How Colleges Help Students Find Purpose in Their Work

In a conference room overlooking Alumni Walk, Peter Bysshe picks up a marker, faces a whiteboard, and quickly sketches a grid — 10 boxes across, 10 down. “Now,” he instructs the students seated around the center table, “give me words.”

“Bootmobile,” one student calls out, and Bysshe fills in a box. “Gore-Tex leak,” offers another, followed by “Change in return policy,” “class action,” and “Linda Bean.”

After five minutes of free associating, the students have a chart with 100 words that capture their impressions of L.L. Bean, one of several businesses they’ve visited this term as part of an intensive, five-week class that is teaching them how to build, manage, and shift a company’s image. From here, they’ll look for patterns in the words, hoping to discern how L.L. Bean, one of the world’s most beloved outdoor retailers, cultivates its customers.

An hour later, a dozen students in another classroom listen to Timothy Kelleher and Sean Cahill describe how they built the nation’s largest “organically grown” Planet Fitness franchise with the help of private funds. Afterward, the students ask questions about the company’s future: What will you do when the current private-equity holder sells? Any plans for inorganic growth (i.e., acquisitions)?

Passion and Profession

Whether behind a desk or on a farm, students in purposeful-work programs explore connections between their intellectual and vocational goals.

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Those could be scenes from any business school, but this is Bates, a liberal-arts college, and the men presenting on this Friday in June aren’t professors but alumni. “Brand Culture Building” and “Private Equity” are “practitioner-taught courses,” and they’re meant to be more practical and applied than the typical liberal-arts fare, giving students a window into potential careers, skills that would serve them in those careers, and connections to alumni who might help them land a job.

The classes are part of a push by Bates and other liberal-arts colleges to clarify the connections between classroom and career, and to prepare students for lives of meaningful work. Their efforts have taken several forms, but they have common goals: to increase graduates’ confidence that they can succeed in an increasingly technical work force, and to dispel parents’ and policy makers’ doubts about the returns on an expensive liberal-arts degree.

“We need to demonstrate in a more compelling way to the skeptics that we are in fact teaching students 21st-century skills,” says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges & Universities, which promotes a liberal education.

In a 2017 survey by Strada and Gallup, slightly more than a third of students attending four-year colleges said they would graduate with the skills and knowledge to be successful in the job market and in the workplace. Only about half believed their major would lead to a good job.

At Bates, the “purposeful work” umbrella includes five practitioner-taught courses and more than 75 “infused” classes, where faculty members apply classroom lessons to real-world problems. There’s an internship program, with subsidies for students in unpaid or low-paid posts, and a popular short class called “Life Architecture,” for juniors and seniors “who feel relatively undecided about their next steps after college.”

Similar programs are being tried at liberal-arts colleges nationwide amid a “movement to be more overt about the career relevance of undergraduate study in the liberal arts,” says Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges.

What sets Bates apart from many of its peers is how its “purposeful work” initiative blends the philosophical and the pragmatic, offering students both concrete skills and an overarching theory of work: namely, that it ought to have both personal meaning and societal relevance.

Students in the “Life Architecture” course not only learn how to find mentors and network effectively; they also contemplate who they are and what brings them happiness. Interns get hands-on experiences, but they are also required to reflect on those experiences, in writing.

It’s difficult to say if the effort is leading more students to find purposeful work. Bates, like many top-tier liberal-arts colleges, had an impressive job-placement rate before the initiative began, in 2014, and hasn’t asked its alumni whether their work has meaning.

Still, a biennial survey of seniors has found that graduating students report feeling more confident than those before the initiative started in their abilities to identify appropriate employers and positions, present their experiences and skills effectively, network, and plan their own careers.

Equally important, the program has helped Bates answer what Allen Delong, senior associate dean for purposeful work, calls the "$68,000 question” that parents pose: Will their kids get a job when they graduate? He says that when he talks to parents on admitted-students’ day, they often mention the initiative as something they hadn’t seen at other colleges.

Defining ‘Purpose’

The notion that liberal-arts colleges ought to prepare students for lives of purpose isn’t new. Proponents of the colleges would argue that it cuts to the core of their mission.

But until recently, many college leaders assumed that if they started with smart students and gave them a well-rounded education, everything would fall into place, says Mark Peltz, dean for careers, life, and service at Grinnell College. Career exploration “was an afterthought — it wasn’t an institutional priority.”

Meanwhile, says Clayton Spencer, Bates’s president, at many liberal-arts colleges “there was an institutional ambivalence about having a strong focus on preparing students for employment.”

“Colleges,” she says, “wanted to make sure that the college experience was viewed not only as a way to get a job but a value on its own.”

That mind-set still exists, but it’s become harder to defend since the 2008 recession, when widespread job losses led more Americans to approach education as a means to an end. By the time Spencer arrived at Bates, in 2012, “there was a lot of talk about the increasing irrelevance of the liberal arts.”

Spencer believes “to the tips of my toes” that the liberal arts are “the most powerful and adaptable form of education ever invented.” She was worried, however, that that message wasn’t getting through to the public and that liberal-arts colleges weren’t doing enough to show students how the skills they were learning in the classroom would apply in the work force. She created the purposeful-work initiative to allay both concerns.

“I wanted to make sure,” she says, “that kids who wanted to major in English or philosophy would get the reflective skills and the confidence that they could take these true interests” and find work.

For Caroline Reynolds, who graduated this past spring, the initiative did just that. A psychology major with an English minor, Reynolds says she used to feel “insecure about how my degree was not cut and dried.”

