Colleges are adding career counselors and urging students to start career planning early, reports Hechinger's Jon Marcus. Some are placing advisors in academic departments or "career communities," expanding mentoring and strengthening alumni networks.
The motivation is clear: Colleges are competing for a smaller number of young people amid growing concerns that college provides an uncertain return on investment.
"Career success" is "the top reason people give for getting a degree," according to a Lightcast survey. While 82 percent of college graduates were satisfied with their educational experience, only 44 percent said the degree "was worth the student loan debt."
"Fewer than one in five of the graduates in that Lightcast survey strongly agreed with the statements that their universities and colleges had invested in their careers and helped them understand career opportunities, create career plans and network with employers or alumni," Marcus writes.
“There are some faculty who say that learning is for the sake of learning — that they’re not here to talk about careers,” said Elizabeth Soady, associate director of professional development for arts and sciences at the University of Richmond, which has also expanded its career services. But others “are keyed into that bigger national conversation about return on investment.”
Some employers are dropping degree requirements for jobs in favor of hiring for job skills, also known as “competencies.”
Career counselors are trying to help students explain to employers what job skills -- known as "competencies" -- they're learning in class. For example, humanities majors might argue they've learned critical thinking and public speaking, said Renée Cramer, provost at Dickinson College.
Employers recruiting for skills rather than degrees are "five times more likely to find a high-performance employee," according to a McKinsey report, writes Alcino Donadel in
University Business. But many students don't know how to identify what they've learned that might be valued in the workforce.
One in five graduates said their college didn’t provide them with needed job skills, in a Cengage survey.
Real career planning for students would be steering them toward the trades. They can go to college later. Since marriage is coming later in life, having family is no longer the cutoff it use to be for going back to college
By contrast, if a study counsellor were to guide pupils, as early as eighth grade, about their choices of mathematics beginning in the following year, they might be on their way towards better educational outcomes, such as those available through university college institute faculty department programmes like MIT's chemical-biological engineering, where they are explicitly published (and which is the default direction towards which One World Schools Activity guides students, until they determine more individually what their particular talents and inclinations are).
If you are a white male, corporations are hiring fewer and fewer of "your kind" so college credentials are even less valuable. Even if they hire, they've not promoted for decades. Scott Adams tells of two jobs he left after being told they couldn't promote him because he was male and white. Got to get those demo numbers up. Anyone think it's better today compared to before Dilbert made it big?
Colleges have a problem, for 50+ years those who would have been successful regardless of going to college have gone to college due to the marketing and presumption. But today, those people are increasingly turning away from wasted years of the college "indoctrination" experience and the student loan deb…