“It is kind of the expected thing that an intelligent Oxbridge graduate will go for grad recruitment schemes and work for one of these companies.” At least this is how one finalist puts it as he guides me through the thinking behind his latest application for a vacation scheme in the City. The statistics reflect this; last year the university’s undergraduate courses collectively produced twice as many investment bankers and management consultants as they did teachers. If the tally is extended to include MPhil and PhD graduates, we managed to churn out an impressive 357 investment bankers and management consultants in 2014.

The graduate orientation towards the corporate world can feel so entrenched that it might seem like an inevitable part of Cambridge life, but it hasn’t always been like this. Forty years ago, the Careers Service was reporting more than four-times as many Cambridge graduates going into school teaching (202) as into investment banking (43), and ‘management consultancy’ did not yet even exist as a category. What’s happened?

Make no mistake, this shift in graduate employment destinations is not the result of some happy, anomalous accident. On a national level, the continual stretching of wage scales since the 1980s has meant that those on the wealthier half of the income spectrum need to earn more to live at the same standard. Forty years ago, you could graduate from Cambridge, become a secondary school teacher and support yourself comfortably in central London. Today, if you don’t have access to an offshore family trust fund, a comfortable, financially independent life in the nation’s capital immediately after graduating effectively requires you to be on a graduate recruitment scheme, more often than not a corporate one. What’s more, this year’s graduate cohort will be the first to leave university shackled with at least £27,000 of debt. The pressure to earn big and to earn quick has never been higher than it is set to be for those graduating in a few months, an appetite that only one sector of the economy can fill.

The historical slide into the corporate sector is greased, in Cambridge’s case, by enormous sums of money poured into student societies by hopeful graduate recruiters. Excluding the Union, the five student societies and campaigns I spoke to collected more than £9,500 in corporate sponsorship over the last year alone. Taking into account the hundreds of student societies operating at the university, and the longevity of some of the sponsorship contracts they rely on, this must be just a fraction of the total. These figures are unaffordable extravagances to almost all types of employers. And so it is into the investment banks, management consultancies and Magic Circle law firms which the most aggressive and successful recruitment strategies are herding many of Cambridge’s most ambitious graduates.

They sponsor the Union, they subsidise the autonomous campaigns meant to represent us, they buy us our sports stash, they give student journalists a platform, and they even give money to the Careers Service. And yet relatively little attention has been given to the emerged model of corporately subsidised student life. Are they donations, or commercial transactions like any other? And if so, what exactly is expected in return?

Unsurprisingly, many of these societies are unwilling to talk frankly to the student press about their experiences with corporate sponsors. At the Cambridge Union, responsibility for managing relations with substantial sponsors falls into the hands of the Vice President, one of the society’s few annual positions. “Much of what I do is covered by confidentiality agreements,” Nick Wright (VP Lent 2014-15) emailed me when I asked to talk with him. “As a result, it would be inappropriate for me to give media interviews in relation to it.” His message was embedded with a link to Deloitte’s graduate recruitment webpage. Maybe Deloitte’s website will be more helpful in explaining the relationship? Instead, I am met with some impressively vague corporate lingo: “We support others to make progress where it matters most whilst offering exciting opportunities for our people and clients to experience who we are in different ways.”
One member of the Union’s Lent Term Full Committee was more frank. “The trend towards larger student organisations depending more on corporate sponsorship is, on the whole, regrettable.

“Everyone knows that we’ve had debates where members have been turned away or sent to the gallery because of seats reserved by them [corporate sponsors]… or that they are anally retentive with respect to banners or email signatures that don’t feature the Deloitte logo in the right proportion, in the right size, in the right place.” What about the Union’s refusal to openly discuss the details of its arrangement with its sponsors? “The corporate relationship breeds a kind of sycophantic hackery, some people will be in on the relationship and declare that some things are beyond discussion… naturally this leads to hierarchy and non-disclosure agreements.”

Another student who has been heavily involved in the Union for over a year referred to a specific incident of tension between the Union and its exclusive sponsors that took place around half a year ago.

