Ask college presidents to list the top priorities for their institutions, and the quality of undergraduate career services ranks—according to a mischievous saying—“somewhere below parking.” If you are frustrated about the limited amount of on-campus career guidance offered to you or if you’re feeling guilty about not making good use of the services that were available, you aren’t alone. In December 2016, a Gallup-Purdue survey of eleven thousand college grads found only 52 percent had visited their career centers during their campus days. Of that group, about half felt the advice they received was either “not at all helpful” or only “somewhat helpful.”
There’s no reason such shortcomings need to continue. Over the years, I’ve seen universities build exciting new academic departments, ranging from cognitive science to astrobiology, on the strength of a few scholars’ zeal. I’ve seen the quality of dining-hall meals go from dismal to surprisingly tasty. I’ve seen women’s sports programs overcome decades of neglect, emerging as thrilling centerpieces of campus pride that fill big stadiums and win television contracts. The people who run colleges and universities are builders by nature. They like to think big, and their next worthy challenge is right in front of them.
What if campus leaders channeled their creative energies into liberal arts career readiness in ways that paired well with the open-ended spirit of academic discovery? Imagine a campus where you could savor great literature, immerse yourself in social sciences fieldwork, and still build credibility in the job sectors that intrigued you. Call it a critical thinker’s nirvana. Let’s dream a bit.
When you arrive on this campus, you discover the classic freshman seminar has been redefined in a way that’s both mind-stretching and good for your eventual career. If you sign up for a class on Perception, Illusion, and Technology, you might start in humanists’ territory, exploring the philosophical underpinnings of imagined existence. Before long, you leap into the engineer’s world, discovering how today’s most advanced virtual-reality systems work. Co-teaching would become the norm, as professors from different disciplines combined forces to help you see complex issues from different vantage points.
When you declare your major, you don’t just click a few buttons on a web page. Instead, you become an invited guest at a celebratory dinner where you are surrounded by people who share your academic focus. This is the perfect moment to mingle with your professors, collecting advice about how to put this new specialty to work. Even better, you will be seated at a table with several alumni who are eager to offer career advice and networking support.
If you are partway through college and don’t yet have a coherent job-market strategy, your campus understands your predicament. For decades, people like you have been tagged as laggards who “visit the career center too late” and “don’t return for follow-up visits.” Better options have arrived. As a sophomore or junior, you and other liberal arts majors are invited (or perhaps even required) to delve into career strategies in the same highly structured classroom setting where so much other learning takes place.
Sign up for classes such as Taking Initiative or Exploring the World of Work and get ready for a semester-long run of coaching, exploratory exercises, group projects, and solo tasks, with a letter grade at the end. No matter how chaotic everything seems at first, you will start taking charge of your destiny as these one-credit academic classes play out. Because you take these courses a year or two before graduation, you’ll have plenty of time to act on your new knowledge before being cast into the wider world.
When you do visit the career-development center, expect another happy surprise. You won’t necessarily start by creating a résumé and booking thirty-minute interview slots with whatever giant companies are coming to campus. That is a winning approach for people with tightly defined vocational majors, but it isn’t necessarily right for you. In this new environment, you and a liberal arts–focused counselor will huddle for a reassuring and energizing conversation about you.
Think about the opportunities described in chapter 4, “My Job Didn’t Exist a Year Ago.” Thousands of openings arise every week for liberal arts graduates with the enthusiasm and temperament to prevail in uncharted domains. You can start preparing for those moments by chatting with a counselor about your own likes, strengths, and values. Those conversations help determine the workplace settings where you should thrive. Just as important, you master the art of telling your story in ways that make employers say, “We should hire you,” even if they don’t have an immediate opening posted. What seems like a free-form chat is actually an astute way of pinpointing fit while preserving flexibility about the exact industry or job title where a match might occur.
Once that groundwork is completed, you will be encouraged to spend 60 percent of your time networking and only 10 percent sending out applications. Again, that isn’t how the business and chemistry majors do it—but it’s right for you. You and your new allies may invent the right job in the course of getting to know one another. Making new acquaintances can shade into job talks so smoothly that it’s often possible to be hired without ever putting in a formal application.
