In 2006, the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education sparked a national debate about the purpose and promise of a college education, with a focus on jobs. The recession of 2008 added greater urgency to the argument that colleges should do more to prepare students for the workplace.
While some in higher education may have hoped that things would return to normal once we recovered from the recession, today the pressure on colleges to link academic and professional preparation seems only to be growing. John Williams, president of Muhlenberg College, recently told me he was having a hard time understanding how his institution could continue to attract top students without delivering greater value. “I can’t cut costs sufficiently to keep tuition flat,” he said. “What do I do when tuition hits $80,000 a year?”
He believes one way to deliver value is to focus on supporting his graduates’ personal and professional success — whether they go into business, nonprofit work, the clergy, or graduate school, or take some other path. He aims to make his college a leader in that respect, particularly among his liberal-arts peers. A new Muhlenberg initiative to pair parents and alumni with first-year students to provide career mentoring represents one effort in that direction.
Nervousness over the economy and questions about the value of a college degree have contributed to growing expectations that colleges must make career services a priority. This special report on innovation examines some of the career-counseling efforts underway — by colleges, start-ups, and collaborations between the two. See the entire issue here.
Examples from innovative colleges suggest that one key step in improving career prospects is for colleges and employers to collaborate in deeper ways: by jointly developing curricula that prepare students for success in diverse professional fields, by bringing the workplace into the classroom via experiential learning, and by bringing the classroom into the workplace via diverse delivery models, such as degree programs designed to blend online study with short-term residencies and noncredit programs tailored to the needs of particular employers.
Even more important, colleges must work across academic disciplines to design more market-responsive curricula. Take Bentley University, recently recognized by the Princeton Review as the top college for career services. Susan Sandler Brennan, associate vice president for university career services, told me: “Our approach is a holistic one. We are not just linking majors to a career down a vocational pathway, where someone with an accounting degree always pursues a career with a CPA firm. It’s about creating a world of options through the fusion of business and the arts and sciences.”
Similarly, colleges must work across key constituent groups to support students’ professional preparation, as Wellesley College seeks to do. “We want a seamless experience across the ecosystem,” Christine Y. Cruzvergara, associate provost and executive director for career education, told me, “and that encompasses parents, student groups, alumni, faculty, and employers.” For Wellesley, this means assembling mini “advisory boards” for individual students, made up of professors and other potential mentors.
Committing to such efforts requires thinking about higher education and its relationship to the economy in different ways. While the myth of the Ivory Tower may persist, the truth is that colleges have always been embedded within their local ecosystems. But it has never been more crucial for colleges to recognize their roles as drivers of economic and talent development in those ecosystems.
Michael Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, uses the term “economic clusters” to refer to geographic concentrations of interconnected companies and institutions. Colleges can step up their efforts to support work readiness by seeking new ways to collaborate within these clusters. That may mean forming ties with companies that employ their graduates, or supporting local-government initiatives to promote high-demand careers, or partnering with start-up companies that are bringing new career solutions to market faster than most campus career centers could ever dream of doing.
It has never been more crucial for colleges to recognize their roles as drivers of economic and talent development.
Indeed, the past few years have witnessed an explosion of start-ups seeking to supplement, or in some cases supplant, the work of traditional campus-career centers. In Silicon Valley, people are calling this phenomenon the “employment tech” sector. Mentoring platforms like CampusTap enable campus career offices to promote career readiness via a social-media platform that connects students with mentors, promotes job events, and points students toward employment opportunities. “It’s not about getting them a job their freshman year,” said Remy Carpinito, CampusTap’s founder and chief executive, “but about integrating that kind of conversation into things like student clubs early on.”
Another employment-tech company, Fidelis Education, underscores the importance of embedding career preparation across the student life cycle by providing a “learning relationship management” platform that gives students access to mentoring, coaching, and academic support. “The idea,” Gunnar Counselman, Fidelis’s co-founder and chief executive, told me, “is to get institutions thinking in terms of relationships rather than processes. That way you’re not seeing student problems as help-desk tickets to be solved, but as people who need support.”
Such companies can also help colleges see their constituencies in all their complexity. Take alumni: Sometimes treated as though they were little more than contributors to the annual fund or tailgating fans at the big game, alumni in reality may be parents of prospective students (or prospective students themselves), potential mentors to students, recruiters of recent graduates, future research partners, or subject-matter experts whose experience could help inform the design of new courses.
So what happens if colleges do all these things? The short answer is, they behave differently. Like the University of Cincinnati, they might locate student jobs on campus by inviting employers into their academic community. Like the Georgia Institute of Technology, they might collaborate with a corporate partner, such as AT&T, to launch a professionally focused degree program, such as Georgia Tech’s online master of science in computer science. Like Northeastern University, they might collaborate with a labor-market-data company, such as Burning Glass Technologies, to better understand how their online and hybrid degree programs map to the needs of particular employment markets across the country. Like the University of Texas at Austin, they might team up with an academic-analytics company, such as Civitas Learning, to better understand how to improve student retention. Like Stanford University, they might work with a career-solutions platform, such as Handshake, to expose their students to a wider network of internship and job opportunities.
Of course, moving down this path requires making long-term career investments in the face of other pressing needs. Moses Lee, of Keypath Education, another employment-tech company, thinks focusing on career services is a smart investment. “Many universities have near-term challenges related to enrollment and retention that they need to address,” he told me. “Career outcomes are important, too, but that’s a long-tail return on investment because students need to succeed after they’ve graduated. And in the long term, the benefits are there — in terms of alumni engagement, more research dollars, and, ultimately, enrollment performance, as the value proposition becomes stronger.”
If colleges focus only on the short term, he said, “you’re not innovating for the future.”
Peter J. Stokes is a managing director in the higher-education practice at the Huron Consulting Group and a former vice president for global strategy and business development at Northeastern University. He is the author of Higher Education and Employability: New Models for Integrating Study and Work (Harvard Education Press, 2015).
