Vocation and the Student by James Sutton
While many Americans conceive of the average
student at an elite university as a wild-eyed leftist, the nation’s best and brightest actually seem to prefer stocks and bonds over socialism. Graduates of such esteemed universities like Harvard, Penn, and Princeton have gone to work in consulting or finance at such high rates (34, 36, and an eye-popping 60 percent, respectively). Color this writer skeptical, but the idea that graduates of elite colleges are drawn en masse to money and business management because of their deep personal call towards Wall Street seems unlikely. It has much more to do with the difference between career and vocation, and the way the former has taken ahold of our worldview. The word vocation comes from the Latin noun vocatio, meaning a call or summons. The word might sound strange to us; a little oldfashioned or awkward. Certainly no one uses it in casual conversation: “So, what kind of vocation do you want to pursue?” seems
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like an off-kilter version of the usual questions adults ask college students about their “career.” Career, however, is a word we are comfortable with. Our high schools host “career days,” colleges send us glossy pamphlets desperately trying to convince us that they and only they will help us on to the most successful career, and once on campus, we have the Office of Career Services. The meaning behind the word is clear as well: almost always something well-compensated, prestigious, or both. Jobs that are neither aren’t mentioned, or seen as a fairly quaint aspiration that young people will outgrow. Of course, the modern university has been failing to help students in discerning their vocations for a long time. One of the clearest and most incisive indictments of careerism (though he never uses that specific term), was made by W.H. Auden in a speech, “Vocation and Society” to undergraduates at Swarthmore.