Need a part-time job on campus? Traditionally each academic department takes care of its own, which leaves liberal arts majors in a bad place. You may end up scraping plates in the cafeteria while biology majors sharpen their résumés (and get paid) as lab assistants. In our new world, that caste system disappears. When the business school needs undergraduates to help with digital marketing, it welcomes English majors. In fact, a sizable percentage of stepping-stone jobs are explicitly set aside for humanities students, because your campus wants you to be career-ready too.
Looking for a summer internship that will add some sparkle to your résumé? You’re in luck. Your college is committed to helping each student find a summer job that’s much more than a job. Alumni and career counselors have identified organizations, big and small, that want summer interns like you. If you have something unique in mind, your counselors will help you create a job that didn’t exist until you made it happen.
Finally, if you came to college without a cushion of family wealth or contacts to help you along, in this new world, your campus wants to open doors for you too. The liberal arts track is too powerful—and too necessary for our society—to be seen as an elitist luxury. If family finances are tight, expect stipends that let you accept the most valuable internships, regardless of what they pay. If you run into postgraduation stumbles, count on your campus to keep sharing job leads and networking opportunities for many years after you graduate. Whether you’re the daughter of Haitian immigrants or the son of Iowa farmers who never went to college, expect your campus to help you build a diverse network that’s uniquely right for you.
Does such a campus exist?
The answer is tantalizing. We’re far from establishing this entire approach as standard fare on major campuses. Yet each individual element is already in place—and succeeding—somewhere. Some of the innovations cited above can be found within the colleges of arts and sciences at giant public universities such as Alabama, Arizona State, Indiana, Ohio State, Rutgers, San Jose State, and Wisconsin. Other breakthrough programs are being piloted by smaller private universities such as Clark, Colgate, Stanford, and Wake Forest. Still other initiatives are already happening at innovative liberal arts colleges across the country.
The essential elements needed to connect a liberal arts education to career success are right in front of us. Their effectiveness has been proven. What remains is to embrace these best practices more widely so today’s rare excellence becomes tomorrow’s common good.
Academia, of course, is famous for convening panels of experts who survey the state of liberal arts education every decade or two without doing much about the problems. Right now, good intentions are abundant. Decisive action is what’s in short supply. I’ve spent time puzzling over the reasons why some campuses mobilize fast on behalf of liberal arts graduates’ job prospects while others remain stuck at the hand-wringing stage. Typically, the following four factors make the difference.
When the President Gets Involved
In his 2011 State of the University speech, Wake Forest president Nathan Hatch raced through his usual updates (faculty salaries, new dorms, et cetera). He explained that he was preoccupied by “a major crisis that, in the last five years, has confronted recent college graduates, particularly liberal arts students.” The overall job market had fallen apart in the 2007–2009 recession. For many students at his North Carolina campus, it wasn’t getting better. In Hatch’s words, “A Wake Forest degree is no longer an automatic ticket to a fulfilling professional position. Our graduates today are coming of age in an economy that can easily crush even the best and the brightest.”
To fight back, Hatch embarked on a multiyear effort to beef up Wake Forest’s career-development office. At times, his zeal mirrors a college president’s response when the football team stinks and everyone is tired of losing. (You know the drill: Pay whatever it takes to hire a mighty new coach who is a proven winner, build a new stadium, triple the budget, and so on.) The early years of this turnaround campaign were nicely described in a 2013 New York Times feature that showcased Hatch’s success in recruiting Stanford Business School’s career-development chief, Andy Chan, to take over a similar job at Wake Forest. The campus’s rapidly expanding career-development office, housed in an elegant new building, looked like a winner. Whether it could live up to appearances would take longer to tell.
Six years later, it’s fascinating to look at the career-friendly initiatives that have sprung up at Wake Forest, nurtured by the belief that this is what the president wants. On most campuses, career-development teams struggle for visibility. Typically, they report to a vice president of student affairs, who in turn may have trouble getting the president’s ear. As a result, promising ideas that need buy-in from other parts of the university tend to die slow deaths. That’s not Hatch’s approach—and it’s not Chan’s constant frustration. The two men have set up a direct reporting arrangement that makes it easy to race forward in dozens of ways. Among the notable initiatives:
• Academic credit for career classes. Such offerings didn’t exist at Wake Forest until the 2011–2012 academic year. Now there are five of them, ranging from Counseling 120 (Personal Framework for Career Exploration) to Counseling 360 (Professional and Life Skills).
