Students expect faculty to be career mentors: IHE article

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/11/11/more-urgency-about-creating-career-exploration-options-college-students

College students who feel supported in connecting their postsecondary education to a career are more likely to say college will be worth the cost.
For example, 83 percent of student respondents who told College Pulse they received excellent support in making the transition to work said their education would be worth the cost. But just 17 percent of those who felt they got poor support had faith in the value of their college education.

Faculty members, do you want to be career mentors? 

Can/will you take on yet another labor-intensive task that often isn't why you became a professor and isn't really why you think a college education is important?

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

Most faculty can hardly offer any career advice due to very limited exposure to the non-academic labour market (let alone"really modern career advice" mentioned in the article). So, lack of career mentorship by faculty is probably a good thing for the undergrads.

Even faculty exposed to the industry are very often misguided:
they would say something like "My pals in the industry tell me that they are really looking for people with skill X. So, I am pushing for more of X in my undergraduate courses". In reality, industry is looking for senior people with skills A,B,C,D, who also picked up some of skill X. The skill X has at best neutral impact during entry-level position search.

[Hibush]

I expect most of these results are a consequence of selection bias and that more faculty support for careers would not result in much improvement in the value perception. The 17 percent who did not value their college education were likely not prepared to get value from their experience and therefore fare poorly on a lot of metrics.

[writingprof]

I regularly have a slightly gentler version of the following exchange:

Student: "How do I go about getting a job doing 'x'?"

Me: "I don't know. If I could get that job myself, I wouldn't be here."

So, no, I am not comfortable working as a career counselor. 

[secundem_artem]

Those of us who teach in applied fields (especially if they lead to some kind of professional licensure) have been doing this for decades.  I've lost count of the number of times I've put students in contact with my professional network, made introductions, or simply spent an hour talking to a student about their goals. 

I can understand that people who teach in many of the liberal arts cannot exactly advise on how to break into the lucrative English market, but for some of us, it's just part of the job and is evaluated as part of our teaching.

[Caracal]

Those of us who teach in applied fields (especially if they lead to some kind of professional licensure) have been doing this for decades.  I've lost count of the number of times I've put students in contact with my professional network, made introductions, or simply spent an hour talking to a student about their goals. 

I can understand that people who teach in many of the liberal arts cannot exactly advise on how to break into the lucrative English market, but for some of us, it's just part of the job and is evaluated as part of our teaching.

I think students mostly know and understand this. If you're getting a degree in education, you probably should expect your professors to give you advice on career paths and give you access to their professional networks. I've certainly talked to students about careers, but they were just interested in getting my perspective on things-they weren't under any illusion that I was going to be able to give them lots of detailed advice.

[eigen]

I do a ton of career advising, and would say I'm actively involved in getting a large portion of my mentees jobs post-graduation. That involves helping them develop the skills they need that might not be directly class content, helping them build a network of people in the field they want to work in, setting up informational interviews and connections with people who will be hiring in industry, and then helping them write / create / edit cover letters and resumes for jobs and practice interviews as they apply.

I feel like it's an important and expected part of my role as an advisor.

[polly_mer]

I can understand that people who teach in many of the liberal arts cannot exactly advise on how to break into the lucrative English market

I'm pretty sure that's the situation that is frustrating students who bought into the idea that a liberal arts education is a flexible preparation for the post-college experience.  Even on these fora in the past week, the insistence has been "You can do a lot with this degree", with the unspoken part being "if you already have a good social network, spend your summers according to how that network expects, and get a little lucky on the timing of the regional/national economy".

In engineering, education, nursing, social work, and other fields that lead to specific job types, professors tend to do a pretty good job professionalizing their students and connecting to the industry counterparts through formal internships and coops or less formal professional networking.

Even business isn't really a pathway to the next step in the same way that accounting is, much to the dismay of students who were ready to sell out for money and then find out after graduation that the money is going to the liberal arts graduates at the elite institutions instead of the C business students from the state branches.

[Golazo]

I include a session in my freshman seminar for basketweavers that is basically "12 different jobs you can do as a baksetweaver and how to get there" and a related assignment. This includes identifying things that help students be successful in things related to the degree. I encourage my (good) students to do internships in a number of areas related in some way to their degree and for a particularly good student will pick up the phone and make connections, which I do have. I'm in a liberal art, though one that has a few more clear career applications than English, is not criminal justice or even psychology. While I have more experience outside of academia than the median prof, faculty at my undergraduate alma mater did the same. I'm happy to do this but...

The big problem here is a significant number of mediocre students don't want to do the hard work to get the skills and experience that will make them competitive for these jobs, and thus me providing mentoring is a waste of time. So my basic rule is-good student that I know or someone a trusted colleague vouched for--career mentor as much as practicable. Mediocre student without the work rate--forget it.   