“Six months ago, there was a big thing where Deloitte threatened to pull out [of the sponsorship deal] unless the Union pulled their socks up and started sticking to their agreement.” The tension is alleged to have boiled down to how much brand exposure the sponsor would receive in return for their donation. “Previous teams hadn’t been putting enough Deloitte logos in places.” The student recalled that “for the invitations to speakers, for instance, they were supposed to have a Deloitte logo on it, and they hadn’t been putting that on.”

Responding to these allegations, the Union gave Varsity the following statement: “The Union is committed to keeping membership prices down, and sponsorship is a vital part of this effort. We are grateful for the support of all our sponsors.”

Deloitte did not respond to Varsity’s request for comment.

Not all sponsorship deals, however, are so wrought with tension. Jonathan Spittles, former Chair of CUSU LGBT+, had “only good things to say about sponsors, and bad about CUSU, at least as far as financing goes”. It seemed slightly comic to me that the operating costs of a CUSU autonomous campaign, a liberation movement, were partly subsidised by Boston Consulting Group and, making a second appearance, the auditors Deloitte.

The £1,000 yielded annually through this contract makes up one-third of the campaign’s total budget. Jonathan has a more logical explanation for the funding arrangements, and blames CUSU. “The extra sponsor funding is useful as we are not supposed to spend CUSU money on alcohol, which can be a problem for our events such as the garden party and Rainbow Ball.

“The extra money is useful for printing costs associated with the magazine,” he also tells me. Although BCG has been sponsoring the campaign for a while now, “before Deloitte, we were sponsored by KPMG”.

A familiar chronology slowly emerges; contracts run into trouble as student societies are accused of not offering the sponsor enough brand exposure. “I believe many saw KPMG as too demanding, wanting to brand too many parts of the campaign.”

It goes without saying that these funding agreements are more than just altruistic donations. They usually take the form of legal contracts, and whether or not it goes unsaid something is expected in return. More specifically, that something is exposure to you, the Cambridge student who is unsure how to spend the 80,000 hours of their life that they will, on average, devote to working. The chance to capitalise on that dangerous mix of financial ambition in an environment of relative economic uncertainty is one that some are willing to pay handsomely for.

How much? For the chance to expose your company’s brand to members and supporters of the rugby club of one larger college, the going rate is £2,000 a year. The club’s former captain explained to me how the exclusive sponsorship deal had been secured after he had promised one major banking group “unrivalled exposure to individuals both determined on the field and highly achieving off it”.

“They required a certain number of brand names on the clothing, and they also requested to send an email out to the rugby mailing list. It familiarised our team members, and our large supporting crowd, with the brand, and in the past our sponsors have come to our annual dinner and done a little spiel there.”

Was £2,000 worth it? “Through our scheme, there was definitely one person who got an internship out of it through the contacts that were developed, and I think he has now got a job in financial services lined up for when he graduates.”

It is not uncommon for these sponsorship deals to result in an employment contract between the corporate recruiter and a senior figure within the society. After graduating last year, Alex* was recruited by the firm that had exclusively sponsored the student society he ran in his final year. The society’s operational costs are still met entirely by this firm’s sponsorship, and as such the names of both the society and the firm have been withheld to protect the society’s sole source of income. “When I was running a society, I always thought that these companies were kind of suckers, because no one actually paid any attention to the sponsors; we were just taking their money.”

In Alex’s case, the sponsor ended up signing him on as a consultant analyst: in all likelihood precisely the return the sponsors were hoping for. But what about Alex? Does he enjoy consultancy? “Enjoy might be a strong term. I like the people there…broadly speaking. The work isn’t fascinating, but I didn’t expect it to be fascinating. It met my requirements, but it is not something that I enjoyed and would see myself doing in the long-term.” He currently has plans to leave the firm shortly, returning to education to do an MPhil.

Alex is what Gordon Chesterman, the Director of the University’s Careers Service, would call “a refugee from the city”. How often do they come to the Service for advice? “We probably get one a fortnight coming in.” It’s usually a case along the lines of “I’ve had enough, I’ve worked six of the last seven weekends, I’ve got half a million quid in the bank, I want a life, I want to become a primary school teacher.”

At its helm for the past thirteen years, and before that working at one point as a graduate recruiter for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Chesterman understands the job anxiety of those soon to graduate. He is proud of the Careers Service’s independence, unlike commercial agencies. “We are funded predominantly by the university to serve the students’ best interests.

