Colleges Say They Prepare Students for a Career, Not Just a First Job. Is That True?

About 60 percent of executives and hiring managers think that most college graduates are prepared to succeed in entry-level positions. But only a third of executives, and a quarter of hiring managers, believe graduates have the skills and knowledge to advance or be promoted. Those findings — among the most striking in a new survey of employers released on Tuesday by the Association of American Colleges & Universities — are open to several interpretations.

On the one hand, it’s probably intuitive that graduates would be better poised for entry-level work than for advancement. No one has a second job until they’ve had a first one. On the other, colleges often argue that they’re preparing students not merely for a first job, but for a lifetime of professional and broader success. That position, in fact, is a key prong in the argument that higher education is worth the price.

But the survey findings appear to be in tension with that argument. How might colleges make sense of it all?

To Nicole Smith, chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the difference in how employers answered those two questions was unsurprising. Advancing from one position to the next, she said, requires learning “firm-specific skills,” something that’s only possible after an employee has developed experience on the job. College graduates aren’t ready for the second job, she said, in the same way that high-school graduates aren’t ready to hold a bachelor’s degree.

As a result, colleges alone can’t prepare students for their second job, said Andy Chan, vice president for innovation and career development at Wake Forest University. Employers, he said, “have some role in that, too.” Yet many employers don’t invest in workers’ professional development they way they used to, Chan said.

But Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, wondered if the findings might point to a problem within higher ed.

After growing up in the Great Recession, and as they confront a gig economy that offers stagnant wages and little security, Roth said, it’s natural for students to focus on what they’ll do immediately after graduation. This is one reason many students decide to major in something they think will lead directly to a job. And colleges, especially those struggling to hit enrollment targets, face plenty of pressure to give students what they want, Roth said, so they offer and talk up such degrees.

The problem, as Roth sees it, is that colleges can end up downplaying the importance of transferable skills, like writing and speaking, that many courses develop. “It may be, as there’s a decline in attention to the ‘power skills’ or ‘soft skills,’” he said, adding that “students are really good at statistics, or dutifully figuring out a particular project, but don’t have the breadth of learning to help them move ahead.”

Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, saw in the survey one of many instances in which employers and colleges are talking past each other. Ask employers if someone’s ready for promotion or advancement, Gardner said, and they’ll very likely answer in terms of whether that person can step into the next position in their hierarchy. From that perspective: “There’s no way in the world,” he said, “anyone’s ready for their second job in college.”

Long-Term Adaptability

Colleges, for their part, consider students’ potential futures quite differently, Gardner said. They’re thinking not about whether graduates move from one position to the next, but how they fare more broadly over time. For many, this will entail confronting disruption, and changing not only employers but careers. Colleges aren’t so much in the business of preparing students for their second jobs as for a sea changes in their industries that might strike decades from now. That is why, Gardner said, “a good institution should make sure students own their learning.” They’ll need to be adaptable for the long haul.

Beth Throne, associate vice president for student and postgraduate development at Franklin & Marshall College, thought that the survey questions reflected the notion that “a career is a trajectory.” That was true for previous generations of college graduates, she said, but for millennials and Generation Z, a career is more of a “buffet.”

Today’s graduates, Throne said, spend their 20s “trying on options to see what fits” — a process that might involve moving to a larger or smaller company, between for-profit and nonprofit employers, or into completely different fields. For many, she added, it makes starting out in an internship or temporary position a good option.

[[relatedpackage align="right” item_limit="3"]]Throne described how this process played out for one 2015 graduate who wanted to work in human-resources recruitment. The young woman started out in recruitment at a financial-services company, but decided she didn’t like the industry, Throne said. She then moved over to doing recruitment in the technology sector. She’s already held six jobs.

Recognizing this pattern has changed the way Franklin & Marshall advises students — and the way it tries to set their parents’ expectations, Throne said. The college’s message? “Your first opportunity is a first opportunity,” Throne said, and that ought to relieve some pressure.

One thing that helps, she added: Parents who belong to Generation X seem more open to the idea of their young-adult children exploring their options than were the baby boomers who came before them.

The current generation of students doesn’t even like the word “career,” Throne said, which to them “implies a lifetime commitment to one path.” For that reason, she said, her office dropped the word from its name back in 2012. The true role of her office, and the college more broadly, Throne said, is to help students be well-rounded and adaptable.

Concerns About Value

Reading survey findings always requires some interpretation, and it’s impossible to know which graduates employers were thinking about as they answered these two questions, said Lynn Pasquerella, president of AAC&U. Perhaps they were thinking of graduates who didn’t have a broad base in the liberal arts, or who hadn’t interned during college. Still, “everybody should be” ready for an entry-level job upon college graduation, Pasquerella said, and employers clearly don’t believe this to be the case.

The association was glad to see that elsewhere in the survey, employers expressed more confidence in colleges than has the general public in recent polling. Sixty-three percent of both executives and hiring managers had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed, compared with the 45 percent of adults who responded similarly in a Gallup poll this year.

Still, Pasquerella said, “that is not a ringing endorsement.” It’s critical, she said, for colleges to show they’re taking the public’s concern about their value seriously, and giving graduates “the capacity to deal with a future that none of us can fully predict.”

Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.