated because large swaths of the population depend on their services. Despite the tech firms employing more lobbyists than any other industry, regulators have begun to treat technology firms accordingly: the European Commission, for example, fined Google €8.25 billion for antitrust violations, while Meta’s 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 the social feed are now inseparable from a youth mental‑health narrative: to cite one example among many, the CDC has reported that in 2021 57% of teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless,” up from 35% in 2011. Causality is complex and multi‑factorial, but few criticized the US Surgeon General for warning that social media is unsafe for children and adolescents. The political environment has suffered too. Social platforms did not invent polarization, but they industrialized online outrage and unending streams of invective. This is not a side effect; it is intrinsic to Big Tech’s business model.
• Entertainment: in a certain light it is hard to underestimate the damage wrought by the modern entertainment industry on American society. For decades it generated a medium that soaked up at least five hours a day for every American. Consider that for a moment: tens of millions of people spending more than five hours a day inertly, passively, staring at a screen, removed from actual human relationships, productive work, reading or exercise. That’s only a start. For Hollywood, ruled as it was by misogynistic and egotistical directors and agents, dictated the nation’s cultural mores and trends for over two generations. Beyond that, for years thousands of the country’s best minds were employed in developing an unending litany of derivative superhero movies. 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 Congress, comprised primarily of lawyers, has a lower favorability rating than virtually any other institution in contemporary American society, and there are likely more jokes about lawyers than any other profession. Yet lawyers, or at least the most elite ones, are ever more rewarded and compensated – often more than senior bankers. Why? The answer: society has become inexorably more litigious, the regulatory state has expanded to unprecedented levels, and over the last generation many Americans have grown increasingly fixated on the notion of individual rights to be upheld as opposed to duties and responsibilities to be carried out. Moreover, legal practices such as tax and trade law have expanded, often in support of large financial or technology companies bent on evading taxes and minimizing employee obligations.

If the five pillars of elite careers are tottering, where does that leave future elite graduate? Some may cling to a vision of the well-trod credentialist path; but others may look anew at universities and the point of four years of higher education. The crumbling of the old elite pathways may lead to new approaches for teaching and preparing graduates.

More broadly, a wider set of pathways for the nation’s brightest and most ambitious minds will, over time, lead to further economic and cultural invigoration. 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 to work for morally compromised finance, consulting or technology firms is, if essentially bloodless, no less a tragedy.

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. These fields reward depth over optics.

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 turn 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 Turchin’s notion of elite overproduction, tends to corrode socities 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, exposes the fragility and superficiality of what the elites have long assumed and pursued.

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)