Big Consulting Is Dead. Long Live Big Consulting!
Management consulting is losing appeal. Prestige remains, but the tradeoffs are harsher, and top grads are looking elsewhere for impact.
Once hailed as the promised land for overachieving grads, consulting used to be the job that made it all feel worth it. The 3 a.m. case comps. The strategic extracurriculars. The obsessive LinkedIn grooming. All of it led to the moment you could say, “I’m joining McKinsey & Company,” and watch your parents’ eyes light up with confused but enthusiastic pride.
Now? It’s more of a prestige-powered hamster wheel where you sprint 80 hours a week for vague praise and maybe a performance bonus if the partners feel generous. The promise used to be: suffer now, cash out later. But “later” keeps getting pushed, and the cash out? It’s not what it used to be.
Applications are thinning, and the hunger in new hires doesn’t look the same. Firms are still searching for whip-smart, type-A masochists. Instead, they’re fielding candidates who ask about "work-life balance" before they’ve even submitted their timesheets.
The system is groaning. But is it broken? More importantly, if it is, do the people running it even want to fix it?
The “Fixes” Are Fake, and Everyone Knows It
Ask a senior partner about how consulting is “changing,” and you’ll get a well-rehearsed pitch. They'll talk about how the firm is embracing flexibility, championing mental health, and harnessing the limitless power of AI to "reimagine" the future of work. It sounds promising. It always does. But like most things in consulting, the promises are beautifully packaged and strategically hollow.
Take “flexibility,” for example. On paper, it means no more late nights and a healthier balance between work and life. In reality, it means you can finish your deck from your kitchen table at 1:30 a.m. instead of the office. That’s progress, apparently. “Protected hours” are preached with sincerity in town halls and trampled with equal sincerity the moment a client needs something “by tomorrow morning.”
“Reduced travel” is another crowd-pleaser. Consultants no longer need to fly out on Mondays. But instead of freedom, you get a permanent Zoom tether. Being “remote” just means you’re now accessible all the time, from anywhere, which is oddly more intrusive than the airport grind ever was.
Then there’s the AI revolution. Firms brag about smarter tools streamlining repetitive tasks. What they don’t say is that consultants are now expected to produce three times the output in half the time, with no change to the demands placed on them. Efficiency gains haven’t reduced the pressure; they’ve simply raised the bar.
The changes look impressive in pitch decks. But behind the curtain, nothing essential has shifted. The hours are still brutal, the expectations are still sky-high, and the burnout is still quietly baked into the business model. The machine is running smoother, but it’s still grinding people down.
Why Would Partners Change the System That Made Them Rich?
Consulting firms love to talk about evolution, inclusion, and progressive leadership, but the truth is simple: no one at the top has any real incentive to change a system that made them wealthy. The entire model runs on the assumption that junior consultants will burn out gracefully in pursuit of the same golden carrot the partners once chased. It's a game of professional hazing.
Partners internalized the grind. They believe that suffering is a rite of passage. Their logic is airtight: “I did the 80-hour weeks, I made the sacrifices, now I get the rewards. If you want what I have, you’ll do the same.” It’s less mentorship, more "tough love from someone who made it and now owns a third home."
Suggest changing that model and you’ll be met with nervous laughter and a quick subject change. Profit-sharing with juniors? Stock options? Salary increases that eat into partner distributions? Not on their watch. These are people who waited over a decade for their turn at the money fountain.
Even the more progressive, millennial-adjacent partners who might say they support a fairer system tend to mysteriously forget those views once they get a taste of the profit pool. Because once you're on the inside, the grind doesn’t look so bad in the rearview mirror. It starts to feel more like character-building.
And that’s the crux of it. The people who could fix consulting are also the ones benefiting the most from keeping it exactly the way it is. So they won’t.
The People Who Want to Join Consulting Are… Not the Right People
There was a time when consulting attracted the top of the top: intellectually sharp, socially polished overachievers who could structure a market sizing question in their sleep and still make it to the gym at 6am. These were the people who lived for “client impact” and secretly loved the smell of Excel macros in the morning.
Now? That pipeline is drying up. The best and brightest grads are being lured elsewhere. Tech companies with stock options, high finance roles with substantial upsides, or startups where “impact” actually means building something. Consulting, in comparison, looks like a high-effort, low-upside purgatory.
The talent still knocking on consulting’s door tends to fall into two camps. First, the hopefuls who still believe consulting is the fast track to greatness, unaware the exit doors are now a little less automatic and a lot more crowded. Second, the ones who didn’t land tech or finance and are hoping consulting still carries the clout it used to. These are not the people firms built their business model on.
Consulting firms are stuck in a bind. They can’t lower the bar, because their entire mystique is built on being “elite.” But they also can’t afford to hire from a pool that’s increasingly made up of people who ask about PTO in the first round and say things like “I value balance.”
So now they’re competing over a shrinking set of candidates who still see the upside in 80-hour weeks, international travel with no actual sightseeing, and the sheer thrill of optimizing a supply chain they will never care about again.
Eventually, something has to shift. Either the firms adapt to a new kind of recruit, or they double down and hope the next wave of high-functioning masochists shows up anyway.
Up-or-Out is Still a Thing, Just… Weirder Now
The up-or-out model has always been one of consulting’s most cherished traditions. It’s the perfect system for manufacturing fear-driven productivity: either rise fast or quietly vanish. The model was brutal but efficient. Promotions were earned, exits were swift, and no one mistook their job for a long-term relationship.
But lately, the whole thing has gotten clumsy. Firms still preach the up-or-out gospel, but in practice, they’ve softened the blow. Why? Because talent isn’t what it used to be. Hiring top-tier consultants has become harder, not easier. The best candidates are no longer flooding in from every Ivy and MBA program with wide-eyed enthusiasm. They're hedging their bets, often viewing consulting as a backup rather than the dream.
So, instead of cutting underperformers outright, firms are dragging things out. Juniors are slowly frozen out, given less client exposure, fewer high-visibility projects, subtly excluded from career conversations. It’s not a firing. It’s more like being left on “read” until you get the message and quietly remove yourself from the team.
The result? The truly sharp, ambitious people burn out and leave quickly. Those who stay? Often the ones content to coast, master internal politics, and just avoid rocking the boat. The talent bar lowers quietly, year by year, while everyone pretends it's still as high as ever.
Of course, the short-term metrics still look fine. Utilization is solid. Billables are up. The PowerPoint engine hums along. But long-term? The risk is clear. You end up with a firm filled with the types of people who survive the system. Not necessarily the ones who should be leading it.
Still, no one's sounding the alarm. Because from the partner perspective, if the spreadsheets are green, what’s the problem?
Let’s not waste time pretending this is a solvable crisis. Consulting doesn’t need saving because, from a business standpoint, it isn’t in crisis at all. The margins are intact. Clients still pay. And there’s always another batch of fresh grads ready to trade their weekends and mental health for a brand name.
Real change would require one of three things:
AI becoming so competent it can run strategy workshops solo (not quite there),
A total collapse in client demand that shreds the business model (slow burn at best)
A new wave of socially conscious partners rising up to burn down the current structure (not happening; those people left for tech years ago).
So firms continue to churn. If the ideal candidates dry up, they’ll simply squeeze more out of the ones who stick around. More work, tighter deadlines, same pay. And if burnout kicks in faster? That’s fine. Someone else will be along shortly.
Consulting isn’t broken. It’s just colder and more efficient than it used to be. Less aspirational, more transactional. Not a dream job, just another step on the résumé staircase. And that's exactly how it's supposed to work
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