Success in College Requires Different Strategy Than When I Went 35 Years Ago
College 35 Years Ago
When I went to Cal State 35 years ago, tuition was $78 a quarter my freshman year in 1979.
Tuition “escalated” to $244 a quarter by the time I got my Masters degree in the mid 1980s.
Because college was affordable, I graduated with no debt.
In contrast, today, tuition has had 2,000% inflation and college debt averages close to $30K per student.
At that time, you could major in anything and get a good job. At that time, good jobs were more like low-hanging fruit. That is no longer true.
College Today
Now over half of college graduates in their thirties still live with their parents. The cost of education, causing enormous debt of $30K or more, ridiculous housing costs, and super tight job market have radically changed what it means to be a college student today.
The stakes are higher today in terms of needing to pay enormous costs, needing to know growing job fields, and needing to know specific job skills.
The American Dream is on life support right now. The top 20% are doing fine, but most of my students are below the Top 20%.
Mistakes I Made in College and Similar Mistakes I See in My College Students Today
One. I was too self-absorbed and not engaged enough in the college experience of networking, getting to know professors, developing meaningful social connections.
Two. I didn’t listen in class. My mind wandered. I was either disaffected, anxious, and self-absorbed typical of an angry young male in the 1970s. I was learning next to nothing in the classroom.
Three. I was too lazy in terms of taking path of less resistance. I was too impatient with coursework that proved difficult. I remember taking an accounting class, and I was so revoluted by the first day’s presentation of some difficult formula that during the class break I walked out of class and never returned.
Four. I embraced a stupid idea that is less true today. It’s called Everything Will Fall Into Place Fallacy. What this is is the assumption that if I follow society’s script, go to college and do reasonably well, everything will fall into place.
My Good Luck
I got lucky. After I got my Masters in English, I was a professional bum working at a wine store in Berkeley. Three people, all friends, propelled my career: Michael Elizalde Senior, Lee Adams and Will Moton.
But just because I got lucky in the 1980s and 90s doesn’t mean my students will be so lucky.
That’s a stupid and dangerous assumption. The statistics show that everything does not fall into place.
In a survey of 503 entry-level job seekers by national career matchmaking firm GradStaff, recent college grads seem largely unaware of career opportunities and unsure of how to apply their skills in the workforce. We can, for example, look at this CNBC article:
The survey, conducted from May to September 2016, revealed inefficient career preparation, job search methods and entry-level recruiting tactics. Among the key findings:
- Nearly 70 percent of respondents were either unemployed or working in a full-time non-professional job to make ends meet.
- Another 20 percent had full-time professional jobs, but were already looking for a new one.
- Respondents had been looking for work an average of 3.6 months and applied for about 23 jobs – an average of less than two applications per week.
- About half of respondents had participated in fewer than two interviews during the average job search time frame.
- 86 percent of respondents reported having no job offers pending at the time they took the survey.
Some Things I Did in College That Were Helpful
One. I realized I was ignorant and took steps to overcome my ignorance by isolating myself while doing homework in giant time blocks of laser focus.
Two. I identified subjects I wasn’t learning in the classroom and went home and read the text to teach myself. For example, I never grasped grammar lessons in class, but I could read a grammar book and understand the content on my own. Once I developed a baseline of grammar acquisition, I had the confidence to take advanced grammar, a class the students were struggling with, and I aced that class.
This condition of being self-taught is called autodidacticism. I tend to be hardwired to be an autodidactic learner. Once I identified that, my GPA improved dramatically.
Three. I got rid of my Energy Vampires. We all have Energy Vampires. It could be social media, a friend who’s proven to be dead weight, or some addiction or other.
At the time, I had a buddy I went to high school with. We trained at the gym together and cruised the Strip, East Fourteenth Street, in Hayward and San Lorenzo. We were going nowhere. The friendship was what I would call “limited.” He had dropped out of college several times and kept going to the unemployment office for dead-end jobs: ketchup factory, margarine factory, Toys R Us. I noticed we were moving in different directions. Eventually, the friendship died, and my GPA improved.
