The email had a businesslike tone. From a “client recruitment director”, it was “reaching out” to offer The Economist services. In the next sentence, the word “leverage” was used as a verb, relating to a “perspective”. It concluded with a question: “Would you be able to hop on a 15-minute call”? Yet it stood out from the guff that clutters journalists’ inboxes for one reason: it came not from an established firm but from an undergraduate economics student at Yale University. The perspective to be “leveraged” was that of “Gen z”, a marketing term for people now aged from roughly 11 to 26. The offer was made on behalf of the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group, a student club with around 60 members.
tgraduate students have long provided paid services to corporate clients. But over the past decade or so, undergraduate “consulting clubs” have proliferated. The idea is to band together and offer to do work for firms for a fraction of the cost of hiring regular consultants, and in the process learn a lot about business. Like real consultants, they pitch for clients, cold-calling or emailing. Some student clubs have a charitable bent: 180dc, a network of clubs founded in 2007 that has spread to scores of universities around the world, targets “social-impact organisations”. Others are more mercantile: Milan Singh, the sender of the Yale email, says the group he belongs to has also worked with several large companies, doing jobs like market research for fees