Pete Buttigieg is a unique and distinctive man in many ways. But in many ways he’s also the ultimate distillation of a particular class, educational, and professional system that people who don’t go to the most elite colleges and universities may hardly even know exists. The brand of smart that Buttigieg has made his calling card, the specific range of interests, even his basic demeanor, are the ultimate in Ivy League-to-McKinsey. Or biglaw, or I-banking.
If you haven’t knowingly encountered this world until Buttigieg’s candidacy took off, or you’ve encountered it and wanted to know more because WTF is going on here, you should read Lauren Rivera’s book Pedigree: How Elite Students get Elite Jobs. Rivera studied the hiring process of elite professional service (EPS) firms—top-tier management consulting, investment banking, and law—engaging in participant observation and conducting interviews with people involved in hiring in such firms. “The way in which elite employers define and evaluate merit in hiring strongly tilts the playing field for the nation’s highest-paying jobs toward children from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds,” Rivera argues. In this world, “pedigree” is a term that’s openly used to refer to specific accomplishments—even as it retains, unacknowledged, the implication of inherited status—and many interviews turn on “polish” and “fit,” where perceptions of polish and fit are heavily driven by socioeconomic class.
Fit might mean showing that you had the range of interests to be a fun person to hang out with—the right, class-specific kind of fun—at jobs that involve long hours and may involve travel with coworkers. “Evaluators thought that involvement in activities outside of the classroom was evidence of superior social skills; they assumed a lack of involvement was a sign of social deficiencies.” Extracurricular activities were also seen as evidence of time-management skills. But participating in extracurricular activities, especially at a high level, requires money. You know, playing piano well enough to join Ben Folds and the South Bend Symphony Orchestra. And playing guitar, too, and didgeridoo also because why not?
Interviewers, Rivera writes, “needed to hear candidates tell compelling and emotionally arousing narratives about their life experiences”—emphasis on narrative. One interesting story doesn’t do it: These candidates had to have a coherent narrative of their life, their career goals, their interests. They had to present it confidently, but not too confidently, had to drive the conversation forward without being overbearing. The personal narratives that got candidates these high-paid, elite jobs “reaffirmed broader American, upper-middle-class ideals of individualism, individual fate, and control.” Sound like any presidential candidate you can think of? Maybe one with a compelling narrative about his life to fit any occasion, as long as you don’t prod the narrative too hard?
The route to these top jobs is all about starting out as a solidly middle-class or upper-middle-class person, enmeshed in a particular culture of achievement and able to easily and confidently relate to high-earning professionals in competitive fields. I first read Pedigree while my now-husband was attending Columbia Law School and interviewing for a biglaw job, and suddenly everything I was seeing made so much sense. Watching Buttigieg’s presidential campaign is another entire “time to reread Pedigree” experience, because this book is seriously like a guide to understanding the route through Harvard, the Rhodes Scholarship, and McKinsey that shaped Buttigieg.
As a bonus recommendation, while Buttigieg was a management consultant rather than an investment banker, Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street is another invaluable look at the culture of elite professional service firms. Her take on “smartness” is particularly important. “The ‘culture of smartness’ is central to understanding Wall Street’s financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic change,” Ho writes. “On Wall Street, ‘smartness’ means much more than individual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and generic sense of ‘impressiveness,’ of elite, pinnacle status and expertise, which is used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness as advisors to corporate America and leaders of the global financial markets.” Or, for management consultants, the worthiness to recommend slashing other people’s jobs and privatizing government services. For instance.