Want a College Experience That Matters? Get to Work.

Now and then, I get invited to journalism classes to talk to students about making a living as a writer. Last year I got a particularly special invitation: to speak to a room full of budding journalists at the Minnesota Daily, the college paper of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. This was the place where I learned about writing as real work—late at night and on weekends, cranking out profiles and essays to see them dropped within a twine-tied bundle of papers the next day at the cafe where I worked. When I arrived at the Daily for my talk, I found students much like my friends and me from years ago—coming from all kinds of majors, devoted to the craft. “Come with whatever you want to talk about,” the managing editor had told me in the invitation. But it was clear what they all wanted to talk about: how to land their first jobs in a stagnant economy, in a profession that is tougher than ever to break into.

That visit came back to me last month as I looked over the findings of the Gallup-Purdue Index, a survey of 30,000 Americans aimed at finding which college experiences lead to a happy job and life. Most of the buzz about the survey focused on the conclusion that caring and stimulating professors significantly raise a student’s chances of finding employment and well-being. But another important finding of the study was less noticed: Graduates who felt that their colleges had prepared them for life beyond the academy—through such activities as internships or jobs where the students were able to apply their classroom knowledge—were three times as likely to be engaged at work. Those who had done a long-term project, held an internship, or participated heavily in extracurricular activities or organizations doubled their chances of being engaged at work. Unfortunately, only a third of the survey respondents said they had gotten such an internship or job during college.

Increasingly, postgraduation job status is the yardstick by which people judge higher education, yet academe has often had an uncomfortable relationship with vocational training. Rick Staisloff, a former chief financial officer at Notre Dame of Maryland University who now helps colleges navigate the “disrupted” college market, is frustrated to see so many institutions not only ignore real-world learning in their curricula but even resist it with “gleeful disdain.”

“The trap is that we think it’s an either/or—that we are either pursuing the life of the mind or that we are a beauty school,” he says. More colleges, he argues, should expose students to real-world work while still in the shelter of the college experience, approaching it the way that they approach study abroad. “We want students to get immersed in a culture. Well, the workplace is a culture.”

Philip D. Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute, at Michigan State University, says the jobs of the future will require a broad mix of intellectual, technical, social, and cultural skills—especially the latter, as technology takes on more of society’s routine tasks. “The idea of work and academic training should be inseparable,” he says. “Students absolutely need as many experiences as they can get outside the academy, testing their knowledge base, learning how they can use it and how to build the broader skills that go around it.”

In that regard, academe may not always provide the best footing for students—its cloistered nature insulates faculty members and students alike. Many students, Mr. Gardner says, get a message from their colleges and professors to stay on the campus—that the project-based learning and undergraduate research they are doing in courses will be sufficient. It’s not.

Also, he says, many students have to earn wages as retail clerks, waiters, receptionists, and such just to pay for college. That’s real work, but not necessarily the kind that will propel them into dream careers.

Colleges need to get more comfortable with integrating students into the working world, Mr. Gardner says. Otherwise, when they make the transition to the job market, “they just won’t have the experience, and they will wander in the wasteland for a couple of years until they put stuff together. That is cruel.”

Of course, some colleges have made real-world experiences integral to the college experience—like the co-op programs of Drexel University and Northeastern University, or the community engagement of sustainability-oriented institutions like Green Mountain College and the College of the Atlantic. But at many institutions, opportunities for real-world work seem limited, particularly for students majoring in open-ended liberal-arts programs like literature, history, and philosophy.

Reliable numbers are hard to come by, says Mr. Gardner. The National Survey of Student Engagement indicates that, over all, nearly 50 percent of college seniors—as many as 66 percent at liberal-arts colleges and as few as 36 percent at doctoral universities—have done some kind of internship, co-op, or fieldwork in college. But those figures say little about the length or quality of that experience, Mr. Gardner notes. Are students who say they had an internship working on problems and wrestling with ethical dilemmas, or are they merely answering phones and fetching coffee?

Leaders of dynamic colleges and programs realize that the current generation of students yearns for real-world work, and that a comprehensive program that takes on real-world problems can attract some of the best. Last year I wrote about the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative, which connects Oregon cities with students in architecture, planning, business, communications, geography, law, and other disciplines. Top students in the program said they’d picked Oregon over other colleges precisely because the program would give them practical training in their disciplines, along with challenges they couldn’t get in a classroom, like local politics and budget constraints. A student project could save a struggling city millions of dollars, but the rewards of coming up with real solutions to real problems are also intangible.

“It’s a small thing,” one Oregon student studying planning and law told me, “but it’s nice to be taken seriously.” Nearly 20 institutions—among the latest the University of Connecticut and the University of Tennessee—are creating their own versions of Oregon’s program.

