Most colleges are bad at career services. Yet today’s students expect more help finding a job than ever before.
Two campus career-center leaders made that dim assessment in an influential manifesto posted to LinkedIn two years ago, and since then their ideas for a new philosophy of career services seem to be gaining currency.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the ever-rising cost of college, students expect higher education to help launch their careers, not just make them smarter. To do that, career-center leaders argue that they must be seen as part of an institution’s strategic core rather as a small service center that operates on the edge of campus. And they stress the need to help students build professional networks that are highly customized to students’ interests.
Meanwhile, several new for-profit companies have stepped into the gap, either working with colleges or offering bridge programs to make up for what colleges aren’t doing on their own.
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.
To better understand the shifting landscape, let’s look at three scenarios. The first examines one of the many upstart companies that are sweeping into college career centers; the second describes one college’s effort to reinvent its career services; and the third focuses on another college’s expanding curriculum to teach students how to seek employment.
The Upstart Company: Garrett Lord was a freshman at Michigan Technological University a few years ago when he and his friends noticed a heap of old computers in a Dumpster on campus. The students hauled 15 of the discarded machines into a dorm room and wired them into a single “cluster computer” designed to analyze large data sets, just to play around with ideas they were learning in their computer-science classes. Impressed, one of Mr. Lord’s professors recommended him for an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Suddenly he was in the computing big leagues, working alongside students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, and other elite universities. He quickly realized that these students had job prospects that seemed a long shot on his campus. Google, Facebook, and other top companies showed up at their colleges to recruit, while job fairs at Michigan Tech drew mostly local companies, he says.
He and his friends at Michigan Tech saw an opportunity to use their computing skills to create a better matching system between companies and college-career centers. They started sneaking into career fairs at nearby colleges, trying to better understand typical recruiting practices. “We would walk up to the employers at the career fair and say, “Hey, how do you do recruiting? What schools do you go to? Why do you choose your schools? How do you look for candidates?”
After graduating from Michigan Tech, Mr. Lord helped turn that research into a service called Handshake. The company produces software that’s designed to replace the systems that colleges have long used to keep track of job postings and pass them along to students. For employers, it’s a way to easily mine talent and broaden the set of colleges where they send job and internship listings.
It is rare to see an ed-tech company grow as fast as Handshake has: More than 160 colleges of all kinds have adopted the system. For smaller colleges, such as HBCUs, Handshake promises a more level playing field. And for institutions like Stanford University, Handshake’s sales pitch is that it can help them fill out career areas in which they have historically had fewer contacts — such as jobs for liberal-arts majors who want to work on the East Coast. Some 90,000 companies have posted jobs through Handshake, including most of the Fortune 500 companies, according to Mr. Lord.
There’s not a lot of classes where you get to just focus on yourself and what you want to do.
Andy Chan, vice president for personal and career development at Wake Forest University, was one of the first to try the system, two years ago, when it was used at only a handful of colleges. He says Handshake works particular well on smartphones, making it easy for students to use it just as they do Facebook and other social networks. That ease of use means students are more likely to keep their profiles up-to-date than they did when using other career-services portals, he says.
“Getting real-time information is really important” for matching with employers, he says, and it’s also important to target any message to students carefully. “When you send an accounting firm’s message to all of your students, then those who aren’t interested in accounting kind of turn off their interest in our office, thinking we don’t know or care about them,” he says. Switching to Handshake has led to 30 percent more listings for students, and from a broader range of companies than before, he says.
Not every college can afford the new system, however, and it remains to be seen how widely it catches on. Some students have come to expect that they’ll rely instead on outside tools such as LinkedIn. In the long run, it’s possible to imagine a world where campus career centers are simply unnecessary, since companies will be able to contact graduating students directly, online and through social media.