• Visiting the big cities. A decade ago, Wake Forest students who wanted to explore high-prestige careers in New York, Washington, DC, and other job hubs needed to set up exploratory interviews on their own. College-sponsored group expeditions are common now. The North Carolina school runs four highly organized Treks each year, providing hundreds of students with access to renowned employers ranging from Calvin Klein to the Brookings Institution and Google. Campus schedules have been adjusted so that trips and breaks align; trips and exams dodge each other.
• Interdisciplinary classes. Turf-protecting is a way of life in academia, and that can impede efforts to create classes that blend liberal arts thinking and practical managerial applications. At Wake Forest, the barriers to collaboration across different schools have come down. Business-school instructors and liberal arts professors reach accords about how to label courses, design the curriculum, and set up cross-listings. That way, students in different programs can make progress toward their majors. As a result, dual-track courses have come to life for topics such as High Performance Teams and Design Thinking and Innovation Leadership Through Communication.
Can we see a tangible payoff in Wake Forest’s initiatives as measured by comprehensive annual surveys of graduates’ first destinations after college? Yes, we can. Many schools survey recent graduates about six months after commencement and ask them: “What are you doing now?” Such surveys count respondents as having achieved a successful first destination if they are either working or heading to graduate school. The fates of alums who haven’t found work and aren’t pursuing additional education are recorded too—assuming they choose to reply.
For reasonably selective liberal arts programs, it’s common to see published success rates of 95 percent or higher among those students who send in responses. What’s unclear is the fate of recent graduates who don’t respond. Most schools make some effort to re-contact students who didn’t respond at first, but typically one-fifth or more of recent graduates remain silent. Make some pessimistic (or realistic) assumptions about the nonresponders’ situations, and it’s likely that about 85 percent of all recent graduates end up with first destinations that can be deemed successful.
When Wake Forest started publishing comprehensive first-destination surveys in 2012, its results were solid but not extraordinary. About one-fifth of graduates didn’t respond; of those who did, 95 percent were either working or in graduate school. Ever since, however, Wake Forest’s scores have been climbing. For the class of 2015, 98 percent achieved successful first destinations within six months of graduating. Meanwhile, the nonresponse rate has shrunk to barely a tenth of the graduating class. In his 2016 State of the University speech, Wake Forest president Hatch indicated he wasn’t fearful anymore of a crisis that could crush students’ hopes. Instead, he said he wanted his school “to become the best at preparation for life after college.”
Presidents, deans, and provosts at many other schools are pushing ahead in similar ways. Staff expansions at career centers are an important step forward; they permit more personalized support for each student. Fund-raising campaigns that create big, cheery new career-services buildings in the center of campus make a difference too. After all, fifty years of campus construction has created state-of-the-art libraries that promote studying, first-rate labs for the sciences, and world-class training facilities for competitive sports teams. Don’t job seekers deserve decent settings too?
At Brigham Young University, thirty thousand undergraduates compete each year for choice internships. A decade ago, BYU’s dean of humanities, John Rosenberg, became concerned that humanities majors weren’t faring well in this hunt. “We needed to do more to help students build a bridge from academia to their first job without vocationalizing their majors,” Rosenberg told me. As a result, he and his colleagues launched Humanities Plus, a wide-ranging initiative that showed students majoring in linguistics, English, arts, and other humanities fields how to connect with a wide range of internships.
“We decided to learn everything we could from the business school,” Rosenberg recalled. “They were extraordinarily collegial. They allowed our students to participate in their internship programs.” Now English majors gravitate to corporate projects where strong writers are needed. Linguistics majors help translate business websites into different languages. Career-related conversations happen much earlier in humanities students’ time at BYU. The payoff includes showcase internships at organizations ranging from the European Parliament to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Overall, 25 percent of BYU’s humanities majors now graduate with career-relevant internships on their résumés, up from 5 percent before the Humanities Plus program began. When top administrators get involved, such changes happen.
It’s also intriguing to see campuses trying harder to recruit high-energy career experts to run these nice new centers. As one Midwestern college president confided to an executive recruiter: “Getting the right career-center chief may be the most important hire that I make during my time in office.” Campus presidents like to recruit. They have a long history of wooing brilliant professors away from other schools to build up a national reputation for leadership in a field. It’s about time that this team-building energy was redirected toward helping students’ job-market prospects too.