The benefits extend far past graduation. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which requires students to complete two long-term projects, usually proposed by a company or other outside organization, has done a study of alumni to determine how those real-world projects affected their careers.

The 2,500 randomly selected alumni who responded to the survey said their greatest lessons were about how to work on a team, manage a project, work in a professional environment, develop ideas, solve problems, learn on their own, and “function effectively in the ‘real world.’ " One of the most surprising outcomes: 66 percent said the project-based learning had helped them “develop a stronger personal character.” In follow-up interviews with the respondents, researchers found that the unpredictability and high-stakes nature of real-world settings were key to the learning process.

“These projects are often the first time that they have been given anything real to do in their educational lives,” says Richard F. Vaz, dean of Worcester’s division of interdisciplinary and global studies and a co-author of the report. With the next step of the study, Worcester will conduct interviews with employers to find out how its alumni compare with employees from other colleges.

Many of the outcomes resonate with my own experience, although my journey was more haphazard. I was an English-literature major who wanted to be a writer, but there were few opportunities to write for a real audience within the department, and I didn’t have a clue how to make a living at it. All I had heard in my creative-writing courses were clichés about the writing life: getting up every morning and putting something down on paper. That was too amorphous to be helpful.

Thanks to pushing from an uncle, I stumbled into a semester-long internship at a newspaper in Washington, where I was a transcriber and gofer for a veteran investigative reporter. That led me back to the Minnesota Daily, where I landed a job as a reporter covering arts and culture. And while the reporters got excellent training in writing on deadline, they also wrestled with the same problems that vex professionals: How do you balance hard-hitting news with crowd-pleasing stories, especially when advertisers are skittish and revenue is down? If the police want to dig through your notes in an investigation, what do you do? How do you handle a colleague (usually a friend) who isn’t cutting it?

Tony Wagner, who just finished his year as the Daily’s editor in chief, says he faced a dilemma when the newspaper came across a police report of an alleged sexual assault at the apartment of some university basketball players. Staffers deliberated right up to press time about whether or not to print the names of the players. They did, and a local metropolitan newspaper, the Star Tribune, did not. “You might talk about something like that in the classroom, but I don’t know of any place other than a student paper where you would actually wrestle with it,” he says. Graduating this spring, he has landed a job at American Public Media, the producer of A Prairie Home Companion, Marketplace, and other public-radio programs.

I, too, learned in a college newsroom the basics of what I went on to do every day, and it helped me land my job at The Chronicle.

Some people—like the wealthy entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who has offered students money to drop out of college and get on with work—might say that my English degree was unnecessary. But novels of ideas and literature of feminism, minorities, and marginalized people opened up the world of a kid raised in a monochrome Twin Cities suburb. In particular, the late Peter E. Firchow—the “caring professor” of my own college story—taught me to look at society through close reading of utopian and dystopian fiction. That training was invaluable to me, personally and professionally, in America after September 11, 2001. My literature degree wouldn’t have taken me far without the work, but my work wouldn’t have been as rich without the literature degree.

Lately my old English department has emphasized the practicality of an English degree. Last year it produced a video about the careers of some of its graduates: a teacher, a labor-compliance officer, a bank vice president, a shopping-mall developer, and—in the case of its best-known alumnus, Garrison Keillor—the host of a radio show.

In addition to providing opportunities like service-learning courses and student-run literary magazines, the department plans to strengthen its ties to local publishers, businesses, and alumni to provide more real-world work for students, says Ellen Messer-Davidow, chair of the department. “I am very concerned about our undergraduate and graduate students’ finding living-wage jobs,” she says, “and that’s why I want our undergraduate and graduate programs to provide pathways to preparation for postgraduation employment.”

Under pressure to show a return on investment, many colleges and programs, my own included, increasingly promote the idea that the liberal arts can lead anywhere. But to an inexperienced, directionless 22-year-old, “anywhere” is as good as “nowhere.”

Michael Sciola, Colgate University’s associate vice president for advancement and director of career services, says his institution is starting the conversation about careers in the freshman and sophomore years. Colgate is reaching out as well to alumni to establish internships and other real-world experiences for its students, and the university is establishing a $10-million fund to help students take unpaid, low-paid, and remote internships.

“We know for a fact that the best outcomes are when students can get a context for what they are studying” in the real world, he says.

Back in the small conference room at the Minnesota Daily, many of the students were only sophomores but were already aware of the gulf between college and career. “Are you scared?” I asked. They all said yes.

But there they were, working as reporters and writers, learning to keep sources “warm,” learning how to bounce back after an error hits print, knocking out stories every day for a small paycheck. “It’s going to be OK,” I said. They are already on their way.