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For years, most liberal-arts schools seemed to put career-services offices “somewhere just below parking” as a matter of administrative priority, in the words of Wake Forest’s president, Nathan Hatch. But increasingly, even elite, decidedly non-career-oriented schools are starting to promote their career services during the freshman year, in response to fears about the economy, an ongoing discussion about college accountability and, in no small part, the concerns of parents, many of whom want to ensure a return on their exorbitant investment.
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No other school has marketed its career center quite as successfully as Wake Forest (which, at No. 27, falls between the University of Virginia and Tufts on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but has struggled with name recognition nationally). In 2009, the university hired [Andy Chan, vice president in charge of the Office of Personal and Career Development], who was running Stanford Business School’s career center and had led a Silicon Valley start-up. Chan has made a name for himself as an oft-quoted expert on getting young people employed. He has given a TEDx talk on the subject of reinventing career services and hosted, at Wake Forest, a symposium that was attended by representatives from some 75 schools. His theme: If universities want to preserve the liberal arts, they have a responsibility to help those humanities majors know how to translate their studies into the work world.
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Colleges and universities have noted parents’ seemingly boundless concern for their children’s well-being and have shifted strategies in response. They have boosted parental involvement, or engagement, as it is known in the fund-raising industry. Schools have doubled the number of on-campus parent associations in roughly 10 years, according to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, and parents, in turn, have given generously, even as college costs have hit new highs. Parent donations to higher education, from 2001 to 2010, increased by nearly 50 percent, according to a study published by the Council for Aid to Education.
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[Parent] Naumann was most enthusiastic about the school’s entrepreneurial program. Chan has raised money for a popular minor in entrepreneurship and social enterprise, which is open to liberal-arts majors. As Chan took notes on his iPad, Naumann talked about the qualities he thought were most essential for the school to cultivate in its students: fearlessness, communication, analytic skills and teamwork. Working well with others, he pointed out, was precisely the kind of skill that could not be learned online and one that brick-and-mortar liberal-arts schools could pride themselves on providing as they sought to stay relevant.
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Andrew Delbanco, a professor at Columbia, writes in his book, “College: What It Was, Is and Should Be,” that colleges should help students develop “a skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past.” Can liberal-arts schools encourage students to question the status quo while simultaneously reminding them from their first days on campus to keep their employability in mind?
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Academics are expected to express reservations about the encroachment of career planning on intellectual development, but their doubts are not that different from those voiced by Brad Henderson, a 34-year-old partner at Boston Consulting Group, who is in charge of the firm’s Midwestern recruiting. Henderson, an alumnus of the University of Chicago, does not object to career programming in principle but worries that at some colleges, “this race to get jobs becomes more important than the actual ‘let’s educate our students,’ ” Henderson said. “It’s not uncommon to encounter a 20-year-old who has not benefited from the maturation you get from higher education, from true engagement in a classroom — it becomes more about taking classes as an extended way to build your résumé. You think you’re talking to a 20-year-old who should have bright ideas and enthusiasm, and they can’t get out of the mode of: ‘What are the words I’m supposed to use in this conversation?’ And you see that the risk has been taken out of résumés — that’s the part that’s most disheartening.”
Some schools have expensive climbing walls; others have wellness centers worthy of five-star hotels. Wake Forest has Andy Chan. At orientation, he addressed the parents wearing a navy jacket and white shirt, roaming freely with a headset and using his hands for emphasis with the skill of a seasoned public speaker. “I believe, and many believe, that a liberal-arts education is the key to navigating the changes that come ahead,” said Chan, a former political-science major, reassuring parents who may recall fondly their years studying 18th-century art history or the Romantic poets but who still want results for the high cost of tuition….
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