The difficult job market for young graduates has spawned a mini-industry of its own.
Young people seeking an edge who have the financial wherewithal increasingly are turning to career “boot camp” companies like General Assembly, FullBridge, and others, paying as much as $11,500 for short courses in computer coding, business basics, or immersion classes on “soft skills” of the workplace.
In a few cases, colleges themselves are footing the bill. Universities are getting into the act, too, offering programs in the mode of Dartmouth College’s 16-year-old Tuck Business Bridge Program. Georgetown University is starting one this summer to teach “the glossary of business” to liberal-arts majors.
Now a new company called Koru—co-founded by Josh Jarrett, who used to head higher-education-innovation programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—is stepping up its profile. The Seattle-based venture announced on Thursday that 13 selective private colleges had signed on as “partner institutions,” including Bates, Denison, and Whitman Colleges and Brown University.
While only a few of the partner colleges have committed to spending their own money to send students through Koru’s four-week, $2,750 course, Mr. Jarrett said all had agreed to “help shape the program so it’s a real complement to a liberal-arts education.”
Several of the new boot-camp programs have the same approach—intensive classes on a set of skills—but they differ some in their focus.
General Assembly, which in just three years has grown to have campuses in 10 cities (including New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and London), is heavy on courses in web design and data analytics.
FullBridge’s coach-led online programs for college students and recent graduates stress skills like “disagreeing effectively” on the job.
Koru’s program features coaching from seasoned professionals plus opportunities for students to spend a few weeks with executives at a company working on a real problem.
Several of the half-dozen business-focused bridge programs run by universities feature involvement by their full-time M.B.A. faculty members and offer hands-on exposure to real issues. Students at Vanderbilt University’s Summer Business Institute, for example, worked recently with the Nashville-based blues musician Keb’ Mo’ to help him expand his visibility on social media and new markets.
‘Goal Posts Are Moving’
In a way, the emergence of the ventures is logical. Studies show that 44 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed, yet millions of jobs are going unfilled because companies say they cannot find candidates with the right skills.
Still, the very notion that, to land a job, students who have just spent thousands of dollars (or perhaps hundreds of thousands) for college need to spend even more to pick up key skills could be seen as an indictment of the value of college, and in particular of liberal-arts colleges.
But Mr. Jarrett said “beating up on colleges” misses the point. Many colleges have been beefing up their career services, but when it comes to getting a job, “the goal posts are moving.” The average tenure in a first job for a typical twentysomething is now about 18 months, he said, and that has made employers more reluctant to invest in employee training for entry-level jobs. It also has made them less willing to take a chance on a young hire.
He and Koru’s co-founder, Kristen Hamilton, a former chief operating officer at World Learning, said that’s one reason they are involving companies so directly in their business, to “de-risk” the hiring decisions. It gives the companies “a different way to find talent than trying to filter through hundreds of résumés that effectively look the same,” he said.
Koru says it aims to work with growth-oriented and creative companies like its current collaborators REI and Zulily. Companies that participate with Koru agree to pay it a finder’s fee whenever they hire one of its students.
Jake Schwartz, a co-founder of General Assembly, which offers courses that run from one day to 12 weeks, said its offerings do not typically involve the same skills that most students learn as undergraduates.
“If anything, what we’re trying to disrupt is not undergraduate education,” said Mr. Schwartz, but “an expensive graduate-school education.” More than 6,000 students have taken its long-form courses.
General Assembly’s courses cover topics like data analysis and developing tools for mobile devices. “You almost could call it ‘the last mile,’” he said. Like a college—and like Dartmouth’s Tuck bridge program, Vanderbilt’s summer institute, and other career-bridge programs—General Assembly also promotes the networking value of its alumni community.
Not the First Time
Mr. Schwartz said the emergence of companies like Koru and General Assembly reflects a change in how society thinks about education, with “college as the end point.”
If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be the first time. Robert G. Hansen, faculty director of the Tuck bridge program, said he had been told by a historian who specializes in the Gilded Age that when new technologies like the railroad and the telegraph were taking hold, in the late 1800s, colleges of the era were under fire for failing to turn out graduates with skills suitable for the times. It’s no coincidence, he said, that the Tuck School of Business was founded in 1900.
Echoes of that frustration can be heard in career-planning offices today. “Employers will say they value the skills liberal-arts graduates bring to the table,” said Amy Murphy, director of career planning at the College of the Holy Cross. “Then, in the same breath, they say they will only hire people with ‘brand experience.’”
For years, Holy Cross offered a homegrown four-week summer program that brought together about 25 students and 30 alumni for an immersion class on business basics. This year, in an effort to reach more students, the professor in charge wants to convert it to a shorter program from FullBridge. It wouldn’t be the same: FullBridge uses cadres of coaches to teach its online curriculum. But it could be offered more often to more people.
And whether this is new or another phase, college leaders say that doesn’t let them off the hook. With the hardships graduates face in getting started in their careers, “the burden has been raised onto colleges like Denison,” said its president, Adam Weinberg, “It’s our responsibility to make sure that they hit those on ramps.”
He said Denison would encourage its students to consider Koru and, for those in need, would use some of its own money to aid them with the cost.
Clayton Spencer, president of Bates, said it too would probably provide some money to help interested students attend Koru. The money will come from a campuswide “Purposeful Work” initiative.
Until recently, she said, with “natural forces and a growing economy, liberal-arts colleges didn’t need to be that intentional about it.” And while many selective liberal-arts colleges may already offer students opportunities for career networking through alumni and parents, Ms. Spencer said those opportunities aren’t as common as they might seem. Making programs like Koru available for “students without strong parental networks,” she said, is a really important part of Bates’s “equity mission.”
‘Finishing School’?
Patricia Jackson, a former vice president for development at Smith College who was recently hired by FullBridge to develop its college relationships and build up its scholarship programs, said the company was acutely aware of those equity issues, and the broader image problem for companies like hers. She’s still smarting, she said, from the time a career-center director she knows told her he wanted proof that the company wasn’t just “a finishing school for full-pay kids.”
FullBridge charges as much as $6,250 for its four-week program, but when colleges contract for the services, they pay a lower price—kind of like buying wholesale—and then can charge the sticker price to students. Some colleges use the differential to provide scholarships, she said, and FullBridge itself is in the process of creating a foundation that would eventually offer scholarships to students at Koru, FullBridge, Tuck, and a number of other career-bridge programs.
Koru says it will offer scholarships, too.
The Tuck and Vanderbilt programs provide limited financial aid, but some of the others, like the new one at Georgetown, don’t offer any.
Louis Soares, vice president for policy research and analysis at the American Council on Education, said it’s worth watching how the new ventures evolve. “Right now these seem a bit boutique-y to me,” he said, given the relatively few students involved. But over time, he said, if it appears that the organizations become a more vital way for young people to make the transition from college to work, policy makers might need to pay more attention to ensure that the programs do not become another way of dividing education haves from have-nots.
Meanwhile, the companies are making headway, and not just at selective colleges. After a test run last year with FullBridge, the Colorado Community College System, which enrolls tens of thousands of students, has decided to offer the company’s three-week program for 30 of its students this year. The system will pick up the $63,000 tab.
Corrections (2/20/2014, 12:24 p.m.): This article originally misstated the title of the American Council on Education’s Louis Soares. He is vice president for policy research and analysis, not director of policy research and analysis. The article has been updated to reflect this correction. The article also inconsistently spelled the name of one of Koru’s partner institutions. It is Denison College.
