Now that I’m back home for summer, I have to make up for nine months of missed Taylor Swift literary analyses with my 15-year-old sister. So there I was at 1 a.m., with coffee number three next to an extra-large bowl of instant ramen (I had to be bribed), “I Hate It Here” on loop and 102 open tabs across Reddit and TikTok—yes, I counted, I had to know when my sentence would end—each dissecting a different four second stretch of the song.
“Quick, quick, tell me something awful / Like you are a poet trapped inside the body of a finance guy.”
The line has inspired its own rabbit hole of interpretations—readings about the woes of blind speed dating, a stretch about her past relationships and most commonly, the possibility that she is describing herself: an artist trapped inside the body of the practical realist. Many seem to relate. The poet, in this reading, is the person you really are; the finance guy is the person circumstance and pragmatism made you become—the shell in which something more creative and intellectually alive is being wasted.
Where had I heard this before?
“Quick, quick, tell me something awful / Like you are a UChicago intellectual trapped inside the body of a Bizcon kid.”
Majorism describes the bias that places certain majors above others, usually favoring science and technology over the liberal arts. UChicago, admittedly by my own diagnosis, suffers from a mutated strain of the same ailment, which I’ll call, for lack of a better name, reverse majorism. Scroll through enough Sidechat and Reddit posts, and you’ll find the same accusation on rotation: that business economics (Bizcon) is the “sell-out” major, a betrayal of the Chicago Mind, and a Sword of Damocles hanging over whatever intellectualism the school has left. We’ve all heard and seen concerns that UChicago’s culture is losing its quirkiness and intellectualism as more and more students major in Bizcon, so much so that there is constant war between the quintessential UChicago intellectual (the poet) and the Bizcon kid (the finance guy).
Of course, I’m not necessarily blind to the reasons behind these accusations. In one of the most widely taken Bizcon electives, the professor, trying to engage the class in an interactive game, randomly asked how many of us planned to go into either investment banking or consulting (leaving aside, for the game’s sake, those who were going to pursue graduate school). Almost every hand in the room shot up for one or the other. As someone who wouldn’t touch finance with a ten-foot pole, I sat there, wanting nothing more than to slide under the desk and hide forever. The major I’d chosen with such conviction had, in the span of a few seconds, been reduced to one of three fates: Goldman, McKinsey, or a Ph.D. In fact, I felt so trapped to the point that when I first started typing out this column it was going to be a different piece entirely—I was so ready to write a screed about how overwhelmingly out of place I felt in the sea of students heading out to coffee chats and recruiting seminars. Why is it that suddenly the only career choices I felt like I had were finance and consulting in all their many fields?
University graduates’ sprint toward Wall Street is a trend that has already been dissected at length, both in the Maroon and elsewhere—and by people who know far more about it than I do. What I will argue, however, is that the simple existence of preprofessional majors at UChicago—Bizcon in particular—is not to blame for it.
I imagine that those who fear UChicago’s identity being hollowed out picture the school as a crumbling castle, each new preprofessional program another crack in the stone, bringing the Life of the Mind one step closer to collapse. Part of that fear is that Bizcon itself is somehow antithetical to learning for the sake of learning.
I happen to disagree.
I have friends who chose Bizcon for the extra room it gave them to take advanced Booth School of Business electives, willingly working for hours over ARCH models. I know others who have used the relative flexibility afforded by its small number of required classes to choose courses at a particular intersection of politics and economics that they enjoyed in preparation for a master’s in international relations. Similarly, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met here switched into Bizcon on a whim after deciding he’d had enough of economic theory built on unreasonable assumptions and wanted to lean more toward applied economics. Is it really that unreasonable to say that volatility models or price theory can be every bit as consuming and as worthy of somebody’s attention as ethnomusicology or linguistic typology?
Crescat scientia; vita excolatur: “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” If the “decree” is simply to let knowledge grow, why should we be so particular about what type of knowledge is permitted to grow? The UChicago motto isn’t limited to knowledge that helps us understand the human condition. Knowledge about the institutions through which people work, trade, invest, and organize their lives seems no less worthy of the UChicago motto and of the Life of the Mind. Let knowledge grow from more to more, then. Whatever body of knowledge it happens to be.
