I was investigating how so many bright young Americans, who arrive on campus full of idealism this time each year, are seduced into the belief that the best way to make change is to work for corporate America. I interviewed Cohen over more than a year for my new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. The best way to bring about meaningful reform was to apprentice in the bowels of the status quo. Should she be a management consultant? Should she be a rabbi? Should she go straight to helping people by working at a nonprofit? Or should she first train in the tools of business? She had absorbed the ascendant message, all but unavoidable for the elite American college student, that those tools were essential to serving others. It was 2014, the spring of her senior year at Georgetown University. Yet she wrestled with a question that haunted many around her: How should the world be changed? Her college mind heavy with the teachings of Aristotle and Goldman Sachs, Hilary Cohen knew she wanted to change the world.
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