Preparing the Neediest for Work

There is no shortage of things college students need when they go to see Hector Rivera for help. Mr. Rivera is the chief operating officer at Our Piece of the Pie, a nonprofit group that works with colleges and tries to open up the employment market for low-income students in and around Connecticut, helping them land and keep jobs.

Mr. Rivera’s coaching pretty much covers the job-search process from beginning to end. The organization looks for job openings, sets up interviews with employers, and trains students in what Mr. Rivera likes to call “skill sets": how to communicate a problem to an employer, how to engage customers, how to independently solve problems, how to ask for a raise.

“For a lot of them, when we talk with them about these skill sets, it’s probably the first time that anyone has in detail discussed them,” he says. High schools are too bogged down in tests and budget woes, and at home a student’s parents might never have worked in a professional environment. So Mr. Rivera’s team checks in with students at their jobs on a weekly basis, to make sure both the employee and the employers are happy.

“We will not let a young person leave our confines until we’re comfortable that they’re going to be OK in the world of work,” he says. It’s vital work for both colleges and companies: One dean at Asnuntuck Community College, in Enfield, Conn., told Mr. Rivera that without a steady stream of employees from Our Piece of the Pie, some manufacturing companies would pick up and move out of town.

Low-income and first-generation students graduate from college every day, and in ever-growing numbers, and this is the kind of help that many of them need. Colleges aren’t accustomed to offering those kinds of services, but some may have to start. When colleges are judged by the students they successfully place in the work force, support for low-income students should become part of any career office’s program.

Scaling Up, Setting Examples

The challenge is scale. Much of the work in helping low-income students with career choices and preparation relies on one-on-one relationships with those students. Most career offices, meanwhile, are overstretched. Sean Gil, who directs the career center at the University of California at Riverside, has started a program that instructs first-generation students in networking and job skills. But the program enrolls only 35 students a year at a university where up to half of the 23,000 students are the first in their family to attend college.

“One of the challenges I always think about is how you scale up while keeping things personal,” Mr. Gil says. “This is a labor-intensive program. For me, this is where we get to test our theories about first-generation college-student learning and career development.”

The University of California at Berkeley has tried acclimating low-income students to careers by making examples of people who have undertaken the same journey. This year the university held a conference for first-generation students — largely low-income students of color — who got to talk with alumni and employers who are also first-generation.

“That’s really important to the population — that they have role models and are able to see themselves in the stories of these individuals,” says Brian Guerrero, senior associate director of the Berkeley career center. The conference opened with a panel discussion with alumni and employers telling students how to navigate the four-year journey at the university and to find a path to work after graduation.

Mr. Guerrero says the career-center advisers try to tell low-income, first-generation students that while they might not have the money that their wealthier peers possess, they have other advantages: In juggling a job or caring for family members while going to college, they have grit and resilience that students with more resources might not have.

But building contacts in the working world continues to be a challenge. For wealthier students, the path to a career wends through one of the oldest job-placement systems in history: whom you know. Some surveys indicate that four out of five jobs are landed through networking, and among college students who come from money, those networks are already set up through families. A parent, an aunt, or an uncle might know someone who knows someone. The student — who may have been coached on how to talk to adults from an early age — just needs to show up and impress enough to land an entry-level position.

For low-income students, who probably have few familial ties to the professional world, the barriers begin in the job-application process. Many employers now use application-management software that eliminates résumés that don’t fit an employer’s biases, says Khalilah M. Harris, chief of staff and vice president for external affairs at Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit organization devoted to expanding economic opportunities for underserved populations. Major employers might skip candidates who list second- or third-tier institutions on their résumés.

“We need to figure out how to screen people in,” she says. There are half a million to a million unfilled jobs in the tech sector. “That they can’t find talent doesn’t ring true to us, because we know there are people from all kinds of nontraditional backgrounds who actually have the talent.” Part of Opportunity@Work’s mission is to create connections between employers and prospective employees that highlight job candidates who have relevant skills but might not have traditional degrees.

Pushy Moms

Some colleges that enroll lower-income students have found ways to incorporate career education into programs or even the institution’s operations. A couple of years ago, Stony Brook University reimagined its work-study programs and on-campus jobs, using them to emphasize training in work-relevant skills. Marianna Savoca, director of the career center at Stony Brook, which is part of the State University of New York system, says students don’t walk around the campus with “low-income” labels on their backs, but students who enroll in work-study programs generally come from families with financial needs. The reorientation of campus work was a way to expand the reach of the career center without having to add people to her office.

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“There is a lot you can learn about work and a lot of skills you can develop, even in campus dining,” she says. “We can’t affect their jobs off campus — that’s hard for us to influence. But we can impact the work experience they have on campus and make it like a mini-apprenticeship.”

Economic mobility has been a focus of the university: A recent study by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research showed that more than half of Stony Brook students from the bottom fifth of the income distribution enter the top three-fifths after graduation, at rates higher than low-income students at more-elite institutions.

LaGuardia Community College, in the City University of New York system, has employed a range of efforts to try to give students a leg up, including recruiting Pushy Moms — wealthy New York women who have already guided their own children through college and who now meet with LaGuardia students to guide them.

Amy Dalsimer, who directs LaGuardia’s Pre-College Academic Programming and the College and Career Pathways Institute, works with low-income, academically unprepared high-school students.

Her programs employ what she calls a “bridge model,” where the curriculum is designed around a particular career path and includes lessons about college and workplace culture. For jobs in health fields — like emergency medical technicians — Ms. Dalsimer’s staff interviewed major health companies in New York City to learn how they hire and what they are looking for.

What the staff finds becomes part of the programs’ intake and guidance, she says. “When we’re helping students become not only trained but poised for work, we know what to look for and how to help them get prepared.”

In the fast-track, career-pathway fields, students can get a certification and move right into a job, or they can transfer those courses to a college track. The programs’ success rate is based on the number of students who go on to a college-degree program or a career in their field.

Such metrics are uncommon in higher education right now, says Mr. Rivera, of Our Piece of the Pie. He frequently sits down with students who want to be, for example, a veterinarian. He shows those students how much debt they might accumulate in vet school, and their slim prospects for jobs after graduation. Colleges, too, should have a responsibility to be realistic about each student’s career prospects.

Unfortunately, most aren’t. Recently, Our Piece of the Pie considered working with a community college in its region, and Mr. Rivera and his colleagues did an analysis of the college’s degree offerings and graduation rates. “The numbers were alarming,” he says. Students, for the most part, were not graduating from programs, and those that did had few job prospects.

Mr. Rivera’s team took the numbers to the community college, and the college’s administrators had a curious response: They thanked him for doing an analysis that they hadn’t done in 10 years.

“When you as a college continue to facilitate courses and degree areas that you know on the back end have no demand, I think that’s almost criminal,” he says. “Colleges should be held accountable for that.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.