For decades, the message we’ve sent to young people has been clear: go to college to improve your career prospects.
But as it turns out, there’s a gap—sometimes a wide one—between earning a degree and getting a job. Especially one that pays off.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, nearly 40 percent of recent college graduates are underemployed. In other words, they are working in jobs that don’t actually require their hard-earned degree. At the same time, students who are first in their family to graduate college earn a fraction of what their peers whose parents attended college make. Pew Research Center found that households headed by a first-generation college graduate had a median annual income of $99,600 compared with $135,800 for households headed by those with at least one parent who graduated from college.
What’s happening on college campuses to address this disconnect? The short answer is not nearly enough. For too long, campuses have largely left students to their own devices, offering only a small, underfunded office to support their futures: career services. In their current state, most career services offices are ill-equipped to tackle the opportunity gaps that underlie employment and wage gaps.
College career services suffer from low capacity, low usage, and low utility. Average student-to-staff ratios are laughable, with an alarming one career services professional to 2,263 students, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). It’s hardly surprising, then, that Gallup found that only 43% of students deem their career services helpful. At the same time, large swaths of students are either unaware of or underwhelmed by the offering in the first place: only about half of college grads report having visited their career services office at all, according to Gallup.
Career services weren’t always so anemic. Historically, many played an actual job placement function. In the 1950s, they made their mark by matching GI Bill grads with opportunities in the booming economy.
But in the ensuing decades, as college enrollment expanded significantly, that commitment to job placement gave way to a more diffuse mission. Career services today operate with an open door policy, providing students who come to them with information to go out and find their own jobs.
That halfhearted approach misses what most students need. As broader swaths of the population have gone to college in hopes of a brighter future, today’s college students— particularly those enrolled in non-selective institutions, working and commuting, and first in their family to attend college—require more than generic advice or opt-in guidance to put their degrees to work. They need access to networks.
Half of all internships and jobs come through personal connections—connections first-generation students or those from low-income households often don’t have, and often don’t build during college. And according to research by Strada Education Foundation, only about 1 in 5 first-generation seniors reported networking with alumni or other professionals in their fields of interest compared to nearly a third of continuing-generation students.
Access to a network doesn’t just mean knowing people who can share job postings or provide references—critical as that may be. Stronger networks can also afford students access to advocates and mentors who can help them make sense of how their interests align to various professions and provide specific feedback as they start to apply and interview for roles.
Luckily, leaders and faculty are starting to explore what it will take to ensure that more students graduate with the networks they need to get the jobs they want. To increase access to things like work experiences, high-touch mentoring, and deeper alumni networks, some colleges and universities are integrating career services more expansively across their entire enterprise. These initiatives—like the one at Johns Hopkins University—often sit in the president’s cabinet, relying on significant leadership and resources.
At the other end of the spectrum sit initiatives like a weekend networking academy at Cal State Fullerton, led from the ground up by faculty. Those efforts often operate outside of traditional university channels—making them more open and nimble, but short on funding.
Both approaches hold their own promise—and highlight potential paths forward for universities rethinking career services from the top down or the ground up.
Designing lives at Johns Hopkins
One of the boldest university-wide experiments is underway at Johns Hopkins University, which the institution has dubbed Life Design. The concept is rooted in one man’s vision: Farouk Dey, who came to JHU from leading Stanford’s office of student affairs and career exploration.
As Dey had watched classes of bright, ambitious students circulate through his office, he saw two ingredients buoying some graduates into successful careers and lives: an “audacious move after a moment of inspiration” and mentors who encouraged them to take an uncertain and risky path.
But he also saw how inspiration, connection, and a willingness to take risks prove unequal goods—even on elite college campuses—where experiences like internships sit on the periphery of the academic core. These experiences are often accessible for those students who have the time, networks, money, know-how, and confidence to take advantage of them.
“Privilege does play a role in our accidental moments of inspiration. It does influence our access to mentors,” Dey explained in a 2019 TEDx talk. “When systems put the onus on the individual to seek mentoring and to seek experiences that can transform their lives, we end up with a culture of haves and have nots.”
In Dey’s estimation, students from families with deeper pockets and broader networks are engaging in designing their lives throughout their education journey, not just searching for jobs in their final semester. Wealthier students can take on the risks of an unpaid internship or can afford to not work while studying abroad. In turn, when it comes time to secure a job, those students have already had plentiful at-bats to explore their passions. For low-income and first-generation college-goers, those decisions look very different:
“The idea of taking risks is not that easy if there are other life circumstances students are worried about,” said Dey.
To cure those divides, Dey’s vision of Life Design at JHU has been to engage all students, particularly those students from low-income households, first in their family to attend college, and students of color, in immersive experiences throughout their time on campus. In addition to radically expanding access to experiences like internships and study abroad, the Life Design initiative focuses on relationships. “Life purpose cannot be planned or predicted,” Dey explained in his TEDx talk. “It is lured out of hiding with the help of mentors and the right mindset.”
To that end, every student is assigned a mentor, often a JHU alum working in a field related to students’ interests. Dey sees mentors as serving a few key functions: encouraging students to explore and take risks; mitigating those risks by offering wisdom, warm introductions, and even financial support; and role modeling for students what a career journey can look like.
Arming students with immersive experiences and mentors is paying off:
- Over the past five years, JHU has nearly doubled student satisfaction with career supports.
- It has closed career outcome gaps between first-generation and continuing-generation students, and between white students and students of color, as measured by the First Destination Survey.
- It also has significantly lessened gaps between low-income students and their more affluent peers.
Some top-tier colleges and universities are taking a similar tack to Johns Hopkins, not just rethinking how to structure “career services” per se, but integrating career exploration and experience across the student experience.
For example, Colby College’s president boldly issued a jobs guarantee to graduates on the heels of COVID’s hiring halt, and the college continues to expand access to work, study abroad, and research experiences through its DavisConnects initiative. At Wake Forest, where the head of the Office of Personal and Career Development has vocally advocated that career services “must die,” students engage in ongoing “personal career development,” accessing a broader array of supports connecting students to employers and mentors, and enlisting their administration and faculty in those efforts.
Promising as these holistic, campus-wide approaches are, they remain the exception rather than the rule. Especially at lesser-resourced college campuses.
It’s those lesser-resourced campuses, however, that serve the majority of first-generation and Pell-eligible students. On campuses unable or unwilling to overhaul their approach, more modest programs supplementing career services, and drawing on resources and networks beyond capacity-constrained campuses and career centers, could move the needle further, faster on equitably connecting students to careers.
Across the country, at California State University, Fullerton’s business program, Professor David Obstfeld is building one such approach.