Energy Vampires kill us slowly. It’s a gradual slippery slope. You don’t realize you’re failing in life until you’re deep in the rabbit hole.
I had a student who spent 7 years in prison because he was hanging out with a bunch of “knuckleheads,” to use his term, and they did more and more stupid stuff. He spent 7 long years in prison. Now he works full-time driving a forklift and is inching his way to getting a business degree. He has zero association with those knuckleheads.
7 Things You Can Do to Improve Your Success in Getting a Career
One. Know the job market for near future so you have relevant skills. Steer away from dying jobs and steer toward growing ones.
Two. Know how to network. Studies show networking is the difference between success and failure.
Three. Get an internship during your senior year of college. Many if not most employers throw away applications that have no job experience in the field. They don’t care about a college degree if there is no job experience attached to it.
Four. Assume your college is doing nothing to build bridge between you and employer so that you take the responsibility to build that bridge. This means learning how to network, getting an internship, and knowing what specific skills employees want.
Five. Reject the Passion Hypothesis (“follow your dream”) as infantile dangerous nonsense that will make you penniless and jobless. Equally dangerous is the idea that you will take a personality test that will match you to your dream job.
Six. Replace the Passion Hypothesis with a craftsman mindset (habits of deep, sustained, focused work) to be competitive in a zero-sum-game career field (zero-sum game means for every winner there is a loser).
Seven. Restrict your use of smartphone and social media, both of which bite huge chunks of time from your schedule and short circuit your brain, making you less competitive.
Colleges Failing to Help Students Find Jobs
Why students aren’t finding jobs on CNBC: Excerpt:
The most popular job search strategies focused on job-posting aggregators like Indeed, conventional job posting sites such as CareerBuilder and Monster, and professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Although 78 percent of respondents reported having created a LinkedIn profile, only 24 percent said they used this tool "very often" in looking for a job. In terms of personal networking, only 40 percent said they used this job search strategy "very often."
Regarding employer size, 92 percent of respondents stated they'd prefer employers of 1,000 employees or less, with 30 percent of the total preferring smaller employers of 100 employees or less. With only 8 percent preferring large employers, the Class of 2016 is strongly interested in working for the small and medium employer.
Interpreting the survey data leads me to several important conclusions:
- New graduates are often leaving college without the knowledge necessary to conduct an effective job search. Not knowing what jobs are a fit or what can be done with a specific major is clearly an obstacle. Unfortunately, this information is readily available as colleges can collect this data from alumni, but, in most cases, this information is not available to students.
- Career services departments are not connecting with students. We believe that the data points to two reasons. First, students are pushing off their job searches until after graduation, whether to take some time off, travel, or to just try and figure out what's next. Second, with only about 37 percent giving their career services department an above average rating, it is clear colleges need to improve the student experience.
- Job seekers continue to rely heavily on online search tools. Based on the finding that college grads "don't know what jobs are a fit for me," it is highly likely that many jobs are overlooked due to lack of knowledge not available through online search tools. A psychology major working in a healthcare software position may not be obvious, but is a real life example of what can happen with the right knowledge.
- With new grads more interested in small and medium employers, job prospects are good since employers of 500 employees or less create two-thirds or more of the new jobs in the U.S. economy. However, these companies don't typically interview on campus. Thus, personal networking is critical in finding opportunities with small and medium employers – a technique used by less than half of job seekers.
The data shows that the pathway from student to entry-level professional worker is both long and hard for many new college graduates. Students must start the process earlier and colleges must improve the services they offer students in career readiness and practical job search skills. Finally, the data highlights a clear need for third-party innovators to assist both colleges and students in making the pathway to the first job more successful. By helping to make connections between career-ready students and the employers who want to hire them, third-party resources can play a key role in the hiring economy.
