The day before classes began, Sunita and Tariq, both college seniors, attended an address by one of their university’s professors, Dr. Graciela Archer, entitled, “Stumbling into Success.” Career Services sponsored this presentation to help the soon-to-be graduates feel less anxious about life after college. Dr. Archer spoke energetically about how she, the first in her family to go to college, had found herself and discovered new abilities by trying new opportunities. She explained that her undergraduate major in anthropology had little to do with her graduate studies in philosophy and had not really defined any of the career choices she made.
Dr. Archer had gleefully pursued decades of career adventures and misadventures after graduate school. She was fired from her first job at the county clerk’s office for blowing the whistle on a corrupt judge. She taught Spanish at a charter school, and she gave ethics seminars at retreats for major corporations. She even built a governmental ethics office from the ground up while teaching full-time at a research-intensive university. Over the years, she had taught in two different departments in three universities and had even gained tenure once, only to give it up and move on to another career. She had worked her way through college waiting tables, of course, and had sometimes fallen back on that type of work while interviewing. She never felt threatened by the prospect of getting fired, despite her edgy approach to life and research. Why should she? She always landed on her feet, finding work that taught her something new. Today, she was here to tell her audience not to worry about their futures either, since those futures were wide open to them.
Not everyone in the audience was worried. Sunita, in fact, was mostly envious. She had worked two summers in the family law firm. Abiding by her dad’s advice, she majored in finance, which was an area in which the firm lacked expertise. Her dad paid for her undergraduate college tuition and promised to pay for her to get a graduate degree in accounting if she didn’t get into law school. She knew she should be grateful that she didn’t have to worry about finding a job, but her worry-free future didn’t seem so wide open.
Tariq, sitting nearby, also felt funneled into his post-college life. His mom managed a local grocery store in a regional chain. Tariq started sacking groceries and stocking produce when he was sixteen. The district manager had promised him a job in human resources at the central office after he got his industrial psychology degree. He didn’t plan to stay there forever, but it would help pay off his student loan.
In this audience, which was reflective of US trends, 30 percent of those graduating already had jobs lined up for them, thanks to their parents. Their first jobs out of college would probably pay more than those of their fellow classmates, and they would continue to earn more than their peers who lacked family connections. Such are the benefits of nepotism.
There are many good reasons to hire a relative, chief among them being trust. But comfort, too, seems to be a driving factor. Research has shown that response to resumés at an employment website depends more on the applicant’s name than their qualifications. In experiments using equivalent resumés, applicants with Euro-American names had a 50 percent higher chance of being invited for an interview over applicants with names thought to reflect other ethnicities. However, while hiring within the family is often safe for both employer and employee, it might harm others employees as well as the community at large. When relatives step into positions, they take jobs that could otherwise diversify the workforce, and promotions are almost guaranteed for them at the expense of others. Furthermore, for young graduates like Sunita and Tariq, working for relatives may relieve them from worries about getting hired but also shields them from the growth that comes with making scary choices in a wide-open future.
From the 2024 National Ethics Bowl