In the business school there’s a rat race to have the best resume possible. An emphasis on quantity over quality has emerged at an individual and organizational level. Because of this, we have reached a point where student development is no longer a means to any real goal, but rather a means to improving a resume.

This isn’t just an issue of integrity and morality, but it’s an issue for employers. 

When one’s willingness to pad their resume carries as much weight as genuine merit, finding the best candidate for a role becomes much more difficult. To make matters worse, those who exaggerate on their resume are more likely to get work experience, and then a year later you’re not comparing a resume padder and a nonpadder, you’re comparing someone with and without work experience.

The resume is the most common way to assess a job applicant. There has always been an incentive to go to questionable lengths to improve one’s resume. Most instances are minor offenses, and you can probably justify them using a “well, everyone else is doing it” argument, but a much more egregious behavior has emerged from the boundless crusade of resume improvement. Student development is being increasingly utilized for solely resume content.

At an individual level, students do the bare minimum required to have a student organization on their resume. It’s not that students aren’t engaged, but rather that this engagement is half-hearted, and the needs it is addressing are at times nonexistent. The appearance of a contribution is much more important than its objective impact.

At a higher level, this has become the norm. Since everyone is hoping to pad their resume, the natural solution is more organizations, events, leadership roles and most importantly more credit to be passed around and thrown on resumes. This has led to redundancy of events, a saturated student organization landscape, a dilution of quality, disingenuous intentions and an overfunding of initiatives.

Business student organizations are no longer a hotbed for student engagement and common interests, but a mechanism for some bullet points on a piece of paper. I believe this because I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of such output. From events with minimal interest where I only filled the room through the promise of free food, to ChatGPT generated newsletters in my inbox (that I can’t unsubscribe from), I have seen the bare minimum at work.

Resume padding and the shallow student development that follows are both byproducts of an emerging ideology here at DePaul. We’ll call it the “any means necessary” philosophy. The end goal of this mindset is to get the best job possible out of college, with best typically measured by salary and status. As the name suggests, this job can be achieved by any means necessary. This is certainly not a campuswide mindset, as it is only prevalent among the more fiscally minded majors, but the number of those who champion this idea is increasing.

To best understand this cultural revolution, look no further than the Department of Finance & Real Estate. Housing a major that is often seen as the epitome of prioritizing job security over pursuing a passion, the finance department has been living up to its reputation. Here and there, DePaul students are landing finance jobs and internships of a more coveted nature — roles that you may associate with a more “prestigious” school. 

While this has always been a possibility, never have we seen a more systematic effort to produce this result. Programs such as the Keeley Center Academy and the Finance Honors Program provide workshops, guidance, certifications and an increased exposure to employers, all the while encouraging its members to use these opportunities to get a job, no matter the cost. 

There is nothing wrong with going to college to get a job, but the systematic effort from DePaul is a strong contributor to the decline in quality of student development.

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