Ivy League students are risk averse. We get it.

Let’s go deeper.

I want everyone to stop this nonsense. Just stop, stop, stop it. After four years spent as an undergrad at Yale, I’ve seen enough of the pattern. Here’s how it goes: every year, someone writes a series of infuriated columns about how everyone is going off to join McKinsey/Goldman/etc. Why aren’t these young people creative enough to think in a wider spectrum, professors want to know! Why aren’t these Ivy League millennial instagramming snapchatting bratz dollz doing something better with their education?

Take this one, by Vivek Wadhwa in theWall Street Journal:

Engineering students with ambitions to save the world would instead become financial analysts—who used their skills to “engineer” our financial system. Or they would take grunt jobs in management consulting—another waste of valuable talent.

Why would they sell their souls? Because they had no choice, the burden of debt they amassed while getting their degrees was just too great. They had six-figure student loans to repay and couldn’t take the risk of joining a startup or founding their own business.

Or, more concisely, this line from the classic (and mostly fantastic) piece by William Deresiewicz, “the Disadvantages of an Elite Education.”

It’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

At least Wadhwa, for his part, isn’t too angry about it; his take is that student loan debt is to blame for such choices. He’s probably wrong about that, if he’s talking purely about undergraduates at Ivy League schools — most of which have need-blind admissions and a much greater ability to provide financial aid than their private peer institutions. While debt is another game once you get into graduate schools, his argument that one should go to a “regular school,” or at least not worry too much if that’s where you end up and have ambition, starts from a few false premises — the same premises that stick around every single article of this kind.

I’d like to try to correct some of these.

1. Ivy League students choose these firms for more than job security. They’re picking them for intellectual security. Call it a mirage, but brilliant marketing tactics on the part of firms that land on elite college campuses to recruit, from Google to McKinsey, promise you a future of the liberal-arts variety. Such companies have a way of pitching themselves so that ambitious but still partially aimless college grads don’t have to specialize. It keeps you from growing up too fast. You don’t have to pick a major! You can shop around! You can get thrown into a number of fields, be surrounded by smart peers, have a “class” that bonds the same way a team of college kids would. It’s slightly more complicated than just sticking on the conveyor belt; it’s that these companies do a brilliant job of translating the feeling of intellectual camaraderie and possibility into their work environments. For Ivy Leaguers to think about real alternatives to these places, alternative job sources should think about recruiting with the same emphasis on culture and opportunity.

2. It’s true that Ivy Leaguers rarely bet on themselves: but this isn’t something entirely unique to people with such educational backgrounds. People like institutions. We trust them, for the most part. Proof: anarchy hasn’t happened yet. Humanity arrived at its current state by believing in the essential meritocracy of organizations and hierarchies. Therefore, we believe we will rise within such organizations.

3. Let’s calm down on the selling-your-soul. For some people, a two-year-stint at a consulting firm might give them the confidence they need in the business world to later strike out on their own. I found as a college senior that an enormous amount of emphasis — an undue amount — was placed on what you did in the first two years out. In the frantic few months before college graduation, while everyone’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to find their defining career path, it seems like this choice means everything. The reality is that it doesn’t. Some of my favorite stories of people who struck out on their own begin with doing something entirely different. Take Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter’s years as a Chicago improve wannabe. Glynn Washington, founder of Snap Judgement on NPR, got himself out of a cult, went to law school, worked for the U.N. My generation will have many different careers. Maybe some people do take these jobs entirely for the money.

But others, like me, might come from new American families. Or certainly new Privilege families. I was shocked during my years at Yale at the world-wiseness of so many of my peers. How could they, at 18, know so much about so many real-life, adult industries? Who told them these things? I’m a curious person. I’ve been reading the news since middle school. But I often felt the intellectual and real-world confidence of some of my peers was miles beyond my grasp. If you’re like me and you have some serious ambitions about, say, health care policy or reforming the private sector or impacting the way corporations think about globalization, maybe you just need to hang out for a while in that world and learn about it. And maybe there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone emerges from the womb with a Ted Talk style, innovative perspective on how to make space for themselves in the world.

4. There’s a difference between financial burden and financial discomfort. I,thankfully, do not have student loan debt. I am lucky enough to not have to contribute to my family. But I am also unable to take a $10/hr job at media job in New York. It makes me deeply uncomfortable. If I had to, maybe I could swing it; get a few extra jobs, crash on a friend’s couch, convert someone’s living room into my bedroom. But even for me, even for someone who considers herself fairly open to risk-taking, it’s too much. That makes it easy to understand why more of my peers aren’t heading off into the sunset to create their own companies or write a novel. For those who don’t just happen to have an extra Park Avenue apartment lying around for spare use, it’s almost impossible to imagine taking that kind of bet on yourself. It’s like Virginia Woolf said: a woman who writes needs a room of one’s own. An entrepreneur does too. And not everyone has one of those to spare.

5. Maybe this demand for entrepreneurship is just another kind of white privilege? I don’t know if anyone’s done a study on how children of immigrants or first-generation college students stack up to their peers in terms of “risk taking,” but I bet the former group is understandably more risk-averse. When you don’t take for granted that you get to occupy space in this country, in these kinds of elite institutions, it’s almost unthinkable to imagine yourself deserving of the kind of arrogance (the underside of confidence?) it takes to create a company or hang out to try to write a novel. Every day I think about the risks I’m taking, I fall back on my immigrant parents; how hard they worked just to give me roots in this country. For me, taking a risk is paying them back for that. But it still scares me. There’s so much judgement inherent in the people who demand that their peers not “sell out.” I want my class at our 5-year-reunion to be doing good things for the world, too. I don’t want to look at people I treasured during our undergraduate years and see them changed, see their intellectual and idealist sparks all dissipated. I don’t want the things that once drove them to apply to such colleges to become casual, liberal ornaments hanging from their mouths at cocktail parties; isn’t it a shame we don’t do better at foreign aid, isn’t the inner city screwed when it comes to education? But I also want to believe that most of us still hold those things that drove us, made us care, made us learn to want, somewhere inside of us, and that no matter what we’re doing — consulting or bumming; writing or banking — we’ll find our way back to them before too long.