Book Review: There is Life After College

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Our awesome college counselor at North Cobb Christian School, Karen Bollinger, has been keeping me in books lately!   Her latest recommendation was There is Life After College by Jeffrey Selingo.  This book was an excellent read…not a quick read due to the depth of the research, but a great resource for educators, parents, and anyone that has a chance to invest in students looking towards the season of life after high school…whatever that looks like for that young person.

This is not a book related to Christian principles, but it can certainly be read through the lens of a biblical worldview discerning God’s call on a person’s life.  College is not for everyone.  That might seem like a strange statement from someone in education, but there are some very profound thoughts regarding the apprenticeship process in this book.  We also have a robust internship program at NCCS that addresses some of the items concerning changing degrees, discerning career paths, etc.

I enjoyed this book and it gave me a lot to think about.  I highlighted several things while reading and have posted those thoughts below…

 

  • At the same time that more and more people are earning a bachelor’s 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.
  • 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?
  • One out of four people in their twenties takes an unpaid job simply to show they have work experience, and only one out of ten considers their current job a career.
  • It’s not good enough anymore to simply gain admission to a top college and then roll into the job market. You have some time to figure this out, but to navigate the new pathways and various on- and off-ramps, you need a business plan for life that engages your talents and interests.
  • This led Arnett to conclude that this period between ages eighteen and twenty-five was a distinct stage separate from both adolescence and young adulthood. In 2000, he published a paper conceiving a new term for this slice of life: “emerging adulthood.” “Emerging adults often explore a variety of possible life directions in love, work, and world views,” Arnett wrote at the time. “Emerging adulthood is a time of life when many different directions remain possible, when little about the future has been decided for certain, when the scope of independent exploration of life’s possibilities is greater for most people than it will be at any other period of the life course.”
  • Switching jobs in your twenties actually boosts your chances for more satisfying and higher-paying work in the decades that follow.
  • The longer timetable to adulthood is here to stay. How those in their late teens and early twenties use that time to acquire the skills and attributes the economy needs and employers demand will determine whether they become Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers in the first decade of their career.
  • The idea of the T-shaped individual first emerged in the early 1990s as a kind of Renaissance man. The vertical bar of the T represents a person’s deep understanding of one subject matter—history, for example—as well as one industry, perhaps energy or health care. The horizontal stroke of T-shaped people is the ability to work across a variety of complex subject areas with ease and confidence. The need for this ability is far greater today than it was two decades ago as the world becomes more complicated technologically.
  • Students need to self-direct their own learning, not just during their undergraduate years but for the rest of their lives as well.
  • Virtually every job posting included in its top five communication, writing, and organizational skills. Writing, for example, was an important skill even in information technology and health care jobs.
  • Employers are increasingly looking past the degree and the transcript for a set of skills they believe are better markers of success for their new hires. If you are a college graduate hoping to get off to the right start, you will need to show you have acquired this set of often overlapping skills: curiosity, creativity, grit, digital awareness, contextual thinking, and humility.
  • In school, students are rewarded for having answers, not asking questions.
  • “People know how to take a course, but they need to learn how to learn,” John Leutner, head of global learning at Xerox
  • “I don’t think you can run a business today in a very dynamic marketplace without being curious.” When Iger interviews people for jobs, he asks them about the books they have read, the movies they have seen, or where they have recently traveled. “I try to get under their skin,” he said, “to determine their level of curiosity.”
  • “Will is about hunger,” she said. “So I’ll ask, ‘What do you want to do in five or ten years?’ That tells you a lot about their aspirations and creativity. If you’re hungry to get somewhere, that means you want to learn. And if you want to learn, you can do any job.”
  • When recruiters interview college students for jobs, they try to find applicants who have overcome challenges and learned from their disappointments. Some even give extra points to candidates whose personal stories exhibit that they have a certain fire in their belly.
  • Understanding the programming language behind the apps on your iPhone or the basics of artificial intelligence is now seen as basic foundational skills by many employers. Learning to program is much like learning a second language was in the twentieth century: you might not become proficient enough to move overseas, but you could get by if you traveled to a particular country.
  • The generation entering college and the workforce now are often referred to as “digital natives” because they were raised on technology from a very young age. But their relationship has been largely passive: switch on the device and use it. Being digitally aware isn’t about turning more people into computer geeks. It’s about moving from a passive relationship with technology to a more active one—especially in understanding the how and why behind machines, not just the what.
  • There is a need for more human interaction in a day and age when everyone has his or her head down, texting on smartphones. “The art of conversation remains a powerful learning tool,” John Leutner of Xerox reminded me.
