Do Institutionalized Choice Sets Funnel Undergraduate Students to Wall Street?

Abstract

This study will analyze the impact of eRecruiting on the undergraduate student population at Duke University. Specifically, it will focus on how the eRecruiting platform alters the academically accepted career decision-making models put forth by many experts. Traditional models propose that in order to make a decision, one must first accumulate full information on the available jobs in the market; however, eRecruiting undermines the process by offering a skewed vision of the external job market. A representative sample of 1,221 jobs listed on eRecruiting was coded by both industry and occupation. The resulting distribution was then compared to nationally representative data and the findings suggest that the eRecruiting site leads to an institutionalized constrained choice set which, in turn, constrains the job search process for Duke students. These findings present many implications for Duke and its graduating students as well as for universities across the country.