The Treasury and its Dragon
One cannot hear enough about the many issues our globalized world is facing. Climate change, loss of biodiversity, rising domestic and international inequality, risk of nuclear conflict, technological abuse, etc. All of these issues require either an immediate solution or a versatile prevention plan. These, unfortunately, almost never stem from a discrete source, requiring the joint effort of private and public sectors, alongside NGOs. These sectors and organizations quite intuitively consist of people who have achieved a higher education, making universities’ impacts on these millions of ex-students that much more important. This is, without a doubt, a huge responsibility with many places to fail or come short. In this article, I am going to highlight the informational flaws and imperfections of the SASSE-corporate partnership and the subsequent imbalance in the opportunities exposed to students. This imbalance, I argue, carries a negative effect on the labor force at large.
At most universities, there exist one or more student bodies responsible for the joys and flows of student life. The chief student corpus at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) is, as you might know, SASSE. We, among other student associations, need substantial funding for an efficient and general existence. There may be a foundation or fund that provides financial backing to a university, the state, or, as is often the case for elite business schools, for-profit companies.
There are two things that should be kept in mind when discussing private funding: first, for-profit organizations are set up such that it is difficult for them to redistribute resources towards causes that are of no financial interest to them. Second, it is in fact difficult for them to redistribute resources toward good causes. The above lead to a reality where firms generally do not support causes that lie outside of their immediate interests. Nevermind also that, for publicly traded companies, the situation is even more complicated, as they have the shareholders behind their backs, watching the executives' every move with eyes agasp.
How then, is it possible that SASSE and other similar student bodies are financed by for-profit companies?
I suppose that their interest is a no-brainer: EXPOSURE.
Firms can get access to high-achieving, intelligent students, by promoting their brands from the very onset of the targets’ higher education, whereas the students benefit from learning about the opportunities the former have to offer. In my opinion, this is an overall good relationship. The problem is not whom we are exposed to, but to whom we are not. Again, solutions to our global issues require that the public and private sectors work hand in hand, in order to give holistic answers to our challenges. This means that it is not ideal that, at most universities, one meets substantially fewer representatives from the public sector and NGOs, sees less of their material, generally, being exposed to them less. This situation prevails while a majority of people at university are also those who have arguably the highest cognitive capacity. Combine this with the aforementioned issue of company apathy for most societal causes, and the effects of the issue become further amplified. This scheme is not only bad for society as a whole, but also means that the students who would like to and would be better off pursuing careers in sectors other than the ones shown are not provided as many of such opportunities.
Although the imperfection is significant, there is hope for change. During this year’s SASSE elections, both candidates for President at the Business Committee (NU) included the diversification of student opportunities in their programs. This meant that students would be provided and would be exposed to more positions at non-profit organizations, especially in the public sector. Not only did they include this initiative in their program, but the elected NU president is also determined to act on his promise. If the initiative yields the expected results, it would have great effects on the breadth of student career offerings, which would, in turn, have a positive effect on general well-being. Furthermore, a greater variety of places where top university students can provide better tools for us to solve global issues. However, nothing worth having comes easily. The aforementioned non-profit sectors have less freedom when it comes to financially supporting student orgs. Including them among our partners while asking for less money, while providing the same level of exposure as to our for-profit partners could dishearten the latter. Regarding this complex topic, I am honored to have talked with the upcoming Business Committee and Education Committee (UU) Presidents, Mohammed Talballa and Anastasia Efstathiou, respectively.
First of all, I was curious about how Mohammed identified the issue of exposure imbalance prior to his campaign. He carefully explained how it was a twofold identification. First, he often heard his groupmates in various projects, as well as students around the Atrium, talking about their unease about how the school’s culture mostly promotes two distinct career paths: management consultancy and investment banking. In addition, once he made the decision to put emphasis on career opportunity diversification in his campaign, he received several messages regarding the issue that verified his assumptions about the size of the problem. We briefly discussed how a narrow range of offerings can have a broadly negative impact, beyond even the general satisfaction of students. Next on the agenda: a way forward for SASSE and NU.
Mohammed very clearly summarized the problem again:
“What the Business Committee sells is exposure. However, we have a limited amount of exposure to offer. Once we start to give out larger sums of this limited resource to certain types of organizations, it would damage the organizations that initially were granted larger portions of this exposure.”
The fact that exposure is a scarce resource indicates that giving it away for cheaper not only means market disruption, but also fewer finances for SASSE. Though the situation may appear stalemated, Mohammed has an action plan. He told me that one of the most important things is to understand our stakeholders. The Business Committee’s complex stakeholder map, consisting primarily of students and partner-companies, means that we must move cautiously towards change. All that being said, Mohammed told me that he is already working on restructuring the business development team that works with establishing new partnerships. He plans on introducing a new incentive system to make the action group more motivated, as well as pushing to start discussions with entirely new segments. He also believes that it is not necessarily the case that the public sector and NGOs would not be able to pay as much as the private sector. He also thinks that small changes can mitigate negative externalities and that renegotiations in good faith are key to achieving great results. Beyond the Business Committee, other avenues for action remain.
Anastasia introduced a new perspective of the problem to both Mohammed and myself. She mentioned that there is already a channel where the Education Committee publishes academic career opportunities and introduces several research and educational centers at the Stockholm School of Economics. The issue, she argues, is that public and non-profit orgs oftentimes do not realize the demand for their positions. She is seeking to tackle this next year via a push toward opening up more research and teaching options at the school. Her model of approach may also be feasible for use by other Committees. Committees and projects that are already allowed to send out and present opportunities and organizations outside of the mainstream should push these and new partnerships further. Hers is another path to be taken towards improving the quality and diversity of opportunities available to all students, post-SSE.
Therefore, the incoming UU President’s message summarizes that, while fewer, opportunities to meet and interact with sustainably-minded non-profits do exist at SASSE, especially backed by the Education Committee and the SASSE Sustainability Group (SSG). The fundamental issue, I believe, is that while opportunities to meet the public sector and NGOs do exist, these do not tend to occur with the same frequency or be prioritized in the same manner that for-profit ones are.
Thus, it would appear that there is hope on the horizon for the prospective public sphere or NGO-minded SSE student. Anastasia, in her capacity as Education Committee President, will continue to advertise academic opportunities available to prospective students. Mohammed, on the other hand, will strive towards restructuring the incentive system surrounding partner acquisition in the hope of gaining new partnerships, while cautiously renegotiating existing relationships within NU. I believe that the difference in the approaches from our two Committee Presidents perfectly illustrates the importance of seeking different perspectives in approaching answers to society’s most aching, elusory questions.
The above conclusions emphasize that we, at SASSE and SSE, have a responsibility in trying to build a university culture that can supply both the private and public sectors with a brilliant and capable workforce, and, by doing so, set up a model for other student organizations and universities to take inspiration from.