Jeffrey J. Selingo - There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow

For Hadley, Rory, and Heather,

who are a constant source of inspiration for my stories

CONTENTS

N OT SO LONG AGO A NEWLY MINTED COLLEGE DEGREE WAS THE TICKET TO A SOLID FIRST JOB AFTER GRADUATION, FOLLOWED BY A SUCCESSFUL career. Any anxiety that parents and their teenage children felt about going off to college was largely limited to the front end of the process: getting into a good school, figuring out how to pay the tuition bill, choosing the right major.

Rarely were students or their parents concerned that college wouldnt supply them with the knowledge and skills needed to survive in the work worldall that mattered was undergraduates emerged on the other side with some sort of credential. A degree was an easily recognizable signal to employers of potential and discipline, one that grew stronger the more selective the school on the rsum.

But today there seems to be a lot of noise interfering with that signal. At the same time that more and more people are earning a bachelors degree, employers are trusting less and less that it is an indicator of real job readiness. As a result, a college senior no longer has as clear or straightforward a career path as previous generations did.

Its easy to blame the job struggles college graduates have been having on the lackluster economic recovery in recent years. But the plight of todays young adults is not confined to one single moment in the economic cycle. Rather it is a result of a longer-term shift in the global workforce that is having an outsized impact on people in their twenties who have little work experience.

Recently, unemployment among the young has risen to highs not seen in four decades, at one point reaching an alarming 9 percent for recent college graduates under the age of twenty-five. For those who found jobs, the average wage of workers with a bachelors degree has declined 10 percent in the first part of this century.

Perhaps more disturbing is that nearly half of college graduates in their twenties are underemployed, meaning the jobs they can get dont require a bachelors degree. Having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high-paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less-educated workers for the barista and clerical job was the conclusion of a widely cited report by three economists in 2014. That study also found demand for college-educated knowledge workers has slowed as the tech revolution has matured. In other words, the stereotype of the college graduate working at Starbucks or as a waiter is no exaggeration. And it suggested that this situation may be the new normalwhere a bachelors degree is needed to get any job, not just a high-skilled, high-wage job.

In 2013, soon after I published a book on the future of higher education called College (Un)bound, I met many of these recent graduates who were struggling to launch into a career. As I crisscrossed the country talking about the college of tomorrow, young adults told me how they were moving from internship to internship without ever finding full-time work. Parents asked me what their kids who had just graduated from college without getting a full-time job had done wrong. High school guidance counselors wondered what advice they should give to students considering college.

Everyone wanted to know if there were other paths to a successful life beyond the one suggested to most teenagers: graduate from high school, go straight to college three months later (preferably a four-year one), and get a job. If colleges were undergoing massive changes, were there new pathways emerging to prepare for a career and land those crucial first jobs in life?

In this book I set out to answer their questions. How can young adults navigate the route from high school through college and into an increasingly perilous economy? What are the fundamental experiences that shape their success in the job market? What skills prove most helpful? And most of all, why do some prosper while others fail?

To begin to find the answers, I took a train trip with some two dozen recent college graduates who were asking many of the same questions themselves.

The mid-August sun was just beginning to set as Amtraks Capitol Limited set out from Chicagos Union Station. Within minutes, the eastbound train was rolling through the mostly shuttered steel yards of Gary, Indiana. At the rear of the train, in a chartered 1950s-era glass-domed dining car, I was sitting with a group of new college graduates, soaking up the last moments of daylight.

This is home to U.S. Steels Gary Works, someone in the back corner of the car shouted out. It used to be the worlds largest steel mill.

A few of the passengers glanced up briefly at the relic of their grandparents generation, who worked at a time when the American economy was fueled by factories and when the pathway through a career was simple and linear: graduate from high school or college; get a good job with advancement opportunities, training programs, and a pension; work thirty-odd years and then retire.

The group I was traveling withborn mostly in the late 1980sis part of a much more complex, fragmented workforce with many overlapping pathways. While their grandparents, and even their parents, had maps with clearly marked trails for their careers, this generation faces wide-open seas as they chart their next thirty-plus years.

This was day eight of the Millennial Trains Project, a cross-country rail trip for two dozen twentysomethings, each of whom pitched a real-world project to explore while they traveled from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. In daylong stops along the wayDenver, Omaha, Chicagothey conducted research in local communities, and as they traveled by night, they heard from guest lecturers who hopped on board the train for an overnight journey.

Think of it as one intense, mostly sleepless, but fun week of college for a group of young people trying to figure out how they wanted to live their lives.

As darkness descended over the Indiana farmlands and dinner was served, Cameron Hardesty and Jessica Straus slid into the cramped booth across from me. The pair of chatty twenty-six-year-olds told me they had graduated in 2007 with degrees in English from Davidson College, a well-regarded liberal arts college just north of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Davidson is the kind of small school that prides itself on providing students with broad foundational skills, but it is not a place that trains you for a narrowly tailored job. You cant major in sports management, physical therapy, or video game design at Davidson, for instance. I asked Cameron and Jessica what they thought of their undergraduate experience.

It didnt prepare me at all for the real world, Jessica said somewhat abruptly.

While she had fond memories of Davidson for allowing her to pursue her dreamsstudy in Cambridge, work at an art gallery in Barcelonashe said her courses didnt encourage her to translate classroom learning into the explicit know-how sought by employers today. It was very permissible at Davidson to just explore, she said.

Exploration, of course, was what college used to be: the informative stage between adolescence and adulthood. The training for employment we now seem to expect of colleges and universities came later, either in graduate school or on the job. But today, with the cost of college approaching $240,000 for four years on a campus like Davidson, students (and their parents) demand a set of specific skills that can land them a job at graduation. They still want the broad educationcritical thinking, writing and communication, and analytical reasoningas long as it doesnt come at the expense of outside-the-classroom, hands-on experiences, particularly internships.