Debra Humphreys, of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, speaks to more than 150 at Colgate’s Innovation + Disruption symposium in New York City. (Photo by Lorenzo Ciniglio)
Colgate’s Career Services, in partnership with 12 other liberal arts institutions, hosted a dynamic afternoon series of speakers, breakout sessions, and a panel discussion as part of the Innovation + Disruption symposium in New York City this week.
“We designed the program to re-introduce and re-frame the national dialogue about the preparation with which liberal arts students launch into today’s professional environment,” said Teresa Olsen, Colgate’s career services director of operations and strategic planning.
“We brought together a mix of our institutions’ most important stakeholders — academic and student life deans, faculty, employers, alumni, trustees, advancement professionals, and of course, career services professionals — with independent researchers, who provided objective and relevant data to depict the employment landscape,” Olsen added.
Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, presented new data on liberal arts and employment to a crowd of more than 150. And while the AAC&U disagrees with strictly looking at income as a gauge of educational success, their findings show robust earnings for liberal arts graduates, regardless of their major.
“Employers really want both ends, both a broad range of knowledge and specific skills,” Humphreys said. “This [kind of education] is one of the things that we do really well on a liberal arts campus that I’m not sure can be scaled or done online.”
Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State, spoke about the tidal change in employment post college, from the days of graduation and walking into a job with only a degree in hand, to a new stringent focus on skill sets, internships, and experience prior to the workplace.
“Companies quit training. Unfortunately they pushed that back on us, and training is very different from learning and acquiring knowledge,” Gardner said.
Gardner contends the new normal in the workplace is constant change, and universities that prepare their students for that environment will succeed. Gardner said that since most employers are looking for strong skill sets, it makes sense for schools to develop career programs around the idea that many of the desired qualities can be found in what students do in a liberal arts classroom.
“Build working relationships, analyze and interpret data, engage in continuous learning, communicate through justification and persuasion, plan and manage a project, create new knowledge, build a team, mentor others, and seek global understanding,” Gardner said, referring to the “T” model. “You have to be truly interdisciplinary. You have to have depth.”
A panel of liberal arts alumni, who are now employers themselves, was moderated by Chronicle of Higher Education Senior Writer Goldie Blumenstyk ‘79. They echoed much of what Humphreys and Gardner contended, in that they are looking for graduates who can work in a team environment and can solve problems.
The panel included Brendan Ripp, Sports Illustrated publisher; Debra LoCastro ‘04, student outreach and programs team manager for Google in North America; Cecilia McKenney, executive vice president of human resources and sales operations for Frontier Communications; Josh Jarrett, chief learning officer and co-founder of Koru; and Jake Schwartz, founder of General Assembly.
The afternoon career sessions were sponsored by Colgate, led by Director of Career Services Michael Sciola, in partnership with Amherst College, Bucknell University, Davidson College, Franklin & Marshall College, Gettysburg College, Grinnell College, Haverford College, Lake Forest College, Lewis & Clark College, Oberlin College & Conservatory, Pomona College, and Scripps College.