One of the reasons universities have had such success in attracting students over the years is the promise they hold for better employment. Over 80% of students say that “getting a better job” is a main reason for going to university. It’s not the only reason they go, of course; most have some kind of intellectual interest in the subjects they study. But the promise of good job outcomes is pretty central to the appeal of a university.
So why do universities seem to pay so little attention to actually helping students get jobs?
To be clear, I’m not arguing that some fields of study prepare students better for the labour market. Let’s assume that all parts of the university equally provide an education that leads to some type of remunerative position after graduation.
And before everyone from arts backgrounds complains that university (or their bits of it, anyway) is about education and knowledge rather than “mere” vocationalism, I understand and respect the argument that a university education – or some types of university education anyway, are not “about” obtaining skills (really, I do. I’m a history major after all). That’s completely fine.
What’s not fine, though, is taking government subsidies and student tuition money on the pretext that a university education improves employability and then ignoring how students do in the labour market. And that’s true whether the improved employability comes from specific technical training, or if it comes from having a broad intellectual formation (Concordia’s Graham Carr makes a good case for the latter here).
I’m not just talking here about the state of institutional career service offices – an area in which students tend to give most universities pretty mediocre marks. I’m talking about the sheer lack of engagement of faculty in this issue. How many professors could provide reasonable advice to students about career-related questions about any career outside academia? How many know what services their own institution’s career office provides? How many even see it as their business to help students with that kind of question?
Obviously, there are a number of universities where faculty do seem to go the extra mile. Western seems to have its act together on this. And at Waterloo, the nature of co-op programs force teachers to remain abreast of the needs of the labour market because of the real-world feedback they get from their own students returning from work terms.
Professors are in an ideal position to help young people negotiate the challenge of the transition to the labour market, and there is some pretty clear evidence that when they do, student satisfaction with their education rises sharply. More institutions need to find ways to get their staff involved in this important task.
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I’m one of those that has a bit of difficulty seeing this as a job for faculty.
First and foremost, with the odd exception – typically professional programs where they’re all about preparing people for specific jobs – most faculty are where they are because they’ve spent their lives avoiding the real world. Aside from advice on how to do the same, by staying on for grad school, we’re the last people in the world who should be giving advice on careers.
I could I suppose be trained in that, and take it on as an extra duty, but at some point all these extra duties get to be a bit much. What do we get to drop if we pick this up?
Hi Jim. Thanks for reading our stuff.
Serious question: if professors (collectively) don’t know much about the labour market, how do they decide on curriculum, exactly?
Seriously, my read is that outside of professional degree programs it’s mostly a compromise between whatever the norms are considered to be (and that’s usually based on some traditional concept of what goes into getting a well rounded understanding of whatever discipline you’re looking at) and the research interests of faculty. There’s usually a bit of research methods stuff in there and those “skills” like critical thinking that we talk about, but most of that I think is just incidental to our curriculum design. It’s about learning a lower level (than ours) version of the discipline.
Since that’s what most of us know and have been trained for (and not much else), I don’t see how you can expect a different outcome if you put it in our hands.
You could argue that it should be done another way, in which case you’ll have to as I said train us differently so we know what we’re doing, and adjust your expectations of us, or hand the job over to someone else. But before that I think you need to demonstrate that we need to do it differently. Given the wide variety of labour market outcomes that our students seem to end up with, especially those coming out of arts, does it really make sense to try designing curriculum to outcomes? And is what we do demonstrably not working? (as opposed to being misunderstood – I think we do need to be more up front with undergrads that what we give them as an education doesn’t train them to be a historian or an economist or a sociologist)
I’m curious how you know that so few of us professors are not trying to do our “duty” with regard to these matters. In any case, I don’t agree that we are in an “ideal” position to help students in the way you suggest.. We would have to know a lot more about what is, it seems to me, an increasingly complex job market. One consistent trend does seem to be the decline in the range of good jobs that don’t require a degree. The question increasingly seems to be ‘what kind of job can you get without a degree?’ My own institution is redefining good jobs to require a degree that were once open to non-degree holders. This seems to be widespread in both the private and the public sectors. What about the people who will not get a degree? What about the social and economic costs to them of what we do in universities, turning out more and more degree-holders to do jobs that really don’t require a degree-level education and in the process excluding non-graduates from those opportunities? I think a lot about universities and their relation to the “real world problems” that my own institution’s leadership is always going on about. I’m increasingly persuaded that the university business is a key player in a major real world problem – the gradual creation of a permanent, and large, class of people who will never have the opportunity to get into a good entry-level job that offers the prospect of advancement.
Hi James. Thanks for reading our stuff.
The answer to the question “how I know” is a lot of student surveys and a lot of interviews with people in career centres. It’s also pretty clear (or I thought it was) that some schools do better at this than others – it’s not a universal claim about the professoriate.