Commentary by Robert J. LaBombard, CEO, GradStaff, Inc., an online career site that helps college graduates find jobs. Mr. LaBombard has more than 22 years of staffing industry experience as CEO of GradStaff, Inc. and founder and CEO of EnviroStaff, Inc.
Colleges failing both students and employers in Forbes: Excerpt:
Higher education is failing to meet the needs of both students and employers, and only a fundamental transformation can put it on the right track.
These are the findings of a major survey of leaders in industry and academia, which cast doubt on higher education’s ability to fulfil a core role of preparing graduates for the world of work.
And the results will add to the voices calling for a complete rethink of the purpose and value of a college degree.
IBM’s Institute for Business Value, in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit, surveyed almost 1,000 industry and academia leaders for their views on the issues confronting higher education.
The results paint a picture of a broken system that is in desperate need of repair.
According to the survey, fewer than half of respondents - 49% - felt higher education was meeting the needs of students, while a smaller proportion still, 41%, said it met industry’s needs. Only 43% said it gave students the skills they needed to join the workforce.
This is not an isolated study. A survey reported in these pages last year found that fewer than two in five managers thought college graduates were well-prepared for a job in their field of study.
There seems to be a growing consensus that a college degree does not provide graduates with the grounding they need to move seamlessly into the workforce.
And yet this is one of the core purposes of higher education. The IBM study ranked job placement rates as the most important measure of effectiveness, just ahead of instilling creativity and problem-solving skills in students. Interestingly, it was educators themselves who were most convinced of the importance of getting students into jobs.
Why are so many students failing to find good jobs after college in WP (networking): Excerpt:
In a survey of more than 11,000 college graduates, the Gallup-Purdue Index found that fewer than half of recent graduates — those who graduated since 2010 — found the career center helpful or very helpful. And that’s just among the students who visited the career center at least once. Six in 10 recent graduates said they never visited the career office as an undergraduate.
Among the graduates of all years who said in the survey that career services were very helpful, 49 percent of them said that they had a good job waiting for them after graduation. Just 15 percent who said career services weren’t helpful said the same about their job prospects after graduation.
[Being from a privileged background helps men, but not women, get top jobs]
No wonder so many students are struggling to launch after college. Nearly half of new graduates are underemployed, working jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A study that was released last week found that the likelihood young adults will earn more than their parents has fallen dramatically in the past few decades. Just half of Americans born in 1984 earned more at age 30 than their parents did at the same age.
College officials will defend their career services by saying students share the responsibility in finding a good job after graduation, and they are certainly right in that assessment. Students find jobs in all kinds of ways, not just by visiting the career center. The Gallup survey found that 20 percent of students acquired an internship or job through a friend. Another half found their jobs through professors or other staff members on campus.
Such informal networks, often established for the first time in college, are the way many students find out about internships and jobs. It’s the reason students, and especially their parents, drive themselves crazy to get into Stanford or Harvard. It’s not because the education is so much better at those places; it’s because of the network students connect to, through the parents of their classmates, alumni, and eventually through the students themselves when they become alumni.
Navigating that network, however, is difficult for many students. Fewer than half of college seniors in the annual National Survey of Student Engagement, a poll of college freshmen and seniors, said they talked often with a faculty member about their career plans.
At selective colleges, students who lack social capital, particularly lower-income students, often find it tough to plug into a network. Affluent students typically can draw on family resources after college to make up for their weak academic records as undergraduates, according to a study of freshmen women at Indiana University that resulted in the 2013 book, Paying for the Party.
So while a group of elite colleges pledged this week to enroll 50,000 more low-income students in the coming decade, they will need to do more than just provide them the aid for tuition and living expenses. Those students will need help in navigating the informal campus networks, and in getting the internships during college that are of increasing importance for landing a good job afterward.
