Franklin & Marshall College kept hearing the same thing from parents and trustees. Could the college do something more to prepare students for their careers?
Students, meanwhile, weren’t even taking advantage of the help Franklin & Marshall already offered. Only about 20 percent of them used the college’s career services, and those who did were usually juniors and seniors.
Career services was due for an overhaul.
A competitive job market, rising student-loan debt, and questions about the value of a degree have pressured colleges to prove that they are a good investment. These forces, coupled with a growing body of research on the value of experiential learning, have led colleges to rethink how they prepare students for careers, says Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “I’ve noticed more light bulbs going off,” especially at liberal-arts-focused colleges, says Ms. Humphreys, who has done consulting work on college-career offices.
Colleges are realizing that the old model—arguing that an education is about more than getting a job, and expecting the career center to help students figure out the job part right before they graduate—is no longer enough. Instead, colleges must equip students with both a good education and the ability to adapt it to the real world.
Each college that has overhauled career services has done so in its own way. Still, some common elements have emerged: Colleges are taking a more developmental approach to career preparation. They are helping students over a longer time span, in some cases starting before students begin their first class and continuing well past graduation. And they’re making career preparation an institutional priority, rather than the work of just one office.
The Office of Student and Post-Graduate Development that Franklin & Marshall opened last year reflects these trends. The college has taken a broader view of preparing students, says Beth Throne, who was hired to remake the career program. “We changed the structure, the scope, and the services,” she says.
The college has moved from the old-fashioned “transactional” model—which focused on helping students complete specific tasks, like writing a résumé—to a developmental model that works with students over time and includes teaching life skills, professional development, conflict resolution, financial literacy, and public speaking, says Ms. Throne, an associate vice president at Franklin & Marshall.
Those changes have made a difference, says Ian Irlander, president of the college’s senior class. “In general, students’ attitude toward the office has improved significantly,” he says.
The new model is more flexible, Mr. Irlander says, allowing students to seek guidance based on their own timetables rather than one created by the college. When Mr. Irlander landed a prestigious but unpaid internship in Washington, his career adviser offered suggestions on finding housing and financial support. Those were “important things that made a huge difference in my summer,” he says, but they wouldn’t traditionally fall under the purview of a career center.
The new office is reaching out to students as soon as they arrive on the campus. Ms. Throne was excited that students now have to find it as part of a scavenger hunt during orientation. The office doesn’t stop helping students when they graduate, either: All its services are available to alumni, and it offers workshops, Webinars, and one-on-one advising geared especially to them.
The effort to prepare students for life after college extends past her office, Ms. Throne says. For liberal-arts colleges in particular, she says, it’s crucial for staff to work collaboratively with faculty. One way Franklin & Marshall has tried to forge connections is through a “declaration dinner” held in honor of students who’ve just chosen a major. At the dinner, students sit with faculty and alumni from the same program. That allows relationships to form among members of all three groups.
Andy Chan has been a prominent spokesman for the new approach to career development since he was hired by Wake Forest University to overhaul its program in 2009.
Last spring, Wake Forest hosted a conference about rethinking liberal-arts careers in the 21st century. Importantly, Mr. Chan says, the conference drew attendees who were not career-center staff: faculty members, presidents, provosts, and employers.
Peter K. Powers, dean of the School of the Humanities at Messiah College, was one of those attendees. His involvement shows that sometimes all it takes for career services to move beyond the career center is one college leader taking an interest.
Mr. Powers began his current job in 2008. At the time, he says, concerns about the value of college were hitting up against longstanding questions about what, exactly, humanities degrees prepare students to do. As he looked through students’ evaluations of their advisers and spoke with alumni, it became clear to Mr. Powers that “we were subpar, as far as I was concerned, in the advising students were getting for career preparation.”
Faculty members, Mr. Powers believed, had a responsibility to help students think through what they might do with their majors. So he worked with the college’s career-development center to come up with major-specific plans that professors could use to help their advisees plan for graduate school or jobs.
More controversially, Mr. Powers decided that career preparation ought to be woven into the curriculum. Each department eventually would come up with its own approach. But all departments had to include certain features: a component on career guidance in a required class that all majors would take in their first two years, and a project in the required senior seminar that would help students translate their work to their professional lives.
Students typically are already invested in their classes and respect their professors, Mr. Chan says. The participation of faculty leaders like Mr. Powers in career development is a big deal, he says, “because they can actually bring it into the classroom.”
Mr. Chan describes the new approach to career development as a “movement"—one he has seen gain steam. “This is something everyone is trying to figure out and do it well,” he says, “and I think we’ll see lots of innovation in the years ahead.”
Certainly other colleges have joined Wake Forest in making career development a high priority. In its new strategic plan, Carleton College, for instance, listed as one of its priorities this goal: “Prepare students more robustly for fulfilling post-graduation lives and careers.” Carleton believes in its approach to a liberal-arts education, says Steven G. Poskanzer, its president. Still, he says, “we are not keeping faith with students and families if they graduate from Carleton and then spend the next three or four years floundering.”
To prevent that from happening, the college is changing its advising program, has started a new Web site to provide information on popular career fields like health and wellness and arts and communication, and is doing more to tie academics and outside activities together.
At Clark University, linking the learning that takes place inside and outside the classroom has become the institutional brand. In 2009, Clark started Liberal Education and Effective Practice, or LEEP, a new educational model meant to integrate “the wealth of intellectual and academic resources already present at the university with the skills and capacities that are becoming increasingly essential in the 21st century.”
While many career-development programs are moving in similar directions, each college’s approach is influenced by its mission and what it has to work with. Davidson College, for instance, saw a valuable but untapped resource in its level of alumni engagement.
Some 60 percent of alumni donate money to Davidson each year, says Nathan J. Elton, director of the center for career development. But no one had really approached those engaged alumni about helping current students become successful graduates.
So the office created the Davidson Internship Challenge, asking alumni to “raise” internships for current students.
Some of the internships were created especially for Davidson students, while in other cases alumni said they would advocate for the students to be selected in an application process. In the program’s second year, alumni offered 141 internships, and 97 were ultimately filled by Davidson students. Most of those internships, Mr. Elton points out, did not overlap with ones posted by employers in the college’s existing system.
Tapping alumni made particular sense at Davidson for another reason, Mr. Elton says. Many of Davidson’s students will fan out to big cities after they graduate. Alumni connections in locations like New York, San Francisco, and Washington can allow Davidson to extend its reach.
“You need people on the ground that can be your representative,” Mr. Elton says.
St. John’s University, in New York, redesigned its career-development offerings with an eye to the particular needs of its student body. Some 40 percent of its degree-seeking students receive federal Pell Grants, and about a quarter of them are among the first generation in their family to attend college.
Low-income and first-generation students may not have many professional role models when they arrive on the campus, says Denise C. Hopkins, executive director of university career services, “so we take our obligation to them very seriously.”
To that end, the university’s career center and its freshman center, which helps students acclimate to college life, cross-train their staffs. The career center places staff within each of St. John’s schools and colleges.
Knowing that students learn from their peers, St. John’s incorporated key points about career development into the training of student leaders, such as members of the student government. That way, student leaders could have a “multiplier effect” on others through formal and informal conversations, Ms. Hopkins says.
The hope, Ms. Hopkins says, is to “infuse career development into the whole college experience.”
Whatever their specific approach, that’s a goal shared by many colleges.
