In 1916, the great liberal philosopher John Dewey called on schools and colleges to create a more just and decent world. “The present industrial constitution of society is, like every society which has ever existed, full of inequities,” Dewey wrote. “It is the aim of progressive education to take part in correcting unfair privilege and unfair deprivation, not to perpetuate them.”

A century later, our elite universities seem to be fighting the good fight that Dewey envisioned. You can’t graduate from a fancy school these days without learning about human inequality and injustice. Multicultural and global course requirements expose students to the evils of poverty, environmental degradation, gender violence and systematic racism. Campus organizations reinforce these messages by staging protests and coordinating volunteer efforts for underserved communities.

But when college comes to an end, our students sell their souls to investment banks and consulting firms. We’ve created a generation of young people who talk the talk of Marx and Foucault, then walk the walk of management and finance.

In a 2014, nearly a third of graduating seniors at Harvard University took jobs at consulting companies like McKinsey or in Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. Even more remarkably, nearly three-quarters of Harvard seniors submit resumes to finance and consulting employers.

And at my own institution, the University of Pennsylvania, 43 percent of 2016 graduates took a job in one of those two industries. That would be OK, if they actually wanted to work for McKinsey, Goldman and friends. But often they don’t, and they do it anyway.

That’s the depressing takeaway of a 2014 study by UC San Diego sociologist Amy Binder and two of her graduate students, who interviewed 60 undergraduates and recent alumni at Harvard and Stanford universities. Most of these people didn’t come to college imagining careers in finance or consulting. Nor did they typically exude excitement about the prospects of working there.

Instead, they saw this choice as the safest one. The finance and consulting firms have a huge footprint at our elite schools, especially at job fairs and career-services offices. The firms are very competitive, obviously, and they pay extremely well. Everyone else seems to be applying to them. And if you don’t, well, you might forsake something big.

That’s what Millennials call FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. You see your peers wearing snazzy clothes, getting wined and dined, and eventually landing a high-salaried job. Like most young people, you’re not sure what you want to do. So why not do this, at least for a little while?

I can think of many good answers. You might not enjoy these jobs, which often require long hours but little intellectual challenge. You wrote a senior thesis decrying inequality, but you’re entering industries that frequently widen it. You’ll become a more interesting person if you go against the grain. And so on.

But our students don’t hear these challenges nearly enough. Many of our career-services operations have essentially become arms of the finance and consulting firms, which pay big bucks to get the best tables at job fairs and the clearest access to seniors’ in-boxes. Everything the students see echoes the same basic theme: For the young whippersnapper on the make, it’s banking (or consulting) or bust.

What about in their classrooms? Most elite-college faculty lean left, of course, so they’re not happy to see their students write papers decrying global injustice and then trundle off to finance and consulting gigs. But most of us don’t make a big fuss over it; instead, we sigh and look away.

The students sense our displeasure, of course. When one of Binder’s Harvard interviewees told a favored professor that he had taken a job at McKinsey, the professor’s body language suddenly changed. “He was sort of like, ‘Oh, there goes another one,’” the student reported. Nothing more was said. It’s like an awkward junior high-school dance, where neither partner likes the band but they can’t admit it.

It’s time to stop the dance, and also the pretense. We’re grown-ups, and so are our students. So we owe it to them — and to ourselves — to press them on their decisions.

When a student tells me she is applying for a consulting or finance job, I always ask why. If she’s excited about the position, and if she believes it will help her flourish and grow, I congratulate her on her choice and wish her all the best.

But if she isn’t psyched for it — and many students aren’t — I don’t go silent. Gently, but pointedly, I ask them what they really want to do with their lives. Then comes the confession, and often the tears. They want to write books, or make movies; they want to teach art or music; they want to join the Peace Corps or the State Department.

But they can’t, or so they say. They need the money and security of a high-paying job, and they want the prestige and status of a fancy title. And with everyone else going for the same prize, it’s just too scary to strike out on your own.

I remind them that every figure we admire in human history did exactly that. I tell them that they are students at one of the world’s greatest universities, so they have more choices than almost anybody else on the planet. And then I tell them that life is just too damned short to do jobs that really, really suck.

Nobody — or almost nobody — comes to college wanting to work for McKinsey. And most of us didn’t set out to become professors so we could groom the next set of business consultants, either. If we do our own jobs, our students will reconsider theirs. At least I hope so.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford University Press, 2016).