Meanwhile, Mr. Lord says, his parents remain surprised at how many doors his obsession with computers has opened. “My dad was like, ‘This nerd stuff is really paying off.’ "
A Reinvented Career Center: Christine Y. Cruzvergara is one of the authors of that career manifesto that’s still getting buzz. This year she was hired by Wellesley College with a mandate to try out the ideas she proposed in her article, which she wrote while working at George Mason University.
Unlike her predecessors in career services at Wellesley, she reports to the president’s cabinet. That makes sense, she says, because her office has a direct impact on recruitment and retention.
Under the new system, officials don’t wait for students come to the career center. A “college career mentor” is assigned to every entering freshman, with the goal of helping her “launch a career grounded in a sense of your own values, strengths and interests,” according to the career office’s website. That person becomes the first member of the student’s “personal advisory board,” which the student is encouraged to add to as she meets favorite professors or, say, alumni in her field. The college is adopting a new service called CampusTap, designed to make it easier for students to connect with mentors and keep up with their personal advisory boards. The college also adopted Handshake, and so far about 60 percent of students on the campus have used it at least once.
Ms. Cruzvergara says college career services have gone through paradigm shifts before, as cultural expectations of colleges have changed. In the 1920s, for instance, the baby boom after World War I led colleges to focus on things like providing vocational guidance for graduating teachers. More recently, the first dot-com boom, in the 2000s, spurred companies to collaborate more with colleges as they looked for talent.
The shift today, she says, is toward finding a customized career path for each student, using technology to more closely match students with jobs and mentors that best fit their interests.
Katelyn Campbell, a Wellesley senior from West Virginia, is an example of a student seeking that kind of customization. She’s majoring in rural studies, a field in which it’s difficult to find careers that might match her interests. Even before Wellesley started its new efforts, she tracked down the relatively few alumni from West Virginia, and she found two favorite professors whom she often turns to “to talk about everything from my grandfather’s death to where I’m going to go to grad school.”
She is determined to find her way back to the community where she grew up, to apply what she has learned. “There’s something about coming back to the mountains,” she says. “It’s like a breath of fresh air.” Plus, “my parents basically busted their asses to get me where I am, so I feel like I sort of owe it to them.”
A Career Curriculum: At Wake Forest University, another campus that’s reinventing its career services, a major focus has been on expanding a roster of elective courses designed to get students thinking about their job search before graduation looms. The five courses it now offers aren’t your typical liberal-arts offerings: One focuses on helping students answer the question, “Who am I?” But despite the self-help nature, the courses count for university credit, says Heidi Robinson, an assistant professor of practice in the university’s counseling department, which offers the courses.
The popularity of the career courses is growing, largely through word of mouth, she says. About 20 percent of students have taken one.
Among them is Milan Shah, a sophomore. He says plenty of his peers are also already thinking ahead. “Everyone’s starting earlier to prepare,” he says.
He took the course online this summer while doing an internship in London. “I was in a big dilemma the first year because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “I was sort of in between two very different careers [medicine or law], and the class just got me thinking about it.”
Now he has decided to try investment banking for a few years, with hopes of going to law school afterward. “There’s not a lot of classes where you get to just focus on yourself and what you want to do and your strengths and weaknesses,” he says. “But this class does that.”
Ms. Robinson describes the course as providing “the gift of the interval” — a space when students can leave the grind of coursework, activities, and parties to think about what their education means.
The other official who co-wrote that manifesto about the future of campus career services is Farouk Dey, associate vice provost for student affairs and dean of career services at Stanford. The design school there offers a popular career course similar to the Wake Forest courses, called “Designing Your Life.” Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach the Stanford course, recently turned it into a bestselling book by the same name.
“Designers get juiced by what they call wicked problems,” the authors write in their first chapter.
“Let’s face it, you’re not reading this book because you have all the answers, are in your dream job, and have a life imbued with more meaning and purpose than you can imagine. Somewhere, in some area of your life, you are stuck.
“You have a wicked problem.
“And that’s a wonderful and exciting place to start.”
