The vice-chancellor stood at the podium in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre, her voice echoing against the carved ceiling: Now go out there and change the world. Robes rustled. Cameras clicked. Rows of classmates smiled, clutching degrees that would soon deliver them to McKinsey , Goldman Sachs, and Clifford Chance: the holy trinity of elite exit plans.

Simon van Teutem clapped, too, but for him, the irony was unbearable.

“I knew where everyone was going,” he said in an interview with Fortune . “Everyone did. Which made it worse — we were all pretending not to see it.”

Career paths for the elite have indeed consolidated over the last half-century. In the 1970s, one in twenty Harvard graduates went into careers of the likes of finance or consulting. Twenty years later, that jumped to on

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