  • For a gap year to have a significant impact on your success in college, and later in the working world, it needs to be a transformative event, quite distinct from anything you have experienced before. It should also be designed to help you acquire the skills and attributes that colleges and employers are looking for: maturity, confidence, problem solving, communication skills, and independence.
  • Some of the most important learning that happens in college comes from your peers, so you want to be surrounded by people who give you different perspectives on life and careers.
  • Colleges will likely take a cue from the Apple Store and present the best experiences they can offer on physical campuses and then move the rest online. In other words, college will become a blended experience for many students, in that it will be neither fully in person nor all online. In this new world, location will matter even more than it does today, as internships, research projects, and other types of experiential learning for students will be nearly impossible to replicate online.
  • Elite colleges are not increasing class sizes even as they receive record numbers of applications. Harvard’s classes are no larger than they were twenty years ago.
  • Tell me and I forget; teach me and I may remember; involve me and I will learn. —XUNZI, CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHER
  • The best college education is a two-prong approach that exercises both the mind and the hands.
  • Equally important is the sequence of your internships. Each internship experience needs to build on the previous one. The first summer of college is a good time to test out a field before officially settling on a major the following year. The internship after the sophomore year should be more focused on what you might want to do after graduation and position you for the final internship before your senior year. With so many employers hiring from their intern pools, the last internship before graduation is perhaps the most important.
  • Knowledge transfer is what gets you hired, because it’s the ability to show in job interviews what you cannot easily display on your résumé or in an application.
  • As a result, Northeastern added courses before and after the co-op to help students figure out how to apply what they learned in the workplace to another context. Teaching students how to transfer their knowledge had a side benefit on campus. It helped faculty see the co-op experience as more a part of the academic fabric of the institution, rather than as a job alone.
  • For American education to remain relevant to students, it must abandon the antiquated idea that schools and colleges broadly educate people for life while employers train them for jobs. It’s not either-or anymore. Given the amount of money parents and students spend on a degree, there is no reason colleges shouldn’t provide both a broad education as well as the specific training and skills needed for the workplace. And one idea for marrying the practical arts with the liberal arts is gaining prominence after largely falling out of favor in the United States over the last half century: the apprenticeship.
  • Makerspaces have also opened in communities where they serve as a training ground for people who want to learn skills or need access to expensive industrial machines to start a business.
  • “It doesn’t matter what you take in college, it matters what you do,” Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, told me. “You should be able to show your teachers and then anyone else how what you’ve made in a class, what you created, demonstrates your capacity to do other things and what you’re going to do next.”
  • If you don’t gain those competencies during internships while in college, it’s likely you’ll end up searching for launch experiences—what I call finishing schools and postgraduate gap years—right after college to practice the job-related skills that should have come with your very expensive bachelor’s degree.
  • Bridge programs offer the career guidance and coaching that students desperately want and need these days but are not getting from their undergraduate institutions.
  • Time spent on a task and the ability to focus on a rigorous project are what researchers have found defines success in the workplace better than grades or major do.
  • There is no replacement for managing a part-time job in something totally outside of your career field. Research has shown that students who are employed while in high school or college allocate their time more efficiently, learn about workplace norms and responsibilities, and are motivated to study harder in their classes so they can achieve a certain career goal.
  • Students rarely see the trial and error that lead to good careers. They are only shown the final answer to a problem. Art Markman, a prominent author and psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said he shares the “awful drafts” of his papers with students to show them that good writing doesn’t just happen, but rather is the result of multiple iterations.
  • The ability to create a narrative about what you have learned in school and in your jobs will become increasingly critical as the knowledge economy demands much more from workers and will require people to find learning opportunities throughout their lives. For generations, the traditional four-year degree was enough to succeed in just about any thirty-year career. But when everyone seems to have a bachelor’s degree, the undergraduate experience is finally getting a desperately needed makeover to better prepare graduates for the lifelong learning that is now a fundamental part of any career.
  • The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. —ALVIN TOFFLER, AUTHOR AND FUTURIST
  • For now, though, the traditional bachelor’s degree remains the dominant delivery system of American higher education. It’s a credential rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, even though today’s students process information and communicate in radically different ways. Colleges are reluctant to fiddle with the inner workings of the bachelor’s degree, unsure what’s in the magic box that leads to a successful graduate. The reality is that the modern four-year degree is what it is today simply because that’s what colleges and universities have offered for centuries. Tradition seems to be one of the biggest obstacles to change.