“I haven’t suffered any sense of being put under pressure to deliver bound and gagged students, oven-ready, shrink-wrapped to a particular organisation because they’d just written a cheque for ‘x’ million quid to the university,” he jokes.

A sizeable portion of the Service’s funding, however, does not come from the university’s purse. Its ‘Supporters Club’, founded in 1987, listed 124 sponsors on the back page of its Annual Report last year. This year, they collectively donated around £85,000 to the Service. Almost all are management consultancies, wealth management firms, investment banks or corporate law firms. In return for supporting the Careers Service with donations, the members receive certain benefits, including two weeks’ priority booking for Careers Service events and access to various internal outlook reports and statistics on graduate directions and destinations.

The Careers Service then uses this money to subsidise programmes geared towards less lucrative sectors of the economy. “I behave very much as Robin Hood would and use the surplus that the students want to attend for career interest where there is just no potential for making money.” Last year, for instance, stalls at the annual Consultancy Event, Banking & Finance Event, and Solicitors Event were priced at £1,070, whereas one at the ‘Work to Change the World’ Event was only £100.

Chesterman is pleased with his efforts translating disproportionate demand from the corporate sector into a diverse programme of career options, suggesting to me that “with this income stream, there are a lot of students who probably owe their future job to the transfer of money under the Robin Hood banner”. 

The Careers Service plays a tricky role in balancing the interests of students on the one had with the demands of an unregulated job market on the other. In a free economy, it will always be the most lucrative sectors which can afford to invest the most on recruiting the best graduates. In one as deregulated as ours, the pay scales offered by the corporate sector shadow other occupational groups so dramatically in 2015 that if the question is one of money there is little, if any, competition. Chesterman argues that through the Careers Service he is able to harness these market forces into the interests of Cambridge students, using them to maintain a diverse programme of career events to suit many different tastes and interests.

Outside of the institutionalised setting of a university department, however, these forces become trickier to control. Chesterman tells me stories of more manipulative behaviour by firms at recruitment dinners in the “I was going to use the word aggressive, but I’ll use the word assertive” career sectors like finance, fund management, and asset management. Quite regularly students come to the Careers Service to complain that they’d been told “accept this offer by tomorrow, and you’ll get an extra couple of thousand” or “if you don’t accept this offer by next Wednesday, it is withdrawn”.

This behaviour is innocent, however, in comparison to the predatory sexual advances routinely made towards female students at networking dinners. One law student described an unwelcome sexual advance at a black tie networking event for barristers, the first that she had attended. The practicing barrister, who “I guess would be in his thirties”, sat next to her, and lingered around as the night went on.

“As dinner drew to a close, and other guests began to leave, he remained seated and took a bottle of port, which he insisted we share. I wondered if this was the normal routine at networking events. By the time the waiters ushered us out, I expected him to call a cab and leave. However, he walked with me out of the college, and asked if I wanted to carry the conversation at a nearby bar, ‘drinks on him’.”

“I felt compromised and vulnerable, so politely declined and half ran back to my own college.” Reflecting on the night later, “The man had known I was a fresher, yet had definitely hit on me. The entire event seemed tainted. Were all barristers sleazy and opportunistic, attending these events to target young students?”

Stories of fully developed romantic involvements between a student and potential employer, developed out of one of these networking events, are not uncommon. “A friend of mine had an extended sexual relationship with someone she met at a law recruitment dinner,” another law student tells me. In her own experience at these events, “the old guys are quite pervy and creepy, complimenting you in weird ways, making you feel a bit uncomfortable.”

“That’s why I don’t go to the dinners.”

It isn’t hard to understand the pressure to respond positively to a sexual advance made at one of these events, particularly if you are new to the networking environment.
“Older men have taken these opportunities to flirt with undergraduate students when they are well aware of how keen these students are to gain internships at their law firms.”

Is this exploitative behaviour limited to experiences at sleazy dinners? Or is there something inherently exploitative in pouring so much corporate money into the more general, everyday runnings of university life and student culture? There is no question that it is done with a particular intention – namely one of long-term economic gain. The answer, I guess, comes down to your assessment of its implications. Is there anything wrong in itself with the corporatisation of the employment destinations of Cambridge graduates? The answer to that might just depend on whether or not you’ve secured a vac scheme yet.

*Name has been changed