But Who’s Counting
This is the old punch line that usually leads to a laugh or a chuckle. But these days it seems to be more of a call for sympathy, as in “I’ve been out of work now for seven months, two weeks and three days, but who’s counting?”
As we click towards May and a second year of virtual graduation exercises, the Federal Reserve is reporting that student loan debt level is up 4% versus a year ago, at a record $1.7 trillion (but who’s counting). It is a level of debt second only to mortgage loans and now ahead of credit card debt. This is somber news in any economic period, and outright disastrous at a time when the Class of 2021 (not to mention 2020) are trying to become earners instead of spenders. In early February, the Wall Street Journal ran a timely article titled, “The Crisis of Unemployed College Graduates”, in which it called for Higher Ed institutions to broaden their scope of interest in the midst of the worst job market in decades. Author Jeffrey Selingo wrote, “Colleges have both an opportunity and an obligation to connect with the job market. At a time when students increasingly need new skills, institutions can no longer wash their hands of what happens to students after graduation.”
It may be a bit harsh to imply that colleges and universities are uninterested in graduate outcomes. Many schools routinely conduct an annual poll of graduating students to capture the name of their employer and a starting salary; this summarized information gets piped directly into the school’s website, viewbooks, and marketing communications, as evidence of the value of a degree from the school. While it’s a useful snapshot, it is hardly the conclusive evidence of a successful careers that should really be measured for the 15-20 years that it takes for graduates to pay off their student loans (18.5 years is the average according to a study by New York Life, but who’s counting). Ironically, if colleges and universities were able to measure the success of their graduates in the workplace, they would have a more compelling case for the value of a degree that most applicants, students (and parents!) care most about these days. Schools can leverage this information to boost applications, enrollment, retention, and advancement activities, four areas that every institution is intensely focused on at the moment.
It’s a big undertaking to gather and analyze information about graduate outcomes. Our company (CareerMap) is excited to be one of the first to take a Big Data approach to measuring and evaluating career success. We recently completed a study of the careers of hundreds of graduates from the School of Information at a major public university, drawing from a database that is more comprehensive than any prior research initiative on careers. The study validated the truism “new insights come from new information”; the findings included macro trends in terms of professional interests and career approaches as Baby Boomers cycled into Gen Xers cycled into Millennials. Looking at specific career paths, the study tracked the number of years and positions a person worked before attaining one’s first management position, and the sequence of roles people took to rise to senior leadership positions. Five distinct professional personas were identified based on distinct career goals, motivations, career-building strategies; these are the types of insights that would be extremely valuable for Career Services advisors to counsel current students and graduates about their career choices and decisions.
With gender equality being a prominent issue in American business, this study also uncovered intriguing findings about the glass ceiling that women encounter in the information technology industry. While confirming the common belief that women in tech take longer to climb the corporate ladder than men, the complete career records of the study participants enabled us to identify specific sectors in which women performed equally well if not better than the men in our sample. [If you’re interested in more information about this study please reach out to me directly via LinkedIn or Facebook].
With our twin son and daughter graduating from university in two months, you could say that my interest in having a clearer understanding of career outcomes is both professional and personal. In January we experienced the bittersweet moment of stroking the final checks for their final semesters (four-year total = I’m not counting). As an international affairs major at George Washington University, Abby learned this month that she was named a fellow in the Princeton In Latin American program; her bittersweet moment is that the acceptance letter from PiLA also announced that they were deferring the fellowship for a year due to COVID-19. She’ll just add this one to the list of senior year disappointments that include no spring a Capella concert, no musical theater performance, no live graduation, and now no stress-free period of knowing what her post-graduation plan will be. The silver lining of being a “full time student” is that she has plenty of time to send off two dozen job applications (or three or four dozen, but who’s counting) for positions that are likely to score meh on the Excite-o-meter for Abby.
Her brother Tucker is following a less drama-filled path. He will graduate with a BS in computer science from Case Western and stay on to pursue his masters degree, rather than jump into the high-tech job market. It used to be that graduate degrees were a resume differentiator for job seekers, and a catalyst for accelerating a person’s career advancement. But as the number of workers holding graduate degrees doubled between 2000 and 2018 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics), in a tight hiring market it’s turned into simply a more expensive cost of entry. Return on investment of bachelors and advanced degrees vary significantly by industry, yet the cost to earn said degrees are driven by the Higher Ed competitive market without regard to the economic market that graduates are being launched into. Which comes back to the expanded responsibility that Higher Ed needs to assume in terms of the true economic value of the degrees they confer.
Roughly 2 million seniors will graduate from their college or university in May/June. Many will be in situations exactly like our kids, which simply proves the adage that misery loves company. Time will tell if this misery lasts only the rest of 2021, or if it will linger for up to ten years of underemployment and depressed income as some academic models are forecasting. An intervention will need to include a Higher Ed focus on long-term career outcomes, breakthrough insights into successful career strategies from CareerMap and companies like us, and public policy that provides student debt relief to those most impacted by the economic downturn. And maybe a change in plans from parents to provide more direct support to our kids than any generation since the 1940s. The future of Gen Z may be counting on us.
Tim Guen is President of CareerMap and blogs frequently about the challenges of career building during the pandemic.