How should small colleges prepare students for jobs? Three models

Three stone stairs, Winston-Salem, NC

Three weeks ago Hult International School of Business released survey results under the title, Traditional Degrees Hinder Graduates at Work.  The study found that HR Directors and young employees both widely believe that colleges did a poor job preparing them for their current positions. Hult’s findings were picked up by higher education commentators as yet more evidence that colleges are failing to do what they are supposed to do.  Mark Perna’s widely read Forbes piece, “New Data Reveals Just How Deep the College Crisis Goes” argued that when employees and employers are dissatisfied with the job preparation delivered by colleges, everyone, including colleges, is hurt. Take a few minutes to read both pieces, or any of the hundreds of other recent articles on the failure of higher education to train employees well. Make what you will of them.

My goal in what follows is to describe three models that colleges, employers, and policy-makers have in mind when they say that colleges should prepare students for jobs. Each model has a different conception of what a job is and what a college’s responsibility is to students and employers. While I favor one of these models, particularly for small colleges, any of them could work.  But each requires a different approach to education and different roles for students, employers, and schools. Frequently, all three models exist on campus and they are entangled in the minds of students, professors, and employers. Clarity, then, about the model that a college has in mind is essential, since such clarity then can shape a college’s approach to work and to readying students for the workforce.

The first model suggests that college isn’t primarily about preparation for work. In this model, getting a college education has many purposes, both personal (discover your calling, develop good learning habits, expand your curiosity, adopt a field of study) and public (become civically engaged, build community, advocate for a better society). Preparation for work is not contrary to any of these outcomes, but it is secondary to them.  That is, the job that graduates will pursue is a result of a student’s formation, rather than driving that formation. And thus a student may run through many jobs until they find one that fulfills the private and public values that the student holds. 

This model has many adherents among faculty and staff, and at liberal arts colleges.  And it describes the de facto experience of many college graduates who, regardless of field of study, end up in a job for reasons that are less about the job and more about the sort of life the student seeks at that particular time in their lives. But it depends for success on certain economic and cultural conditions–widely available jobs, decent compensation across the workforce, employers openness to employees with a wide range of backgrounds, confidence about the economy, unencumbered college graduates–which only obtain from time to time and place to place. And it runs contrary to trends in the disciplines, which seek greater specialization and thus prepare students for narrower ranges of jobs. 

The second model is the one at work in studies like the Hult study and much of public policy as well. It assumes the following. There is a thing called a job–manager, say, or nurse. It is largely the same everywhere. Colleges can prepare for the job by teaching them the skills necessary to complete the job. These skills are clearly defined, easily taught, and transferable from the classroom to the job for which the student’s field of study has prepared them. The college is responsible if one of its graduates has the wrong skills to do the job well, or if the employee is dissatisfied with their job. In this model, colleges bear heavy responsibility to employers and students, who, in turn, have little responsibility to the college. Hence the spate of articles blaming educators for workforce dissatisfaction.

I’d like to make two points about this model. First, it misunderstands what a job is and how one prepares for it. No job is a simple amalgamation of skills.  The word job derives from “gobbe”, which means “mass, lump…[or] ‘cart-load’.” Anyone who has had a job knows it to be a cart-load of stuff, some portion of which requires skill (derivation: power of discernment, sound judgement) and some portion of which requires techniques, or tools, or knowledge, or habits or character traits, or any number of other behaviors which a person may or may not be able to learn.

And, there is no such thing as a job.  The same positions in the same field at two different employers vary wildly from each other. A nurse will have learned to use certain tools, have become familiar with many techniques, have developed knowledge about the field in general, and have demonstrated those things by earning a degree and becoming licensed.  But no nurse works in the field in general.  They work in actual places for actual employers with other human beings.  All of these variables make two positions with the same titles and similar descriptions distinct from each other.  Or, put another way–there is no Job, only jobs.

As with the first model, this one only works at certain times and certain places.  It relies on standardization of job responsibilities and of curricula. It treats employees as largely interchangeable.  And it thrives during times when the status of educators lags that of employers, and when students are broadly considered as consumers. It is thus strangely situated today, where on the one hand educators do lag employers in prestige and students are consumers, but on the other, the standardization of jobs and employers is diminishing. It is a model, then, with internal contradictions. Or put another way–it is a model designed to further the dissatisfaction of employers and workers.

The third model requires a partnership between employers, colleges, and students. It assumes that there is a body of knowledge, tools, and techniques that is common across a type of job, but that the application of those things and the development of skill takes place in a particular workplace, not in the classroom.  Thus educators need to ensure that students are learning the right things in the classroom, employers need to be dedicated to training employees in the particular ways that turn their tools, techniques, and knowledge into workplace-specific skill, and students need to aspire to stability in the workforce.

This model, too, relies on certain cultural conditions to work. Employers must be committed to developing their employees. Employees must be committed to their particular job and employer.  And colleges must understand both the particular employers who hire their students, and the particular students they educate.

This third model might thus seem the most fanciful, for it places heavy responsibility on students and employers.  But for certain schools, employers, and students, it works best.  It is the de facto model at the Ivy League schools, where history, alumni relations, and prestige seeking ensure that graduates pursue work at certain employers, not any employer.  It is the model embraced by many top employers–Enterprise, Costco, Deloitte, Chik-Fil-A among them–who spend significant amounts of time and money preparing their employees to do their work in accordance with the culture and expectations of the employer. And of course many of the most popular solutions to the “workforce crisis”–developing more tradespeople, apprenticeships, internships–continue, unwittingly perhaps, to assume that employers should train their employees, and employees should learn to do work at work. 

Let me close by suggesting that while many small colleges assume the value of the first model and are moving under pressure to the second (hence the expansion of certificate offerings and the vogue for “skills” (which are, actually, “techniques” if I were to quibble about what words mean)), it is the third model that suits them best. Healthy small colleges are defined by their focus–be it focus on a particular place or on a particular approach to education.  Such focus on the part of small colleges permits them to recruit specific students–those who share their commitment to content or to place. And it permits them to build partnerships with the specific employers who desire their graduates. When those things happen then colleges can focus on the work they do best–helping students learn particular things that will serve them in the particular places they will do their work.