By Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (March 13, 2024) – Despite the ivory tower stereotype, American universities are marked by their embrace of pragmatic education.

We’re the country that invented land-grant colleges devoted to “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes,” as the lovely prose of the 1862 Morrill Act commanded. We’re a country where community colleges teach literature and Harvard teaches mechanical engineering.

We’ve long known that a sound education should fill a resume and feed the soul.

Ben Wildavksy certainly thinks so, and he lays out an excellent case in The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credential, and Connections. Wildavsky, a visiting scholar at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, rebuts the idea that students have to choose “between college and practical skills” when considering their options after high school.

“At a time when long-term economic changes increasingly require education beyond high school for career success, too many Americans doubt the proven value of college,” he writes. Growing skepticism toward higher education, and especially a perception that the liberal arts don’t pay off, could prevent students from pursuing a life-changing opportunity.

Wildavsky catalogs the exhaustive evidence that Americans who graduate from college earn more, generally much more, than similarly situated peers who do not.

“There is more reason than ever for Americans to seek out postsecondary opportunities, for policy makers to foster college access, and for colleges and universities themselves to include and succeed with more students.”

But he’s also clear-eyed about the need for colleges to strengthen the odds of student success, since the biggest financial risk of college is dropping out. Universities should build career-focused credentials into the curriculum, so students and employers can better identify specific skills included in each degree. Identifying resume skills is especially useful in programs that don’t have obvious career outcomes — think art history or psychology — so that students have more confidence about finding a decent job with a liberal arts degree.

Most intriguingly, Wildavsky calls on universities to get serious about professional networking and social capital as key components of the college years. Turns out it’s what you know and who you know.

“Our emphasis on education and skills in the past fifty years, while necessary and valuable, has too often come at the expense of helping young people build the networks they need to thrive professionally, particularly in an era when growing life expectancies will mean multiple career changes.”

Those social ties are especially valuable for first-generation and low-income students who often don’t have the family connections to land premier internships or promising entry-level jobs. Being able to rely on classmates and alumni to make introductions and open doors is crucial.

That’s especially striking given Wildavsky’s observation that elite institutions — selective private schools, tailored scholarship programs — generally put the most emphasis on building social capital.

The rest of higher education, especially the open-access public institutions that serve most students, need to put a lot more focus on building alumni networks, expanding internship programs, and teaching students to cultivate mentors.

Wildavsky cites nonprofit programs across the country that pair low-income students with career mentors, people who can help plug them into high-value social networks. Organizations like Braven, which combines professional skills with career coaching for first-generation students, and Climb Hire, which helps working adults transition to tech-focused jobs through both training and networking. Colleges and alumni associations could take similar steps, tapping alumni as life coaches and career guides.

Alumni are often in the best position to answer that all-important question for aspiring graduates, “What are you going to do with your degree?”

One of the most striking findings from the UNC System’s ROI study, released last fall, is that many public college graduates are working in career fields not directly related to their majors. Nursing graduates become nurses and education school graduates become teachers, but the students who choose majors without a defined professional path — psychology, mathematics, comparative literature — still find their way, ending up in an array of different fields.

Wildavsky has a good sense of why. “The hard-to-quantify liberal arts soft skills like problem solving and adaptability have long-term career value by design,” he writes. “At times of rapid technological change… range and flexibility are even more crucial.”

A February study by the BurningGlass Institute warned that while the last era of automation affected farms, factories, and other blue-collar careers, the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to affect financial analysts, software engineers, and marketing managers.

“As AI disrupts traditional roles, the importance of uniquely human attributes such as critical thinking, empathy and adaptability will become even more pronounced,” BurningGlass predicted. “Businesses can achieve the best outcomes when they leverage both the capabilities of GenAI and the unique strengths of human intelligence.”

In the age of smart machines that can write a legal brief or repair broken computer code, turns out the humanities are still a pretty good bet.

Eric Johnson lives in Chapel Hill and works for the UNC System. You can reach him at [email protected].