The economy and the job market have evolved in ways that make the typical college playbook for preparing students for post-graduation no longer relevant. Graduates expect colleges to help them find jobs. Those in the Gallup-Purdue survey who said their career offices were helpful were three times more likely than those who didn’t to think their degrees were worth the price and two and half times more likely to donate to their schools.
Perhaps it’s that last finding that will finally persuade colleges — and even professors — that it’s part of their job to help students find jobs.
Why do so many college students lack job skills? In the WP (reasoning and analytical skills): Excerpt:
Bosses, of course, have long complained that newly minted college grads are not ready for the world of work, but there is a growing body of evidence that what students learn — or more likely don’t learn — in college makes them ill-prepared for the global job market. Two studies in just the past few weeks show that the clear signal a college degree once sent to employers that someone is ready for a job increasingly has a lot of noise surrounding it.
One study is the result of a test administered to 32,000 students at 169 colleges and universities. It found that 40 percent of college seniors fail to graduate with the complex reasoning skills needed in today’s workplace. The test, the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, is given to freshmen and seniors and measures the gains made during college in critical thinking, writing and communication, and analytical reasoning.
The results of the test found little difference between those students who graduated from public colleges and those who went to private schools. Not surprisingly, students who graduated from the best colleges did better than everyone else on the test as seniors, but their gains since taking the test as freshmen were actually smaller than those students who graduated from less elite schools.
The big difference between the skills of graduates depended on their college major: Students who studied math and science scored significantly higher than those who studied in the so-called helping and service fields, such as social work, and in business, which is the most popular college major.
A second study released this month found a similar disconnect between what employers need and the readiness of college seniors. In a pair of surveys by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, would-be graduates said college armed them with the skills needed for the job market. But employers disagreed. On a range of nearly 20 skills, employers consistently rated students much lower than they judged themselves. While 57 percent of students said they were creative and innovative, for example, just 25 percent of employers agreed.
Employers tell me that students who dedicate time and effort to their major or an outside-the-classroom activity, secure multiple internships during their four years, and take on leadership roles are more likely to possess the skills needed for the workforce than students who drift through college. The best skill that students can learn in college is actually the ability to learn.
“People know how to take a course. But they need to learn how to learn,” said John Leutner, head of global learning at Xerox. The reason he said so many workers take time management courses is that while they were in college someone else set their priorities for them. “College graduates now,” he told me, “move into a contextual job, not a task-based job.”
The best preparation for today’s job market is a mix of classroom learning that can be applied in real-world experiences, or a combination of academic experience and practical experience. “Our best employees are problem solvers and are able to weave everything they know together,” said Artim, of Enterprise. “They can think on their feet.”
What these recent studies show is that too many students are focused on the wrong things in college. Too many of them are worried, for example, about picking the right college major for the job market, when it really doesn’t matter what they major in as long as they are rigorous in their studies as well as activities beyond the classroom.
There is also too much emphasis these days on picking a practical field of study, which is why business is the most popular undergraduate major. But employers need people who are broadly educated and have practical skills. Too many colleges are failing to provide that guidance and those opportunities to students while saddling them with debt they won’t be able pay off in the unemployment line.
One of the country’s most-sought-after employers, Google, has found that it is increasingly hiring people without college degrees because the signal of the credential is no longer as clear as it used to be that someone is job ready. If colleges don’t provide the mix of academic and practical experiences that students need and students fail to take advantage of them, pretty soon we’ll see other employers looking for alternatives to the college degree as well.
Growing Jobs
“The 50 Best Jobs in America, According to the Glassdoor”
8 College Majors with Great Job Prospects
Best College Majors for Highest Paying Jobs
Best 10 Cities for Job Seekers
Essay #1 One: So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Two Essay Options
Essay Option A. Support or refute Cal Newport’s claim that the Passion Hypothesis is both a misguided and dangerous idea.
Essay Option B. In context of Cal Newport’s craftsman mindset manifesto and other essays we’ve read about career building for college students, develop an argumentative thesis about what college students need to do to remain relevant in a changing economy.
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