The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going.

Cathy Day’s guest essay in this week’s edition of The Edge certainly reminds me of a number of the conversations that Ned Laff and I have had with students while on the road for Hacking College. Certainly, we talk to plenty of students who believe, right or wrong, that their major will say something about them to employers. We also see a lot of students like Maya, below, who think they should add a couple of minors to signal other talents or interests — when, in fact, they might just be adding unnecessary requirements and time, as Day points out.

Day, a professor of English at Ball State University, has been involved with the Hacking College Learning Community through the University of Minnesota, so she is certainly familiar with the concepts Ned and I discuss in the book. But her inclusion of Michael Tomlinson’s research on employability and meaningful work adds valuable nuance to the discernment process that students go through as they pick a life direction and, subsequently, a major.

Most of all, Day emphasizes that a student needs to take agency and engage in the college experience to develop an identity and determine a direction. I’ll let her take it from here.

College is not an identity store

I’m a professor in a large English department at a regional public university. I’m advising a student (let’s call her Maya) who recently added a screenwriting minor. Great! But finishing this minor will mean more time in school, more loans, more debt.

“But I need this minor,” Maya says, “to apply for jobs in screenwriting.”

I sigh. “Oh Maya, no. Trust me, this world you’re trying to break into, your major or minor doesn’t matter. Your writing experience does.”

I ask her some questions as delicately as I can. Does she know anyone who works as a screenwriter? Has she attended any alumni events featuring people who write for television or film? Has she done any internships or job shadows in this field? Belong to any screenwriting clubs or groups? Is she connected online with anyone in the industry? Has she ever seen a job ad for a screenwriter?

Nothing but nos. At this point, she looks like she’s going to cry or throw up.

Oh, this lovely young woman from a small town who believes that she’s done everything right. Maya got good grades in high school. Went to college, the first in her family — like me. Majored in English. Makes dean’s list despite working at PetSmart 35 hours a week. Ninety percent of the careers she might pursue are simply invisible to her. Does she really want to be a screenwriter, or is she set on it because it’s a job she’s heard of before? When she graduates cum laude in a few months, Maya thinks she will Google “screenwriting jobs” and she’ll be on her way. Isn’t that how it works?

Please know that I’m not making fun of Maya — because I went to college thinking that’s how it worked, too. Except for the Googling part. Instead, I imagined scanning the want ads of the Indianapolis Star.

Look, I tell her, college is not some identity store. It’s not Stitch Fix where you go on a website, take a quiz, a stylist picks out your identity, and boom, you’re done. You have to try on a lot of clothes. You must do the leg work to figure out what’s really you. The degree doesn’t turn you into whatever you’d like to be. You find it from the inside out, not from the outside in.

She listens. “OK, so if I don’t stay an extra year to get that minor, what do I do instead if I want to write screenplays or something like that? And why don’t I know these things?”

That’s the important and completely reasonable question for which higher ed needs to find an answer — for every student.

Talking to my colleagues

I’ve worked in five different English departments during my career, and all of them made career resources available, but not as a required part of the curriculum; they were only optional and in the co-curriculum. This way, we could always claim that we were providing resources — speaker events and workshops in the evening, alumni visiting a few classes, signs pointing to the career center, job and internship boards. But we assiduously avoided the arguments that would no doubt ensue if we tried embedding those interventions into our curriculum.

I once observed to a colleague that privileged students took advantage of career resources the most but needed them the least. Shouldn’t we try to reach everyone? He sighed. “We can’t help everybody, Cathy. If they don’t have it in them to talk to an alum or walk over to the career center, what are we supposed to do?”

Is that it? I thought. Some students are scrappy and some are not? Is Maya not scrappy? Or is it that students like her don’t know the unwritten rules, the hidden curriculum?

Another colleague once told me that we didn’t need to provide career instruction in the curriculum, because humanities students spend a year or two after college waiting tables or serving coffee, figuring out what to do with their lives. Why spend class time talking about careers, she asked, when we could be talking about books and ideas?

