Who would you like to work for when you grow up? That's a question the National Society of High School Scholars, an honor society for high-achieving students, asks its members in a survey every two years or so. The rankings, unsurprisingly, tend to skew to the kinds of companies most familiar to kids (top-100 staples over the years have included Disney and Build-A-Bear). But beyond the big-name brands, the survey offers a snapshot of the aspirations of America's most ambitious teens — students who will soon become the next generation of elite professionals.
For years, the top spots in the survey have been dominated by tech giants. In 2017, for example, the most aspired-to employer was Google. But this year's rankings, based on responses from more than 10,000 Gen Zers, reflect a changing world order. Google fell to No. 7 on the list; Amazon to No. 8; and Tesla to No. 33. Instagram came in at No. 48, and Facebook just barely made the cut at all, tumbling all the way down past Dow Chemical and 3M to No. 94. Tech's allure, it appears, is plummeting among the best and brightest high schoolers.
Why has tech suddenly fallen out of favor among students? Part of it, I'm guessing, is a simple calculation of who's hiring right now. Silicon Valley has been laying off workers by the tens of thousands, making tech work almost impossible to come by. In a survey conducted by Handshake, a job site for college students, the class of 2024 listed job stability as their top priority in deciding where to apply. And in the search for steady employment, the share of applications they submitted to tech companies dropped by 19% compared with the class of 2022.
Students also said a major consideration in where to apply was the reputation of a company as a good place to work. "They're looking for an employer that's going to take care of them and be nice to their workforce," says Christine Cruzvergara, the chief education strategy officer at Handshake. And the tech industry did itself no favors in the harsh way it conducted its recent wave of layoffs. "You've seen people go on social media and talk about what their layoff experience was like and how the company treated them," Cruzvergara says.
But the numbers suggest that tech's disfavor among Gen Z is more than self-interested calculus. For over a decade, tech has enjoyed a near-total monopoly on the country's smartest young workers. Millennials believed they were heading to Silicon Valley in service of a lofty mission. Tech, they were told, was going to democratize data, creating a digital bridge to a better and more equitable world. Instead, tech companies have been responsible for spreading misinformation, fueling hate speech, sowing digital addiction, and exacerbating an epidemic of mental illness among teens. To Gen Z, tech no longer looks like a force for good. On the high-school survey this year, more students said they believe artificial intelligence will have a negative effect on society than those who say it will have a positive one.
We've seen this happen before. Two decades ago, when I was in college, the smartest students in my class wanted to go into finance. Then, in the fall semester of our senior year, Lehman Brothers collapsed and took the rest of the economy with it. The sharp contraction in banking — combined with Wall Street's new image as evil personified — spurred students to begin looking elsewhere for employment. That's when the Googles and Facebooks swooped in, offering wildly generous stock options, free meals, offices with ping-pong tables, and a chance to build world-changing products. It didn't take long for tech to supplant finance as the ultimate dream job.
Now, the waning interest in Big Tech could pose a long-term threat to its future. After all, the industry's ascent was fueled by more than its algorithms. Part of what made Silicon Valley so dominant was the endless pipeline of brilliant college graduates who supplied young companies with the fresh ideas and mountains of code they needed to become the behemoths they are today. If Big Tech has lost the hearts and minds of today's students, it has lost its ultimate edge.
If Silicon Valley is going out of vogue, what will take its place as the next hot destination? One contender, according to the latest high-school survey, appears to be healthcare. In this year's rankings, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital was No. 1. The Mayo Clinic was No. 2. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which wasn't even in the top 100 in 2018, was No. 14. If the pandemic taught Gen Z anything, it's that no jobs are more important than those of the front-line workers who put their own lives on the line to save the lives of others. (Students ranked their local hospital at No. 4.) And with the healthcare industry facing severe staffing shortages, we need young people to pursue careers as doctors and nurses far more than we need them to optimize ads on the internet.
Another contender to take tech's place may be — irony of ironies — the federal government. Civil service doesn't come with the pay or the glamour of tech jobs, but it offers the stability that college students say they want. Perhaps that's why the share of applications to government jobs on Handshake this year nearly doubled from 2022. And in the survey of high schoolers, the FBI, NASA, the CIA, and the CDC all ranked in the top 20. Big Tech's biggest titans may loathe Washington, but today's smartest teenagers see it as a source of meaningful work and steady employment.
But as I've chewed this question over, I wonder if the new dream job for young people isn't a job at all — at least not the kind where they work for someone else. On the Handshake survey, three-quarters of respondents said they would be interested in pursuing entrepreneurship at some point in their career. Many, in fact, have already dabbled in a variety of side hustles, acquiring a taste for working for themselves. When I speak to college students these days, I'm struck by how they lack the naivete I suffered from when I was their age. They already know that the only company you can't get fired from is the one where you're the owner.
That doesn't mean they plan on striking out on their own right away. That would be the opposite of the stability they want, and this is a practical bunch. Instead, they're still applying for normal, entry-level jobs to support themselves while they spin up their own thing. "They're using their full-time job as a safety net to make sure that they have steady income, that they're able to pay their bills, that they're able to save," says Cruzvergara. "Then, if things are going well, they can make that transition and it doesn't feel as idealistic and scary." Today's students may not look all that different from the careerists of previous generations. But their North Star is no longer to become a senior vice president of someone else's company.
Whatever ends up becoming the next hot career — healthcare, government, entrepreneurship, or something else — the waning dominance of Big Tech is likely to be a good thing for the rest of the economy. So many sectors have languished for years, unable to compete for the bright young minds that Silicon Valley hoarded for so long. Now, like tech and finance before them, they'll finally have a shot at hiring the generation that will drive the innovation of the future.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.