Some friends of mine have worked at BCG and similar companies, with very similar opinions of the work. What surprises me is how these consulting firms keep having an image among college seniors that they are a desirable job.
The image building is actually very easy. College kids know very little about the real world, having not lived or worked in it yet. They're insanely impressionable.
All kids know is what people tell them. So McKinsey, BCG, etc. plaster their name all over ivy league campuses and sponsor events telling kids how prestigious and sexy and exclusive their work is. And the kids believe them!
Then the kids get there, and realize the job is basically spending 80 hr weeks to create badly designed powerpoint decks filled with bullshit charts and sell them to know-nothing careerists at dying legacy companies and governments.
The ones who don't become consultants themselves, go on to become future clients. Marketing to college kids is extremely undervalued IMO. Professional services firms have used that marketing playbook for hundreds of years. All the big law firms do it too.
Before the internet killed traditional advertising, Ad Agencies used to do it too and were the "it" career for many decades.
What alternatives to college seniors have? There are not many lucrative jobs available right out of the gate, and most schools do not have Goldman or Google coming to campus to recruit.
