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The Future of Work

Future of Work cover
In the eyes of many students and their parents today, higher education is tied to a job. And yet the world of work is poised to undergo a number of dramatic changes over the next 10 years. The Chronicle’s latest report, The Future of Work: How Colleges Can Prepare Students for the Jobs Ahead, features predictions from economists and technology experts on the labor market; insight from employers on the skills they are looking for among recent college graduates; thoughts from college administrators on how career services must change; and more.

This page features Chronicle articles and videos about the path from college to work, innovative programs that give students real-world experience, and other topics to supplement the report.

The simplistic, anti-intellectual stereotype is that liberal-arts majors are bound for jobs as baristas or waiters. But even the new narrative — that the liberal arts provide key training for jobs in Silicon Valley and creative industries — may be equally off-target, as career success for humanities majors doesn’t always depend on what those disciplines taught. Sometimes, where you come from and what college you attended are what counts.
News
What Gets Forgotten in Debates About the Liberal Arts
By Scott Carlson
Career success for humanities majors doesn’t always depend on what those disciplines taught you. Sometimes, where you come from and what college you attended are what counts.
Joseph E. Aoun
News
How Real-World Learning Could Help People Compete With Machines
By Scott Carlson
Joseph Aoun, president of Northeastern University, says colleges must change how they educate for a work force dominated by automation.
Bachelor’s-degree graduates in engineering and the sciences start out earning roughly $10,000 to $30,000 more annually than their liberal-arts peers, a new study finds, but the humanities majors catch up over time.
News
Over Time, Humanities Grads Close the Pay Gap With Professional Peers
By Scott Carlson
A new study suggests that opportunities abound for liberal-arts majors with flexible career aspirations.
A kitchen at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus, in Napa Valley, Calif. Academe tends to allow students to dress as they please, to question authority, and to speak freely. Institutions like CIA, though, provide students a place in the pecking order as part of programs that prepare them for jobs.
Curriculum
What Students Can Learn From Workplace Hierarchies
By Scott Carlson
Academe tends to allow students to dress as they please, to question authority, and to speak freely. Some preprofessional institutions, though, provide students a place in the pecking order that may prepare them better for jobs.
The shipboard training provided at Cal State Maritime gives students "a bigger sense of how the world works," one alumnus says.
News
A New Liberal Art
By Scott Carlson
How systems thinking can prepare students for a complex world.
van video thumb
News
An Educational ‘Booster Shot’ for America’s Labor Force
By Scott Carlson
Van Ton-Quinlivan, vice chancellor for work-force and economic development in the California Community Colleges system, says colleges need to form partnerships with employers to help “stranded workers” get back into the job market.
A still from a California Career Education video, part of a $6-million rebranding effort to emphasize that CTE is a pathway to promising careers, not a dead end for kids who aren’t cut out for college.
Community Colleges
Ads Spell Out What Career and Technical Education Really Is — and Who It’s For
By Scott Carlson
To attract a generation of students, colleges try to shift outdated perceptions of a pathway to promising jobs.
Marianna Savoca (center), director of the career center at Stony Brook U. of the State U. of New York system, talks to two sophomores about their career choices. "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."
News
Preparing the Neediest for Work
By Scott Carlson
When low-income students enter the work force, they often lack the built-in advantages of their wealthy peers. Can colleges fill the gap?
Alejandro Garcia (right), shown working with a more experienced employee to route power cables.
News
Why Colleges Need to Embrace the Apprenticeship
By Scott Carlson
Apprenticeships are no longer an alternative to the college path but a supplement that prepares students for careers while they earn a degree.
Susan Brennan, Bentley U.
News
Career Services in the Classroom
By Scott Carlson
Susan Sandler Brennan, associate vice president for career services at Bentley University, describes how Bentley’s career office created a course to help prepare students for the world of work, and what traits she is looking for in career counselors.
David P. Nelson
On Leadership
Busting the Art-School Myths
By Lee Gardner
Graduates of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design often buck the perception that an art-school degree is a disadvantage in the job market.
Omar Palomino, who grew up working at his parents’ auto-salvage shop, hadn’t planned to go to college. Then, in high school, he started taking career-focused courses in electronics and robotics. "Once I stepped into these courses, it set off something for me," he says. "I knew I had what it takes, and I could accomplish things."
Students
When Vocational Education Spurs Students to Strive for College
By Scott Carlson
At a rural high school in Washington State, courses like electronics and exercise science engage rather than divert students.
Thomas Byers helped start the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which fills 3,000 seats a year. The professor has helped create two companies himself. One succeeded, the other didn’t, and he tells students about both of them.
Campus Culture
Inside Startup U: How Stanford Develops Entrepreneurial Students
By Beth McMurtrie
The university, entwined with Silicon Valley, develops innovative students with a synergy that has been summarized as “one plus one equals four.”
Michael Sciola
News
Helping Students Navigate Paths to a Job, and Beyond
By Scott Carlson
Colleges’ career centers need to reposition themselves to be more effective, says Michael Sciola, associate vice president for institutional advancement and career initiatives at Colgate University.
Abdullah Abdurrah (left) and Chase Brignac, students at the U. of Maryland at College Park, work on a new part 
for a 3-D printer at Startup Shell, a student-founded nonprofit incubator.
Administration
Now Everyone’s an Entrepreneur
By Beth McMurtrie
Colleges are teaching undergraduates how to be self-starters. But what does that really mean?
A Case Western Reserve student (left) works with a staff member to drill a hole in a mold of a laryngoscope. The aim of the project is to measure the pressure patients feel during medical procedures.
Administration
The ‘Maker Movement’ Goes to College
By Scott Carlson
Institutions gamble on free-for-all tool shops as engines of entrepreneurship.
Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, found a place in the city for its Food for Good Farm: the playing field of its discontinued football team. Students will work there now to pay their tuition.
Student Affairs
A College Puts Students to Work, for Their Future and Its Own
By Scott Carlson
Paul Quinn College, in Dallas, is the first urban institution to adopt the work-college model, in which students’ labor both educates them and keeps the campus going.
“My literature degree wouldn’t have taken me far without the work” as a reporter at the U. of Minnesota-Twin Cities, 
writes the author, “but my work wouldn’t have been as rich without the literature degree.”
Students
Want a College Experience That Matters? Get to Work.
By Scott Carlson
Both liberal-arts values and job training beyond the campus have a place in undergraduate education, as some colleges are showing.
Rich Margerum (right), head of the department of planning, public policy, and management at the U. of Oregon, talks with a recent graduate student, Mary Adams, on a former railroad bridge remade into a pedestrian path leading to downtown Salem, Ore.
Service Learning
Students Go Into the Consulting Business for Cities
By Scott Carlson
Students at the U. of Oregon, acting as consultants, test ways to help nearby cities. The idea is spreading.