Although more small private liberal-arts colleges have come to embrace student career-development programs in recent years, the groundwork was laid more than 20 years ago.
The Liberal Arts Career Network was formed when Hamilton, Hartwick, and Oberlin Colleges created a partnership to share information on how best to get their students real work experience — and an edge in the career marketplace.
The consortium added one or two members a year, until the 2008 recession forced highly selective (and often pricey) institutions to intensify their efforts to help students develop career plans and to offer opportunities for them to experience the working world. Since 2011 the group has grown by 25 percent, and many of its members have since designed campuswide career programs to reach all students at some point during their undergraduate years.
Small liberal-arts colleges are doing more to get students thinking about what will happen once they pack away their caps and gowns.
“The recession was a loud wake-up call across the country for these schools,” says Mark Peltz, the network’s president and a dean at Grinnell College. “Now colleges see that they can retain their mission while simultaneously investing in preparing their students for career pathways.”
The group now numbers 39 members. Each contributes to a database that includes 21,000 employers that offer opportunities for undergrads. More than 200,000 students have signed on as users. The database features more than 30,000 internship and job postings.
Colleges that are able to offer students a window into the world beyond graduation have more to sell to students and their parents, many of whom are questioning the value of a liberal-arts education.
“Parents will ask us, ‘How many students are finding the work they want to do?,’ " Mr. Peltz says. “It’s the how-many-of-your-students-are-baristas question that we hear so often.”
Such programs have proved to be popular with students, but it’s hard to tell whether the programs are preparing them to meet their career goals as fully as institutions hope. Colleges conduct benchmark surveys of recent grads and student involvement with career centers, “but standardized metrics is a real shortcoming,” Mr. Peltz says.
If the network’s popularity is any indication, other colleges believe that sharing data on careers is of great use. The group no longer allows any top-flight liberal-arts college to join, worried that the volunteer-run organization lacks the capacity to handle a slew of new members. “We’re strictly by-invitation-only now,” Mr. Peltz says. The network will invite peer institutions that “have a demonstrated commitment to experiential learning” and can broaden the network’s geographic profile, he says.
The group’s multicollege crowdsourcing is more powerful than what any one college can do on its own.
“The sad reality is that most college career centers are not there for the entire student body,” Mr. Peltz says. “They just don’t have the resources. Our members push back against that model.”