“People were always asking, ‘Why didn’t you major in economics?’” she says.

Hearing from alumni with humanities degrees who had succeeded in a wide variety of careers was a “big reassurance,” giving her faith that she’ll find her way.

“I really liked having people come in and reiterate that your career path doesn’t have to be linear,” she says. Now, “as I go into interviews, I feel less wary of saying, ‘I was a psych major,’ and more proud.”

Reynolds is still figuring out a long-term plan, but for the next year she’ll be in Stockholm, working for the study-abroad program that she participated in junior year.

But getting students to be comfortable with their choices is only part of what Bates hopes to achieve. By exposing its students to potential careers, and letting them try them out while they’re still in college, Bates hopes to smooth the “gritty paths” that the business writer George Anders says many liberal-arts majors follow to successful careers.

Anders, the author of You Can Do Anything: The Surprising Power of a “Useless” Liberal-Arts Education, says that Americans have long romanticized successful people who spent time wandering and wondering about their place in the world. Today, though, many parents and students expect that time to be shorter.

“We know they’ll figure it out eventually,” says Anders, who is a senior editor at large at LinkedIn. “But given how much college costs, you’d like it to start working out when people are 22 or 23.”

Anders, who has studied programs at other colleges, says Bates’s is among the “most comprehensive” that he has seen. Still, he’s not convinced that private equity or brand management qualify as “purposeful” work.

“To me, the term ‘purposeful’ has to exclude some things,” he says. “It should be something that makes the world better.”

Spencer prefers a broader definition. To her, “purposeful work” is not just about saving the world; it’s about finding alignment between “who you are and what you do.”

“You could be a ballerina, or a forest ranger, or you could work at Goldman Sachs,” she says. If you’re doing “amazing, socially relevant work but it doesn’t bring you meaning,” it’s not purposeful.

Farming and Finance

This summer, 125 Bates students participated in purposeful-work internships, in fields from farming to finance. Roughly half were in “sponsored internships,” in which their salary was paid by Bates.

Three of the interns — Michael Somma, Morgan Dewdney, and Alexia Sahue — were doing data analysis for the Analysis Group, a global economics-consulting firm with headquarters in a gleaming skyscraper in downtown Boston. Interviewed during the summer, the three, who were assigned to cases before they even arrived, say that they have been treated like full-time analysts from the start, entrusted with importing, sorting, and analyzing sensitive data for law firms and pharmaceutical companies.

Each week Bates asks the students to reflect on their experiences at the firm, providing prompts like “What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now?” and “Share one example of a skill you want to be using, or are using, every day.”

Sahue’s favorite was a prompt that asked for a photo that illustrated her summer. She chose a picture of Fenway Park, to show that “it’s busy, but there are a lot of social events after work.” Somma picked the icon for the SAS statistical software, “because that’s what I’ve been doing all summer.”

Dewdney liked the question that asked students to help solve one another’s challenges, finding it comforting to know that other students sometimes feel overwhelmed too.

He says the internship has given him confidence that his success in the classroom will translate into success on the job.

“At Bates, they try to make it real world, but it’s still a classroom,” he says. “Here, we’re using real-world data and creating presentations that will have real-world impact.”

Back in Maine, Christopher (Topher) Castaneda, an environmental-studies major from Los Angeles, is having a very different summer experience. When he arrives at his job at Valley View Farm, in Auburn, on a Monday in July, the list of chores waiting for him on the whiteboard includes: “Feed and water all,” “clean turkey and quail pens,” “walk pig electric fence and adjust as needed,” and “remove rabbit poop and add 4-5 inches of sand underneath.”

His first task is to feed the baby quail and turkeys that are huddled in the corner of two retrofitted water basins lined with newspaper. With a gloved hand, he lifts out some pellets and scatters them in the basins.

It’s at least 80 degrees already, but he’s dressed in long cargo pants and a thick red-and-black flannel shirt, with “Bates Residence Life” sewn into the corner. He doesn’t mind the heat, and the sleeves protect against an uneven tan — oh, and the ticks and mosquitoes, too. By mid-morning, there are bits of hay in his hair.

Castaneda enjoys the animals, but his favorite part is the people he gets to meet during the farmers’ markets he attends on Tuesdays and Saturdays. He’s even considering staying in Maine after graduation, despite the cold and snow.

“This has allowed me to find community” outside the campus, he says.

Castaneda, a first-generation student whose mother was born in Guatemala and whose paternal grandfather is from Mexico, says he wouldn’t have been able to take the internship if it weren’t for the $3,000 grant and housing stipend that Bates gave him. The job at the farm pays only $100 a week, and his parents — an Uber driver and a finish carpenter — can’t afford to subsidize his rent and food. Without the grant, he’d probably be back in LA, babysitting his two younger brothers.

Castaneda isn’t a huge fan of the reflection prompts, which he considers “a waste of time,” but he says the experience at the farm has been valuable.

“It’s allowed me to look deeply into myself and what I want to do,” he says.

One career he’s ruled out: farming. “I love doing this now, but I can’t see myself doing this forever,” he says as he tosses pieces of old bread and hamburger buns to a horde of hungry sheep. “It’s a really time-consuming job, and it’s never over.”

Correction (9/5/18, 12:06 p.m.): A caption under the photo of L.L. Bean’s Brunswick, Me., plant originally misidentified the L.L. Bean employee leading students on a tour. He is Jack Samson, vice president for fulfillment and marketing, not Stephen M. Fuller, another employee of the company who is also a Bates trustee.