Artists Are Not Accountants
When Eilis Wasserman was earning her master’s degree in education from the University of Dayton in 2013, she embarked on a provocative research study of undergraduate attitudes toward career counseling. Overall, she found most students felt they were getting effective advice. Humanities majors, however, didn’t feel well served at all. As they saw it, campus centers were optimized for providing technical advice to students with career-oriented majors. The system lacked the patience, ingenuity, and resources to help students with supposedly impractical majors.
Wasserman’s study exposes an open secret: If you’re a biology major hoping to join Johnson and Johnson or a finance major with ambitions of working at Visa, the traditional career-center model is well tailored for you. Big companies that want you will visit campus regularly for job fairs or specially designed recruiting sessions. Your point of contact will be a full-time campus recruiter from these organizations, someone trained to regard résumés as the appropriate starting point. Your career counselors know the drill. They will gladly shine up your résumé, helping to prove you took the right classes and mastered the right skills.
For many liberal arts majors, this formula fails. Your greatest strengths might come through in conversations, not in résumé bullet points. The careers you’re targeting might not align well with the job-fair model either. Perhaps you hope to connect with a nonprofit or smaller employer that isn’t inclined to pay three thousand dollars for the privilege of setting up a table at a campus event. Or maybe your breakthrough moment will be more nontraditional; you strike up a connection with a big company’s free-spirited manager, someone who doesn’t visit campuses or read résumés for a living.
Bottom line, you know you’ve got a great story to tell. You realize that artists aren’t accountants. But there mightn’t be anyone at the traditional job fairs who wants to hear it.
Indiana University understands your situation. Like many big state universities, Indiana operates multiple career centers on its main campus so engineering majors can get the advice that works best for them while liberal arts majors in the College of Arts and Sciences can follow a different path. Instead of grudgingly acknowledging that students in the humanities and social sciences like to consider a lot of possibilities before deciding on their career choices, Indiana embraces the questioning spirit.
“We prepare the explorers and the constantly curious, those whose dreams won’t fit into a one-size-fits-all degree,” Indiana’s Walter Center for Career Achievement declares on its website home page. If you’re starting out a career hunt without a fully formed plan in mind, the Walter Center hosts a flurry of Discover events, inviting you to chat up alumni and employers in whatever field momentarily intrigues you. If you’re starting to narrow your choices, Indiana offers ten career clusters—such as media, government, or education—where you can mingle in person or online with what might be your crowd. If you change your mind and want to try a different cluster, that’s fine too.
Indiana advises liberal arts undergraduates to spend only 10 percent of their career-minded energy actually applying for jobs. That is a shockingly low number for people with vocational majors. It makes sense, however, in many fields where hiring happens by word of mouth or personal chemistry. Indiana’s career counselors know that; they advise liberal arts undergraduates to steer 60 percent of their job-hunting energies into connecting with people who could be helpful. (Save another 30 percent for researching specific opportunities.)
You’ll hear similar advice at the University of Texas. “Talk to as many people in your field of interest as possible,” says Tatem Oldham, assistant director of Texas’s College of Liberal Arts. Or, as one of the campus’s career coaches, Amira Sounny-Slitine, advises, “Be the author of your own story. Don’t let other people tell you what you can or cannot do with your degree. Set goals, reach them, and then do it again.”
Telling your own story well is an acquired art—every bit as important as getting your résumé in shape. In the late 1990s, Fast Company magazine created an enormous stir by extolling “the Brand Called You.” Nobody knew then whether it was possible to champion yourself without coming across as annoyingly narcissistic or arrogant. It’s still possible to do a bad job of telling your own story, but there’s now much greater understanding of what’s involved in doing it well. When employers openly ask for candidates who are “comfortable and charismatic” (remember that phrase from chapter 2?), there’s every reason for your college to help you master this increasingly important part of the job hunt.
Iowa State gets it. Its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers workshops such as Tips to Build Your Personal Brand and Get Hired. So does the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with numerous offerings including a for-credit class called Taking Initiative, in which one of the stated goals is to help students become really good at giving a two-minute “elevator speech” about their backgrounds, strengths, and ambitions. The University of Illinois is on board, too, with a career-readiness program that begins by helping you identify the four central elements of your story: what you like doing, your strengths, your values, and your purpose. As Illinois’s career counselors observe, being able to explain yourself on a fundamental level “is what makes you unique and the right fit for an opportunity.”