[marshwiggle]

The big problem here is a significant number of mediocre students don't want to do the hard work to get the skills and experience that will make them competitive for these jobs, and thus me providing mentoring is a waste of time. So my basic rule is-good student that I know or someone a trusted colleague vouched for--career mentor as much as practicable. Mediocre student without the work rate--forget it.

I stand to be corrected, but I'd guess there's an irony here; the good students are probably those who actually chose the discipline because it appealed, whereas the mediocre students probably took it because they thought a degree was the golden ticket to a job.

If that's the case, then it makes the point that recruiting unmotivated students into a discipline is pretty much a losing proposition.

[Hibush]

The big problem here is a significant number of mediocre students don't want to do the hard work to get the skills and experience that will make them competitive for these jobs, and thus me providing mentoring is a waste of time. So my basic rule is-good student that I know or someone a trusted colleague vouched for--career mentor as much as practicable. Mediocre student without the work rate--forget it.

I stand to be corrected, but I'd guess there's an irony here; the good students are probably those who actually chose the discipline because it appealed, whereas the mediocre students probably took it becuase they thought a degree was the golden ticket to a job.

If that's the case, then it makes the point that recruiting unmotivated students into a discipline is pretty much a losing proposition.

Those unmotivated students are going to be the ones with who depress your statistics on "was the degree worth the money" as well as access to all the resources they didn't bother to access, and to future career outcomes.

Several of our regular posters write of the tension between administrators who over-compromise on quality to keep enrollment up and faculty form whom these students are just extra effort for no payoff (and worsen the educational experience for the motivated students).  If the administrators are at all numbers driven, could some of those metrics be used to suggest a route to a better balance sheet?

[mamselle]

Sort-of echoing what was noted above, the fields in question have a lot to do with this.

In the lab and fieldwork sciences I'm familiar with, there's a multi-layered beneficial feedback network that loops around on itself to motivate mentors to help their mentees find good placements.

The lab director I worked for had her primary advisor in microbiology from a large school a couple of states away (2-3 hrs by fast train) still coming up every other month to do lab inspections, consult on the 6 ongoing drug development projects they ran, and give a talk.

Her highly visible placement and career advancement benefitted him well past retirement; there were at least 12 years' worth of consultancy payments in the files when I took over her EAs desk.

Kids in the arts...well...not so much. A star with their own show in the 1980s might have leveraged a cameo in a feature film for a trusted diction teacher at one time, but that whole system's gone by the bye now; the stars themselves are hired at the whim of their agents/controllers, and the film co. stockholders have all the say.

Musicians in the trenches, who once covered weddings, restaurants, and bar/bat mitzvahs, might get a sideman (sic) seat for a teacher for one night, but those are one-offs, and don't exist at present.

More online collaboration, of late, might funnel some performance arts projects, like dance, into something more like the lab sciences presentational/publishing network of "you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours," but again, the funding levels just don't have the kinds of margins that allow for more than a small gratuity, not a four-figure honorarium every other month.

And the discursive arts areas like dance/music/art/theatre history are hanging on with the rest of the humanities watching themselves slide towards that subduction zone at the edge of the universe that galactic hedgehog and I used to joke about...

M.

[mahagonny]

Those of us who teach in applied fields (especially if they lead to some kind of professional licensure) have been doing this for decades.  I've lost count of the number of times I've put students in contact with my professional network, made introductions, or simply spent an hour talking to a student about their goals. 

Does someone want to start paying us adjunct faculty (who are described as those who only teach) for the career mentoring and connections we've been providing? Sure. No problem, . Let's do that.

[Caracal]

I can understand that people who teach in many of the liberal arts cannot exactly advise on how to break into the lucrative English market

I'm pretty sure that's the situation that is frustrating students who bought into the idea that a liberal arts education is a flexible preparation for the post-college experience.  Even on these fora in the past week, the insistence has been "You can do a lot with this degree", with the unspoken part being "if you already have a good social network, spend your summers according to how that network expects, and get a little lucky on the timing of the regional/national economy".

In engineering, education, nursing, social work, and other fields that lead to specific job types, professors tend to do a pretty good job professionalizing their students and connecting to the industry counterparts through formal internships and coops or less formal professional networking.

Without getting into these discussions again, I'll just point out that this is a circular argument that doesn't really make much sense. Liberal arts degrees do give students skills that can prepare them for all kinds of careers. Professional degrees prepare students for particular careers. That's great for people who are looking to go into a specific career track with a clear pathway. But, most people don't have the desire or skills to do most of these things.

English majors aren't potential engineers who made bad choices. They are usually people whose skills don't translate very well to professional undergrad degrees. Most jobs actually don't have a specific pathway connected to particular fields of studies and/or licensure. As Poly points out, business degrees actually aren't really particularly useful as professional degrees anyway, so....what exactly is the point here?

[mamselle]

Maybe that expectations can be met at some levels, and an overall welcoming attitude expressed for kindness' sake, but that expectations for the depth and degree of help possible need to be managed as appropriate to the situation and the status/background/professional preparation of the individuals involved?

M.