To be a bit clearer, the “duty” is an institutional one. It is institutions which have made the claim on students’ money and on the public purse in the name of employability, but they have not put a commensurate effort into ensuring that students are in fact transitioning to the labour market efficiently. And simply because they are the part of the university with which students have the most contact, it seems to me only common sense that professors have a role here. Not to mention the fact that since universities know most of their students aren’t going to go in academia, there’s a duty of care to be designing and delivering programs in such a way that the skills and habits they learn have useful applications afterwards (and that’s not a plea for vocationalism, btw; I credit my history degree for most of my career success because of the way it taught me to sniff out BS, which is pretty handy in policy work).
The rest of your points are very valid, it seems to me. I’m still not sure exactly what we can do about some of them (no country has yet dialled back from credentialism, so there’s no good models for a way forward on that front that I can see), but I agree they need to be debated more.
Hello Alex: thanks for replying. I too have a history degree and hopefully it helps me sniff out BS here and there. What studying history also does of course, is impress upon me the unending reality that one person’s “BS” is more often than not another person’s “common sense,” and vice versa. You are right, the university’s have taken the King’s shilling, twice over. They have committed themselves to be recruiters for the market place, but they are not living up to the obligation: we take students in with market/job-oriented arguments and then do not live up to that. I agree, But what exactly would a “commensurate effort into ensuring that students are in fact transitioning to the labour market efficiently” look like? What kind of influences or controls do universities exercise over the job market that would make such a mission even feasible? I’m not convinced that universities have the ability, far less the will, to do what you are suggesting.
You seem to agree with my point about what you call credentialism (which I’m not really sure is the right word for employers requiring that you need a BA to work at, for example, the counter of a car rental company). But you seem to separate it from the other points about how universities treat students whom they have drawn in with the promise of better job prospects. I don’t think so, though. Fodder in, fodder out. We’re all part of the sausage factory.
Hi James,
I think a large part of it starts with curriculum. Canadian universities – in the Arts and Sciences anyway – tend not to take the notion of curriculum especially seriously: it’s very much a smorgasboard approach to credit accumulation as opposed to a co-ordinated process of ensuring that students obtain certain competencies and and transversal skills (Louis Menand’s recent book “The Marketplace of Ideas” gives a nice overview about how the fragmentation of the curriculum occurred in the US, but I think much of that is applicable to Canada). I like the way that a lot of European institutions have started using input from employers to understand the kinds of transversal skills that students a) will need in their search for employment and b) can be incorporated even into a non-professional program such as social sciences and humanities (you can see some of the ways this has been done in history here: http://www.coimbra-group.eu/balance/Docs/turku/International%20Aspect%20of%20Bologna%20Process%20-Tuning.ppt).
But, more directly than that, simply being in touch with the kinds of skills students want and need isn’t difficult. Institutions do graduate surveys all the time. Why not ask students specifically: which courses were most/least valuable to you in your current job and why? You’d get a sense pretty quickly of what competencies students think they obtained and what kinds of courses were best at giving it to them. Faculty wouldn’t have to actually do that kind of research themselves – that’s work for people in IR departments and such; but as long as professors actually read and absorb that kind of research, then they could be reasonably in touch with some key aspects of the transition process. You could organize a session once a year with a group of employers of their own recent graduates to hear some feedback about what these students could and couldn’t do. And, most importantly, professors could have a session every year or two with the career advisory people to learn about what services they offer so that they can provide that information to students (I’m sure some do this already, but I don;t get the impression it’s a generalized practice).
All three of those examples would involve a lot of work by the institution and is non-academic staff, but only a couple of hours of profs’ time each year. And yet, I think they would make for an institution which is much more in tune with what its students, ultimately, need. (I think the curricular stuff is important, too, but I’m not holding my breath on that).
Alex, thanks again. I mean this in the kindest way (because I think I am really more sympathetic to your views than many of my colleagues) but you need to stop using phrases like “transversal skills” if you really hope to win over the humanists 😉 Seriously, thanks for the links – I will follow up.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean re curricular matters. Some departments offer a smorgasbord, others have a much more routinized process of requirements, prerequisites, etc. Regardless, I don’t think any department approaches curricular issues from the point of view you seem to be proposing, that is one that provides a “co-ordinated process of ensuring that students obtain certain competencies and transversal skills.” I think they would argue that various skills are imparted through the teaching of the discipline. Should more be done to ensure this is happening rather than just assuming it is, absolutely. But as someone who has worked on encouraging curriculum reform for a few years now, what you propose strikes me as very unrealistic (doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it).
A couple of points:
At least in the Arts and Social Sciences, don’t we know the skills that employers want, students need, and universities claim they deliver with a BA degree? An ability for analysis, imaginative interpretation, research skills, precision and clarity of language (verbal and written), healthy scepticism, and so on.
The question then is how do we best combine that kind of education with our responsibilities to our discipline (and our students, most of whom are interested in subjects as well as skills). In theory I don’t think this should be difficult. As you know, all of the above should be very compatible with the study of history, regardless of time or place. Ideally though, it requires a university environment (small-ish classes, students who can afford to be full-time students, more faculty more prepared to accept that their first obligation is not merely content-delivery, and so on).