Critical Thinking’s Newest Guises
Lee Franklin is trying something different this afternoon. The Yale-educated philosophy professor has been lecturing on Plato and Aristotle for more than a decade, winning campus teaching awards for his trouble. “I know what’s effective,” he tells me as we chat in his small, ground-floor office at Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Marshall College. In recent years, though, Franklin has worried students aren’t engaging with the material as deeply as he would like. Instead, they absorb his lectures with the passive wonder of pedestrians watching a jet plane fly overhead. They look up… they follow this high-speed performance as it traverses their line of sight… and then, when everything is done, they resume regular activities without much change.
Rather than stick with the status quo, Franklin is overhauling his signature class, putting students in charge. Ten minutes into an hourlong class, Franklin poses the day’s big question: “What can you learn from a shadow of a vase?” Then he stops talking. For the next twenty minutes, it’s incumbent on his students to attack this Platonic mystery as boldly as they can.
In the back of the room, a noisy, confident spirit of discovery takes hold. “You’d know someone was making the shadow,” one freshman observes. “You couldn’t figure out the vase’s size,” another remarks. They realize Franklin wants them to start with literal observations and then build out a deeper understanding of the distortions and limitations of indirectly received knowledge. Speakers interrupt each other constantly. They regroup and weave various insights together. They are excited and having fun. At a different table in the front of the room, torpor sets in. “You know it’s not a car,” one student observes. The others nod. An awkward silence ensues. No one can think of anything else to say.
“This is still very experimental,” Franklin tells me after the class is over. “It takes us twice as long, or occasionally even five times as long, to cover everything that would be in a single lecture. But when I started teaching this way last year, by the end of the term, students had improved in ways that hadn’t ever happened in any other class of mine. They were grappling with Aristotle’s most challenging writing. We teach this way in graduate school, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be doing this now.”
When new classes and new teaching approaches take root, they generally need to be justified on purely academic grounds. That said, some simple adjustments can strengthen students’ career readiness without weakening an institution’s academic rigor, and in such situations, there’s no reason intellectual purists should resist. Here are four areas in the twin causes of career readiness and academic innovation that are especially harmonious. They bear out the notion that critical thinking renews itself via constant experimentation.
More discussions, fewer lectures. Lee Franklin’s bold teaching experiment is being echoed on many other campuses, and that’s good news for liberal arts majors with career ambitions outside academia. Employers want college graduates who know how to work in teams, and even long-established schools such as Williams College are responding quickly. “I want to produce graduates who can work effectively in that environment,” says Williams president Adam Falk. It’s harder to decide who gets an A, B, or C when most work is done in teams, Falk acknowledges, but that doesn’t bother him. “If the cost of collaboration is giving everyone an A, that’s okay,” he contends. Another prominent example is the Minerva Project, an organization that operates seven college campuses around the world. It is forsaking traditional lectures entirely, boasting in its marketing material that “every class is a small seminar designed to keep you actively engaged.”
New majors and programs. Fifteen years ago, the boundaries separating psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, and linguistics were inarguable. Now, all these disciplines converge in ways that have led to the rise of cognitive science. How do we think? What influences affect our thoughts? At more than forty U.S. schools, ranging from Caltech to Vassar, undergraduates now can wrestle with such questions via boundary-breaking programs in cognitive science. We don’t need to guess about the value of this interdisciplinary approach blending engineering, physical sciences, and liberal arts perspectives in the labor market. In job ads, employers such as IBM, Amazon, and Los Angeles County are explicitly asking for candidates with training in cognitive science.
On a smaller scale, schools such as Clark University and the University of Oregon have been overhauling freshman seminars so that students can apply their emerging critical-thinking skills to immediate, real-world problems.
I spent a fascinating afternoon in October of 2016 watching Clark president David Angel teach a seminar about the inner workings of a modern university. His school has worked hard in recent years to make its 1960s-era main library into a friendlier place, and Angel turned that campaign into an impressive series of teaching moments. Some students became field researchers, taking notes on the ways their peers used the library at different times. Others became historians, learning about the reasons why Clark opted for a brutalist design when the library was built—and exploring the university’s later decision to ameliorate the sight of so much concrete. The result: a chance to sharpen up everything from research skills to debating practices in a feisty room.