Does Maya have time or money for a gap year? Does she even know what a gap year is? Who at PetSmart is going to mentor Maya after graduation and tell her she needs to be doing informational interviews and checking out graduate schools?

Career discovery

Conversations like these (and seeing that around 40 percent of today’s college graduates are underemployed) changed how I taught my classes. I became less interested in teaching students the skill of written communication and more interested in making them feel like people who would one day communicate for a living. Eventually, I proposed a required one-credit course for English majors at the sophomore level called “Career Discovery.”

I’d had to prepare for new courses before, but nothing like this. I read many college-to-career textbooks, especially those for liberal-arts students, looking for some kind of framework for what I was trying to accomplish. Finally, I found the Graduate Capital Model (GCM) created by Michael Tomlinson of the University of Southampton in the U.K. His research centers on “employability,” particularly the importance of capitals (human, social, cultural, psychological, and identity) and the formation of professional identity. The original concept was laid out in a peer-reviewed article published in 2019 in Studies in Higher Education, and has since been put into practice at Tomlinson’s institution.

In a new article published just this past summer, Tomlinson reveals a three-part framework for meaningful work. Students have different notions of their purpose, and they fall into types: Some are looking for A.) meaning in work, a self-identity from the work they do in life, while others B.) want meaning (particularly related to their social, civic, and environmental values) from work, and yet others C.) seek emotional meaning at work among work colleagues and from their employers. This framework has helped me teach my class much more effectively — because I’m a type A and not all my students are; when I talk about purpose in this class, it’s vital that types B and C are also valued, guided, and appropriately mentored.

What I appreciate about Tomlinson’s research is that it’s not built around the competencies employers want, but rather around each student. The GCM acknowledges inequity, helping less advantaged students navigate the college-to-career pivot and its insider knowledge. The GCM never says, “Hmmm, why don’t you already know this?” but rather, “In terms of [blank] capital, you’re starting out/almost there/making great progress.”

Course objectives

I tell my students straight up that their major will not make them writers, editors, publishers, marketers, communication specialists, or managers. In addition to focusing on their major/s and minor/s (human capital), they need to seek out mentorship, professional experiences, and relationships (social and cultural capital) with people in those positions — in real life and online. They need to take actions that will allow them to think, act, and feel like a future [blank] (identity capital). Most importantly, they need to learn to talk themselves out of their own fears and self-limiting beliefs (psychological capital).

But I don’t just tell them these things; I give them assignments that require them to do it. Why? At least once before they graduate, I want them to feel what might be right for them professionally — be it creative writing or something else entirely. I want them to experience those existential tumblers clicking into place: Yes, I can see my future-self doing this.

I love the moment when they find their “desire path” and feel at least a little bit like an aspiring [blank]. It’s the best feeling in the world — both for them and for me. The psychologist James Marcia, who expanded on Erik Erikson’s theory of identity formation, would call this feeling “identity achievement,” making a high commitment to a vocational identity reached after a “crisis” period of high exploration. This is important, I say to students: Career exploration is an intentional crisis. They will be uncomfortable, uncertain, and distressed. But if they avoid this crisis, they will never get the best feeling in the world.

Selling the liberal arts before it’s too late

Students shop for identities because it’s easier to acquire a ready-made one than to think about who they really are. The problem with trying to get people to major in the liberal arts is that it’s such a hard sell — Come here and we won’t tell you who or what to be! Liberal-arts faculty must accept that what brings students to college is this: They simply want to know who they’re supposed to be. But these days, they look at a list of majors, and they choose names that imply the careers that follow.

Colleagues, we don’t need to repackage our majors to align with the labor market, creating a wide variety of professional-identity ensembles. No. We just need to make space in our classrooms and curriculum (not just our office hours) for intentional conversations with our students (all of them, like Maya) about who they are, where they’re going, and how to get there. These conversations can transform their lives and livelihoods, which is at least part of the reason why we got into higher education in the first place — because it changed our lives, too.

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