  • The bachelor’s degree was supposed to help you figure out what you wanted to do with the rest of your life and then land you the job that would start you off on that career trajectory. But in today’s workplace, the bachelor’s degree can no longer meet the differing expectations of both students and employers. Simply put, the bachelor’s degree is overdesigned, with too many options and not enough focus or practical applications.
  • An experiment at Arizona State University, a massive public institution with seventy-six thousand students, might eliminate the idea of a course altogether. Backed by a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, the university is testing out a degree in which students learn the subject matter for their majors through a series of projects instead of a specified schedule of classes. Engineering students might build a robot, for example, and they could learn the key principles of mechanics and electronics from faculty members as needed during the project. If students are struggling with a concept, professors could pull together an impromptu class or students could learn on their own using other resources, such as free online courses offered by other universities.
  • The college degree of the future will be more “modular” than today’s; it will allow students to pick and choose how they reach the end point so they are no longer constrained by artificial limits on course hours, semesters, or years in school. Imagine this future degree as a Lego set. Most people build the picture on the outside of the box, just as most students today follow similar routes to a degree. But think of everything else you can build with the pieces inside a Lego box. Consider the possibilities for how one might piece together a degree that better fits the motivations for going to college and develops the skills needed in the workforce of tomorrow.
  • New ways of teaching, fueled by the Internet and a diverse band of tech entrepreneurs, cognitive psychologists, artificial intelligence experts, and neuroscientists, are encouraging a radical rethinking of how we learn throughout our lives. After years of talking about how we need to become lifelong learners, the rhetoric has finally reached reality.
  • Why does formal education have an end point in today’s world where knowledge is constantly growing and changing?
  • Employers have raised the bar on the skills workers need to start a job on day one and are less involved in employee training. Young adults are largely on their own to acquire those skills.
  • “We’re asking twenty-three-year-old new graduates to act like thirty-five-year-old experienced workers,” Gardner said.
  • Companies are beginning to realize their hiring practices aren’t always yielding the best candidates, and more of them are beginning to approach hiring as a science and are embracing new technology and data analytics in making their talent decisions. This shift away from the human equation in hiring could transform how students find employment coming out of college and forever change the value of the degree as the sole signaling device that someone is job ready.
  • When I first heard about people analytics matching students with jobs, I had the same worries I had when I heard about colleges using advanced algorithms to steer undergraduates to specific courses and majors. But the more time I spent observing the recruiting process for college seniors and interviewing young adults struggling to find jobs or their way in life, I began to see how people analytics could bring order to an often chaotic process and shine light into that black box of job matching to make it fairer for everyone.
  • People with good stories show employers they can transfer their learning from one environment to another, typically from the classroom to the workplace.
  • What do my work and study experiences in college say about me? Do they reveal my core interests and passions?        What kind of working environments do I enjoy and do well in?        What failures did I experience in college, and what lessons did I learn from them?        What kind of job would give me a sense of fulfillment?        Where do I want to be in five years?
  • The emphasis schools place on science, technology, engineering, and math as well as standardized testing and rote memorization may teach students the logical and technical skills they need to do a job, but the college experience often fails to provide them with the necessary street smarts to apply those skills in whatever situation they may encounter. That capacity for developing and discovering new ideas is often provided by other academic disciplines, such as history, philosophy, or sociology. This is how we create the next Steve Jobs or Steven Spielberg and why a broad education should still matter to you, even though you might not understand that when you’re eighteen years old. A good liberal arts education combined with a skills-based vocational education provides the “connective tissue” between disparate ideas and will help you navigate the ambiguous work world you are going to live in, where job requirements seem to change nearly every day and careers disappear with regularity.
  • YOUR STORY NEEDS TO BE AUTHENTIC AND TRUE. AND you should worry more about it being coherent than artful. Employers are looking for the why behind your decisions and how the situations you faced before might compare with ones you will confront on the job.
  • Students today are commonly told they should follow their passions and find a mission in life, but very few eighteen-year-olds or even twenty-two-year-olds have enough experience in the world to know what truly excites them. Pick a major that interests you, but allow it and external experiences to help shape, not dictate, your mission in life.
  • Throughout much of human history, the answer to staying ahead of automation was more education. That’s still the case, but now the answer is much more ambiguous and complicated. Just going to college will not land you meaningful employment. The biggest employers of tomorrow will be able to get by with far fewer workers. The challenge to young adults today is to stand out in this competitive economy with a career story that resonates with employers. To succeed you will have to learn to manage the many pathways available to find the right kinds of educational opportunities, at the right time, to achieve the life you desire.

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