“My goal in ILR is to study the working class,” said Eva Egeghy ’26, an industrial and labor relations major. “I want to understand why we have low wage jobs that seem impossible to get out from. I want to understand why people on lower incomes are facing challenges or barriers and inequalities.”
However, during her first year as an ILR student, Egeghy was disappointed by the curriculum’s lack of solidarity to this cause.
“My freshman year, the classes were organizational behavior, psychology of work — classes that were just very focused on how organizations can extract the most out of their labor, which I found totally offensive.”
But other ILR students disagree, asserting its curriculum is too labor-focused.
“I was interested in all the concentrations that ILR had advertised — things like politics, economics [and] business law,” Abby Bates ’26 said. “But I really just didn’t understand how exclusive it would be to labor. I was fine with taking a labor class or two, but I didn’t realize that it would be labor law, labor policy, labor econ — ‘labor’ in front of all of the disciplines I was interested in.”
Bates and Egeghy’s contradictory critiques of ILR represents the two polar extremes at either end of the spectrum of interests within the school’s student body.
“I would say the divide is between those who consider it a business school and those who want it to be a labor school,” Bates said.
In terms of post graduate plans, undergraduate students who pursue business careers dominate: according to the Cornell Outcomes Dashboard, 52 percent of students in the 2022 and 2021 graduating classes are employed in financial services or business consulting and professional practice industries, while only two percent went into labor-related industries such as union organizing.
This misalignment between ILR’s mission and the career fields its graduates pursue points to a central tension within the school: while ILR was largely founded to improve working lives, student interest has shifted away from labor and toward business-oriented fields.
Egeghy explained that she feels that the large portion of business-oriented students in the school represents a shift away from part of the founding mission of ILR to “improve the lives of workers.”
“It’s a very ‘organizational behavior’ lens, what we do here. I came here expecting more of a focus on labor,” Egeghy said.
Duncan Buckerfield ’26 also pointed out that it can be challenging to enroll in the elective labor-focused classes.
“A lot of the labor courses tend to be really small courses with low enrollment caps. A lot of the classes I was hoping to enroll in that are more labor-centric were capped at like 25 or 50 people,” Buckerfield said. “For the students more interested in management or business, I think there are a lot of resources through Dyson or the Hotel School that may be available to them.”
The confusion surrounding what the identity of ILR truly is raises questions about the way ILR advertises itself to prospective students and how the curriculum upholds those principles. Some students feel as though ILR admissions pitches the school as not only being about labor, but a swath of broader disciplines, including business and economics.
“Because no one who is applying actually knows what industrial and labor relations is, they advertise it as these six subjects that are tangential to it, like politics, economics, business law, etc.,” Bates said. “I think for what they advertised, they didn’t advertise labor enough. I didn’t really know what it means to study labor economics versus regular economics, but I certainly didn’t think I would be spending two years learning about unions.”
Egeghy agreed that ILR’s may present itself to prospective applicants as a potential pre-business path to attract more interest in the school. But by doing this, ILR sets itself up to face student dissatisfaction, both from labor-oriented and business-oriented students.
“Prospective students want to see more paths in business, finance and economics, so I think there’s a conscious push for ILR to brand itself as more of a business school that is informed by social science,” Egeghy said. “But by trying to appeal to both of these groups — one very much larger than the other — ILR is losing both of them.”
Students and faculty also indicated how the realities of the job market contribute to the large number of students pursuing non-labor related jobs post-graduation. Even if students are interested in labor, the decision to pursue a labor- or union-related career may not be the most intuitive option.
Prof. Galli Racabi, ILR, also highlighted that the deficit of students going into labor or union jobs may be a function of the market.
“Career outcomes are also market dependent. The market for labor organizers has declined significantly in the last four decades,” Racabi said. “There’s also a trend with public service, NGO and labor side students to do something else after they graduate like go into business for a couple of years and go into public service.”
Jenna Chiarella ’24, a senior in ILR who will work in finance next year, discussed her current post-grad plans.
“I never really intended to go into consulting and finance,” Chiarella said. “I mostly joined ILR because I’m passionate about social justice, and I still intend to pursue that maybe after a few years working or as a supplement to my job.”
Chiarella also pointed to the financial factor that may incentivize students to go into finance or consulting post-graduation.
“ILR pushes law school so much, but you have to pay for law school somehow, and perhaps that’s why a lot of students are going into finance and consulting,” Chiarella said. “I’m really curious what percentage of kids going into finance and consulting are trying to pay for law school.”
Racabi, however, said that labor-side and management-side perspectives can learn from each other — that perhaps the tension that characterizes the ‘divide’ in ILR is actually what makes the educational experience unique, enriching and even professionally advantageous.
“I think the idea of ILR is not just a school for the labor movement,” Racabi said. “The founding idea of ILR is to create a space where labor relations can be taught from multiple perspectives. I think the relevant perspectives are labor, management and policymakers.”
In his class, Racabi asks students to take on the role of both management and labor to expose students to the opposing viewpoints in the labor-management relationship.
“They get to see the world from different perspectives,” Racabi said. “And I think that’s beneficial — for the more management oriented students to see how workers and employees view the situation, and for the more labor side to try to represent management.”
Racabi also highlighted that the idea of a school like ILR, one which seeks to bring together viewpoints that represent opposing interests, is uncommon.
“This notion that ILR tries to bring this kind of tripartite perspective — management, labor and the state — is unusual in how people are raised and function in the workplace in the US. It’s not how we do things,” Racabi said. “Labor doesn’t sit around with management to talk about their shared ideas and ideals outside of ILR.”
Some students echoed Racabi’s sentiment and said they appreciated that ILR exposed them to both the labor and management side of the discipline.
“I think that ILR is a balance of both of these interests — it is not meant to be a business program, but it is also not meant to be a pro-union program. I think that this can sometimes get lost in the rhetoric,” Buckerfield said. “I think that a large majority of ILR students really enjoy the practical career preparation of getting both perspectives, and this ‘divide’ is not a flaw but rather a feature of the school.”
Nonetheless, Racabi said that ILR may be working to create more options for students to pursue disciplines with ILR they are most interested in.
“I think there’s some experimentation being done with the faculty playing around by creating a course structure that is more streamlines aimed for HR, or more streamlines for HR,” Racabi said. “That might help students and I think it tries to respond to students who are feeling that they can find labor-oriented courses or courses that they are more interested in.”
While students on either end of the labor-management spectrum have discontent that the school isn’t enough of what they expected it to be, other students who identify themselves as being more in the “middle” express appreciation for the well-rounded education that ILR provides.
“I wouldn’t say that I fit squarely into either end of the binary. And I think that’s how a decent number of students feel,” Buckerfield said. “There is definitely a divide because I will say there are a decent number of students on each end of this continuum — and those students may not be getting the support that maybe the students in the middle are.”
Upon reflection, Buckerfield feels that he has found the kind of educational experience he sought.
“I want to study work in all its facets, so looking at work from both a management perspective and from a worker perspective,” Buckerfield said. “I think ILR has lived up to that.”