One of the lasting impacts of the COVID virus is going to be the destruction it has wrought in the youth labour market.  There are two main problems: first, the virus has most strongly affected the tourist and service industries in which students most commonly find work, and second, the recession is inevitably going to play havoc with the kinds of entry level jobs that young graduates normally get.  What should universities and colleges do?

Simple: double down on work-integrated learning.

Now, I should pause and clear the air here because there is no faster way in universities to start a bad faith fight than to link higher education and employment (colleges are different, obviously).  As soon as you say this, there is a band of professors who will sneer at the idea that they will be asked to teach “mere” skills, or that they are turning their students into cannon fodder for the knowledge economy, or whatever. And then in return you will get people commenting on “why are we subsidizing education which doesn’t lead to anything”, etc. etc. 

It’s almost all nonsense and based on each side choosing to deliberately mischaracterize the arguments of the other side.  Almost everyone understands that students regularly list “getting a better job” as their main reason for attending school, and that the social contract under which universities receive public funding for what they do depends very precisely on giving students this leg up in the labour market.   And almost everyone understands that universities teach a variety of skills and competencies across a range of disciplines, some of which are more relevant to working life in the short term and others more useful for a range of ends over the long term and that it all kind of works out in the end. It is not beyond the wit of people to find better ways of combining those two different types of skills, and there’s nothing obviously wrong with tweaking the balance between the long and short terms, either in response to student demand or due to external circumstances. 

(For example, at the University of Waterloo, students in Classics, Medieval Studies and Philosophy are all eligible to do co-op work terms.  Does this make graduates of these programs any worse as classicists, medievalists or philosophers?  No?  Then what is the freaking problem?)

End of digression.  Point is, students and new graduates need a helping hand to get their working lives started and work-integrated learning of various kinds is one of the best ways to provide this help.  To make a commitment to WIL effective, institutions need to overcome four big barriers.

Finding WIL spots for students.  I know there has been a fad at some institutions for re-classifying work done inside the institution as work-integrated learning, but it doesn’t really compare to getting students into private or public workplaces outside the institution.  And those spots are going to be hard to come by for the next couple of years.  Institutions that want to do well in the next few years are going to put a lot more effort than usual into securing spots for students.  For instance, instead of asking business or wealthy individuals for philanthropic contributions, they could tell them that helping students now through providing more WIL placements is a more pressing contribution.

Helping Employers Make WIL More Meaningful.  One of the basic challenges in WIL – be it co-op or apprenticeships or internships – is getting employers to think of themselves not just as a place of work but as a place of learning.  This is tough: North American employers are more inclined to see their participation in terms of self-interest (“can we find our next great employee from this placement”) than in terms of contribution to the general interest (“can we make this person a better employee for everyone”) as, say German ones do.   It’s not something that any individual institution can do on their own, but it is certainly something each can contribute to by providing employers with guidelines and encouragement about how students can be better supervised and mentored during their term of employment.

Better integrating WIL into the institutional curriculum.  WIL has to be more than just a part-time job.  The hard work is helping students integrate what they have learned into their overall education.  As a rule of thumb (yes, there are exceptions), most co-op programs are pretty good at this and most forms of WIL short of co-op status are not so good.  And the reason is co-op is fundamentally curricular while other forms of WIL often have a fundamentally extra-curricular feel to them.  This might be the hardest recommendation of the lot, because curriculum changes require professorial time and that’s in short supply even at the best of times.  But it’s important and needs to be a priority.

Measuring WIL. I know, I this is Canada, and no one cars about data because data might actually hold people and programs accountable and that’s about as unCanadian as it gets.  But bear with me: everyone in the field knows that the lived experience of WIL varies widely from one placement to the next.  WIL varies by field of study, by industry.  It varies by the kind of work performed and the kind of supervision given.  It varies by length and intensity.  But we have literally no idea how any of this changes student outcomes.  And yet it wouldn’t be impossible to get a much better picture of this.  If even a dozen institutions actually kept a student-level data record of each student’s WIL experience (length, industry, etc.), including the results of a short student survey (e.g. quality of supervision, degree of linkage to program goals), linked that to the student’s larger student record, and then pursued follow-up inquiries, either through graduate surveys or the kind of tax-data linkage that my friend Ross Finnie and his colleagues at EPRI do so well, we would actually be able to get a much better sense of what kinds of WIL experiences genuinely add to students’ long-term outcomes.  It’s really not that taxing to implement (seriously, get in touch if this is something you want to work on): what’s missing is the will to collect the data and then act on the findings.

It’s going to be a difficult few years.  Students are going to be desperate for their institutions to show them this kind of support.  Can we give it to them?