Greater roles for digital tools. When Alicia Ellis, a literature professor at Colby College, assigns challenging novels such as Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, she asks students to use Pinterest as a repository for photos and articles that highlight aspects of the book’s journey through Jamaica and personal identity. Students who aren’t sure what to make of the book as a whole can start collecting fragments that relate to specific passages or chapters. Class discussions become livelier, mastery of the material increases, and a useful new note-taking habit sets in. Nobody authorized her to turn Pinterest into a modern improvement on index cards, but that’s fine—nobody needed to. Her off-label use is a fine reminder that even simple campus routines can become proving grounds for nimbler learning habits that can help out in the workplace too.
Society’s Difference Makers
During his freshman year at Rutgers University–Newark, Dyllan Brown-Bramble was the student nobody noticed. Even though he earned strong grades in his psychology major, he minimized his time on the New Jersey campus. Commuting from his parents’ home eight miles away, he usually arrived at Rutgers just a few minutes before his ten a.m. classes started. Once his afternoon lectures or seminars were done, he retreated to parking lot B and revved up his 2003 Sentra. By 3:50 p.m., he was gone.
He kept quiet about his family heritage too. His father had emigrated from Martinique and ran a small construction business; his mother came from Dominica and managed a tourism office in New York City. Privately, he was quite proud of them, but it seemed pointless to explain his Caribbean origins to strangers. People always reacted inappropriately. Some imagined him to be the son of dirt-poor refugees struggling to rise above a shabby past. Others cast him as a superhero immigrant: “an astrophysicist who could fly.” There wasn’t any room for him to be himself: articulate, opinionated, and tired of fighting other people’s stereotypes.
In the autumn of 2015, partway through sophomore year, a campus flyer caught his eye. It urged students at Rutgers-Newark to enroll in small evening workshops called the Braven Career Accelerator. “I knew I was supposed to be networking in college,” Brown-Bramble later told me. “I thought, okay, here’s a chance to do something.”
Suddenly, Rutgers became a lot more compelling. For nine weeks, Brown-Bramble and four other students of color became evening allies. They met in an empty classroom on Tuesdays at six to construct LinkedIn profiles and practice mock interviews. They picked up tips about local internships, aided by a volunteer coach whose life and background were much like theirs. They knit together as a group, discussing each person’s weekly highs and lows while encouraging one another to keep trying for internships and better grades. “We had a saying,” Brown-Bramble recalled. “If one of us succeeds, all of us succeed.”
At Rutgers-Newark, 63 percent of the undergraduate population is Latino, Asian, or black. Within the Career Accelerator program, minority participation is even higher. In the spring term of 2016, when Brown-Bramble participated in the program, the volunteer coaches all came from minority backgrounds too. Among the coaches: Josmar Tejeda, who had graduated from the New Jersey Institute of Technology five years earlier with an architecture degree. Since then, Tejeda had worked at everything from social-media jobs to being an asbestos inspector. As the coach for Brown-Bramble’s group, Tejeda combined relentless optimism with an acknowledgment that getting ahead wasn’t easy.
“Keep it real,” Tejeda kept telling his students as they talked through case studies and their own goals. Everyone did so. That feeling of being the only black or Latino person in the room? The awkwardness of always being asked, “Where are you from?” The strains of always trying to be the “model minority”? Familiar territory for everyone.
“It was liberating,” Brown-Bramble told me. Surrounded by sympathetic peers, Brown-Bramble discovered new ways to share his heritage in job interviews. Yes, some of his Caribbean relatives had arrived in the United States not knowing how to fill out basic government forms. Yes, as a boy he had needed to help them. But that was all right. In fact, it was a hidden strength. “I could create a culture story that worked for me,” Brown-Bramble said. “I know a lot about another culture. I can relate to people with different backgrounds. There’s nothing about me that I have to rise above.”
Take a close look at the college-major choices of students from underrepresented backgrounds, and you will find something surprising. Some 33 percent of first-generation college students choose a liberal arts major, according to a 2016 nationwide survey, compared with a national average of 30 percent. Psychology, in particular, exercises its strongest pull on undergraduates with lower-than-average family incomes. Each major is its own story, and English majors do tend to come from wealthier families. In general, though, if you’ve been told that a liberal arts education is a luxury only students from well-entrenched families can afford, you’ve been misinformed.