I hate it when my colleagues immediately start talking about the students when we are discussing what we as faculty can do about a larger problem, but I’m going to do it anyway, just to address one barrier that i see to the kinds of things you propose.
Students, like everyone else, want several things at once. At my university, most students take 5 credits a year and have some combination of work, debt, family responsibilities on top. Frankly, I’m in awe of what many of them achieve, So, say you are one of these students. On one level you “know” what you need in terms of improving skills that will help you academically and in future. You also know that you have a crammed schedule which plays a large part in the courses you choose. So, do you go with a course that asks you to do half a dozen writing assignments each semester, even if some are small, allowing you to develop you writing, analysis, etc. Or do you go with a course which will give you one mid-term test and a final? It’s a tough call for many, I think. They have to make realistic day-to-day choices that may not be in, ideally, their long-term interests. This is not a judgement of the students, rather of the system that politicians and universities have chosen to create around higher education. Repetition, practice, is really important. Was Michael Jordan a genius on the court? Yes. Did he spend hours a week at practice? Also yes. You know this of course, my point is that the modern student-hungry universities have pretty much accepted that they cannot provide the environment that would allow most (not just a few) students to excel). But they continue to pretend that they can. That is the lie within which we live.
I work in what is one of the most writing-intensive departments in our university. We have also moved to introduce discussion groups to large-enrollment courses. We have introduced a co-op program. We have expanded greatly the opportunities for students to do real research, both of a more traditional kind as well as in the digital humanities, documentary-making, and so on. My colleagues are committed to their teaching. We are doing, pedagogy-wise, the right things, I believe. But we also have seen a rising withdrawal rate from courses over the same period of time, not entirely uncorrelated to times when assignments are due. I don’t think it’s down to us all being crap professors. There is a problem that no amount of improved curriculum or professor involvement can resolve: we have created a university environment in which most students (except at perhaps those more privileged institutions) cannot come close to making the most of the opportunities we claim to offer them.
So this does not really respond to your points about curriculum (although I think you really do avoid the question of disciplinary content and priorities that should be
but rather another important point – all the research-backed curriculum advances in the world will not matter if students can get
I think you might have hit the word limit there.
Great post, most of which I agree with completely. Re: disciplinary content v. “transversal skills” (insert your own words here…really I’m not stuck on the term!), I don’t view this as an either/or. I really do think that more careful curriculum planning is key here. And part of that, frankly, is reducing the number of electives, so that students can;t pull out as easily from the difficult courses that bring long-term benefit.
(You’re dead-on about students avoiding a challenge, btw – we actually did some surveying on this about a year ago, which I may dig out and turn into a post).
Alex: I don’t want to present it as students avoiding a challenge. They are so under pressure it’s not funny. I’d do exactly what they are doing.
As to reducing electives – you’re talking about Engineering! Here the Engineering faculty lobbied for a 3-F rule, meaning that if a student failed a required course three times they were out. Guess which faculty immediately started asking for exceptions to be made?
As to the Humanities, I’m not sure you fully understand the bums-on-seats v. required courses dilemma, or the fact that, in history, for example, there is no DISCIPLINARY imperative pushing for more required courses. What you are really talking about it seems to me is required elements within courses that relate to skills. I’m with you there, but good luck!
I’m not making judgements about *why* they avoid the academic challenge. I suspect you’re right about pressures elsewhere.
Re: disciplinary imperatives. More required elements is certainly one option – and there are some disciplines in which that could work. I think you could make an argument for more required courses even in history, though – and really ensure that those required elements get pounded home in those courses. For instance, would it hurt to require students to take intro classes in Canadian, American, European and Chinese history just to ensure some breadth? You could do it by period, too…a little ancient, modern and medieval in order to get the “big sweep”. I realize there;s no disciplinary reason to do it, but there;s no reason not to do it, either. And it would make it easier to ensure all that other good stuff happens as well.
Alex: for me using the word ‘avoid’ is making a judgement.
Your’e losing me on the required courses. Your entire argument has been about skills, etc. Now you are asking “would it hurt to require students to take intro classes in Canadian, American, European and Chinese history just to ensure some breadth?” Of course it wouldn’t. The university has a breadth requirment (which makes you suggestion about students taking four intro courses in areas of history impossible), as does our department. But you were not talking about breadth in terms of times and places of study (our students have that in spades – smorgasbord anyone?) Up until now you have been talking about something else. That’s one of my points. The disciplinary desire to give students a range of historical subjects does not necessarily sit well with what I thought you were talking about – namely a more consistent, and collectively organized emphasis on skills (which I think is a good idea, as I’ve said.
My point was that increasing the number of required courses which focus on a particular set of skills can be done in such a way that there is a disciplinary logic to it. (not one everyone would agree with, obv. but a logic nonetheless).
(I wouldn’t characterize breadth = smorgasboard, btw. The latter is about lack of structure, not lack of depth. At their best, Liberal Arts are about broad, structured, experiences.)
Hi again: ignore the last couple of bits, forgot to delete them after addressing them elsewhere,