Do Your Academic Programs Actually Develop ‘Employability’? There’s an Assessment for That

Is a glut of unfilled jobs — as many as seven million, depending on how you calculate — the result of a “skills gap”? The term is everywhere, but all the talk doesn’t help students who enroll in college and aspire to rewarding careers, employees who want more education to get ahead, or institutions trying to keep up with the future of work. As hiring becomes more skills-based and alternative credentials gain traction, how can the degree remain a reliable signal on the labor market?

The Chronicle recently released a special report, “Career-Ready Education: Beyond the Skills Gap, Tools and Tactics for an Evolving Economy,” drawing on more than 100 interviews with educators, employers, policy makers, and students. We asked them how to add relevance to the curriculum and strengthen connections between higher education and industry without dismantling educational models or compromising principles. In the report, we explore several approaches to prepare students to start or advance their careers.

Lots of colleges claim that their academic programs prepare students for employment. A new organization known as the QA Commons says: Prove it.

The idea is to evaluate whether individual courses of study develop the skills that employers increasingly say they want, the so-called soft skills like communication, adaptability, and problem solving.

“We don’t think they’re ‘soft’ anymore. We think they’re essential,” says Ralph A. Wolff, who founded the group after more than three decades in accreditation (he led the higher-ed arm of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges).

QA Commons spent two years developing and testing a set of “essential employability qualities” and recently began offering to certify programs that meet its standards. Among the first to sign up is the state of Kentucky, which has put forward 20 programs from six institutions, including two-year colleges and the flagship university.

The group’s assessment focuses on five factors, examining whether a given program:

• develops skills in a work-based context, such as through a capstone project.
• coordinates its activities with the institution’s career services.
• creates meaningful relationships with employers.
• engages with students to make sure they feel they are being prepared well.
• reports how its graduates fare in the labor market.

The organization, backed by more than $3 million in grants from the Lumina Foundation, doesn’t dictate exactly how programs should meet those criteria. But it suggests that skills like technical agility or comfort with other cultures are best taught over time, with continued attention to students’ experiences inside and outside the classroom.

Guttman Community College, the newest institution of the City University of New York, was one of 27 colleges to undergo the assessment during the group’s experimental phase. For a college that prides itself on career development, the process was “a way to see if we were true to our word,” says Niesha Ziehmke, Guttman’s associate dean for academic programs.

The assessment — of programs in business, IT, and human services — turned up a few areas where certain skills weren’t as embedded in the curriculum as they could be. The college has since added a new business course that revolves around students’ internships and jobs and replaced an IT course with one offered by a nonprofit organization called Per Scholas, which has close ties to industry and a hands-on space in the Bronx. Students who successfully complete that course earn not only academic credit, but a credential in computer-network management.

Whether or not Guttman’s programs get certified by the QA Commons, Ziehmke has found the process worthwhile, and now wants to put other programs through it, too. “We do not do this enough in liberal arts,” she says.

Wolff, meanwhile, hopes the approach will gain traction and perhaps even be adopted by traditional accreditors. “We’re not trying to vocationalize the whole higher-ed world,” he says, but college leaders need to pay more attention to developing students’ prospects.

“What we’d like to do,” Wolff says, “is legitimate that preparation for the workplace is part of the academic enterprise.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.