HOW COLLEGES CAN BETTER ENGAGE AND PREPARE A NEW GENERATION OF STUDENTS
As we approach the end of the second decade of the new millennium, the higher-education market is shifting and the economy is changing in fundamental ways.
Career paths for this generation of students are no longer as clear and straightforward as they were in the past. That’s why colleges must focus on career development for students. If they don’t, they will be yielding the field to outside ventures and losing a vital opportunity to create a life-long—and essential—connection with alumni
This is an excerpt from the Reimagining the Career Center: How Colleges Can Better Engage and Prepare a New Generation of Students for the 21st Century Workforce A free download of the paper is available here
you can read full article here
Colleges are still reluctant to even think of themselves as career prep centers. They live in their lofty ivory towers of learning ideas for their own sake and are above all that. That may have been true during the days of kings and leaders' training but especially since WWII more people are getting and need to complete higher education training. Society and the world demands this.
Its more than just the career center - though this does need an overhaul with new kids of people in there and new training for the job, not just someone who worked at the university who seems to have some interest in career centers and student volunteers or workers. Several different depts. in the university need to be better connected and work with each other for students, not just to get a degree (or whatever else) but to be well prepared for the world after graduation. Employers want it, demand it, work conditions expect it but college staff thinks they know better.
There are some colleges and universities that prepare their grads well enough that employers clamor for their grads but they are the exception. They have a different mindset of the kind of product they want to produce (graduates) and what they do to get it done among faculty and how the staff and campus is run and what it offers.
So though I agree that the career center needs to change, there really needs to be a change of what a colleges thinks its for and then realign itself to get it done. Why don't the student advisors and the newly trained career center staff merge as one - how to get thru college and prepare for many kinds of careers with what degree you get. Why don't they align with the alumni center staff, student life center and admissions. They have distinctive roles but can work better together for the sake of the students and society, if they would only think that was an important part of their mission. Learning to learn and enjoying what you learn is important but even there many employers complain that grads don't have good critical thinking skills, problem solving skills, research skills, etc. So we have to ask, for whom are colleges preparing their grads for?
Percentage of College graduates who say they visited a career services office, by time period
40 percent of recent graduates never even visited their career offices