For college and university leaders, the liberal arts’ appeal across the socioeconomic spectrum is both exciting and daunting. As Dan Porterfield, the president of Pennsylvania’s Franklin and Marshall College, points out, first-generation students “may come to college thinking: ‘I want to be a doctor. I want to help people.’ Then they discover anthropology, earth sciences, and many other new fields. They start to fall in love with the idea of being a writer or an entrepreneur. They realize: ‘I just didn’t have a broad enough vision of how to be a difference maker in society.’”
If you are a striver choosing the liberal arts, one key element to college and career success is likely to be missing: well-connected relatives who can tell you what classes to take or how to win a choice summer internship. As a result, if you are a first-generation college student, your odds of graduating on time are slimmer, and your ability to find good first jobs (without extra support) is impaired.
Can colleges offset these deficiencies? They are trying. Initiatives such as the University of Washington’s Husky 100 program or Michigan State’s Citizen Scholars program provide clever ways of recognizing a few extraordinary students from austere backgrounds and providing them with an extra lift. Fundamentally, though, colleges run into one of two problems. Large public universities generally lack the money or staff resources to provide the intensive, one-on-one advisory sessions that open opportunities fastest for students from underrepresented backgrounds. Elite private schools aren’t short of resources, but their campus cultures tend to be so far removed from the realities of first-generation students’ lives that even well-intentioned initiatives can seem clumsy.
To close these gaps, a handful of colleges are teaming up with nonprofits that specialize in building career-readiness programs for students most in need of extra support. One such group, America Needs You, assists hundreds of students at schools such as City University of New York, DePaul, and the University of Illinois–Chicago. It targets “high-achieving, low-income, first-generation college students” with two-year programs that include twenty-eight full-day workshops and 220 hours of one-on-one mentoring.
I asked Shirley Collado, the executive vice chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, what defines the best of these career-readiness programs. “The power of the cohort,” she replied. When students settle into small groups with trustworthy peers, candor takes hold. The sterile dynamic of large lectures and solo homework assignments gives way to something more collaborative—and more intimate. As seatmates and coaches provide mutual support, motivation soars. “You build social capital where it didn’t exist before,” Collado explained.
Strapped for cash and talent, Rutgers-Newark can’t run its Career Accelerator programs on its own. But a fast-growing nonprofit, Braven, can. The nonprofit’s founder, Aimée Eubanks Davis, is a former Teach for America executive. She set up Braven when she grew frustrated that many of the children taught in TFA classrooms had done well enough academically to head off to college but didn’t thrive later, when they tried to make the transition from college to meaningful careers. Eubanks Davis’s goal: to teach the skills and create the support networks that help such students make the most of their potential.
Braven, which began operations in 2014, has already reached about four hundred students at Rutgers-Newark and San Jose State. It mixes liberal arts students with vocational majors in each cohort, the theory being that all can learn from one another. Scaling up the Career Accelerator program to reach thousands of students nationwide is the next step. The pool of volunteer coaches will increase rapidly, Eubanks Davis says, if Braven can develop strong partnerships with employers that supply the coaches. Funding is surging, as employers in Newark and Silicon Valley help underwrite costs in the belief that Braven’s Career Accelerators can help improve their own job-applicant pools.
Meanwhile, early graduates of Braven’s program are showing signs of becoming the difference makers that such programs aim to create. By early 2017, Rutgers-Newark’s Dyllan Brown-Bramble had lined up three internships at various social-media companies. His grade point average had climbed to 3.93. He began mapping out plans to get a law degree, work in corporate law for a few years to pay off his student loans—and then set up his own law firm, specializing in start-up formation. “I’d like to help other entrepreneurs do things in Newark,” he said.
He’s not invisible on campus anymore either. For the closing ceremony of the spring 2016 cycle of Career Accelerators, Brown-Bramble was picked to introduce Newark’s chancellor. He was petrified at first. Then, after two evenings of rehearsals in the school’s Starbucks lounge, Brown-Bramble delivered his talk. He kept his voice strong, just the way coach Josmar Tejeda told him. When the audience broke into applause at the end, Brown-Bramble later confided, “It felt good. I could imagine doing this again.”