Of course, some would argue that Bizcon leaves students with too little of this enrichment—that its small number of requirements make for an education barely more advanced than a high school economics class. But even if you find it hard to believe that the courses under Bizcon can be just as intellectually stimulating as in other majors, the major itself hardly stops its students from taking the political theory seminar or the graduate economics course that catches their eye. If anything, having fewer requirements can make that easier. And, with the Core, there really is no reason for a Bizcon student to walk away from UChicago with a less well-rounded education compared to their peers—if they choose to make it that way.
In addition, a quick Google search will tell you that you do not need a business or finance degree to enter the world of finance and consulting. With or without the Bizcon major, the broader shift toward finance is happening anyway. Banks and consulting firms choose to recruit from a handful of elite colleges regardless of major because they want to tell their clients they’ve hired a team from a prestigious university—and UChicago is no exception. Has the introduction of the Bizcon major accelerated it? Maybe. But take Bizcon out of the picture, and I suspect we’d just have more computer science, mathematics, and public policy majors in suits making pitch decks instead. My point is that our graduates’ stampede towards Wall Street didn’t begin with Bizcon. UChicago was hardly immune to the pull before the major existed, and I don’t think it would become immune simply by getting rid of it.
So why do most of the students majoring in Bizcon want to go down the finance and consulting road? Why did almost everyone in that elective raise their hands to say they were deciding between wanting to work at Goldman or McKinsey? If we’re going to assign blame, I’d start with reverse majorism.
Are we really surprised that the (inaccurate) reputation of Bizcon as the easiest route into finance and consulting attracts the students who want to end up in those careers? If we keep telling students that Bizcon is for people whose primary concern is making money after graduation, it should hardly shock us when the students who prioritize their financial security start gravitating toward it. The result is a kind of selection bias: the more Bizcon is seen as the finance-and-consulting major, the more likely students interested in those careers are to choose it. Bad publicity is still publicity—or so a business class would tell you.
And Bizcon isn’t just seen as the finance major, it’s also seen as the “the easiest and stupidest major at this school.” I would argue that this too is a consequence of reverse majorism. If students are repeatedly told that Bizcon is the easy route, why would they go out of their way to make it harder for themselves? Why would students with recruiting in mind jeopardize their transcripts in a major that is seen as less academically rigorous by taking more demanding classes, when most recruiters care so much about GPA? Why risk lowering your GPA when the people you’re competing against for the same jobs can choose the easier way and keep theirs intact? Even Bizcon students who aren’t necessarily aiming for finance or consulting still have strong reasons to protect their GPAs, and so they too are pushed toward avoiding more demanding courses. And so the cycle begins: in trying to expose Bizcon’s supposed inferiority, reverse majorism might have just contributed to it.
None of this is me claiming that majorism and reverse majorism cause equal or even comparable damage to society. I’m merely suggesting that the latter, whatever its intentions are, has no real business existing at a school like this. It seems to me too obvious to need saying that a major is not a verdict on character. It’s not a moral stance, and certainly not a reliable predictor of who someone becomes. Have we forgotten that a major can be a deeply personal choice, shaped by considerations that might only make perfect sense to the person making it?
To assume that a UChicago intellectual is trapped inside the body of a Bizcon kid is to imagine the major as a kind of prison: somewhere inside is the kid who wanted to major in English and Fundamentals, waiting behind the bars while their vampiric Bizcon counterpart stands guard (in a suit, obviously). If we take the Reddit interpretation of Swift’s line seriously, then the poet is trapped enough to hate the world around them and retreat into the “secret gardens” of their mind. But do we really believe Bizcon majors really hate what they’re doing?
In that same elective, alongside classmates already preparing for careers in investment banking and consulting, we used the theory taught in class to argue about the existence of God, and on another day, to dissect gendered agency in romantic relationships.
Even someone convinced that business majors must be abolished from all universities should, I think, have trouble objecting to Bizcon at UChicago. If there is a university capable of making business economics a subject of genuine intellectual inquiry rather than soul-sucking vocational training, surely it is this one. Perhaps (at UChicago at least) the poet doesn’t have to be trapped inside the body of a finance guy after all.
