Twenty-one years ago next month, I graduated from college. I’m firmly planted in Generation X, but for the last two years I spent much of my life meeting and interviewing Millennials for a new book hitting bookstores today called There Is Life After College.
Through the stories of 20-somethings, the book explores how young adults can better navigate the route from high school through college and into an economy where entire industries and careers are expanding and contracting at an alarming pace. It looks at the fundamental experiences in and out of school that shape success in the job market today, the skills that prove most helpful, and most of all, explores why some students prosper, while others fail.
The message of the book is that it’s how you get an education after high school—the intensity of the courses, the internships and hands-on learning, the peer networking—that’s more important than where you go. Notice I said “education after high school.” The book attempts to redefine what we mean by “higher education” and “college” in the U.S. by exploring gap years, apprenticeships, community colleges, and boot camps that teach job skills.
After I finished writing the book, I was so glad that I wasn’t about to apply for my first job all over again. Today's pathway to that first job and a fulfilling career is a much different today than it was just one generation ago, forever changed by the massive shift to a global, information-based economy.
As part of the research for the book I conducted a poll of young adults in their mid-twenties. I wanted to find out what experiences they had in the previous decade that led to the jobs they ended up getting. From that poll and my reporting, here are the five ways the rules have changed for new college graduates:
The degree is a weaker signal of job readiness.
The bachelor’s degree is still a strong signal, but one with a lot more noise surrounding it. When I graduated from college, the bachelor’s degree was still the golden ticket to a job, and a pretty good one at that. Today, as 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 I describe in Chapter 1 of the book, students today launch out of college in one of three ways: they are either Sprinters, Wanderers, or Stragglers (for more details on these three groups, see an excerpt from the book in last Sunday's New York Times).
Two-thirds of todays graduates are either Wanderers and Stragglers, who take their time and press pause on their journey to adulthood. How they launch from college depends largely on how they approached the undergraduate career and their outcomes immediately after graduation—if they graduate—differ greatly (as you can see in the chart below).
Students can't treat college as a spectator sport.
This is important advice for students going off to college this fall. College graduates who thrive in their careers are more willing to find professors and mentors in the workplace to guide them. They begin to build professional networks in college, and they develop soft skills—such as proactively taking on work beyond the beyond the rigidity of a syllabus and seeking out additional opportunities to learn—that employers want.
There was a time when you could wander through college, think about a job or career the second semester of your senior year, and still succeed. Not anymore.
The results of the Gallup-Purdue University Index show that the experiences in college, and not just showing up, matter the most. As part of the survey, Gallup polls some 30,000 bachelor’s-degree recipients and 1,500 associate’s-degree holders nationwide to measure their well being.
According to the survey, college graduates who said they had had a professor who cared about them as a person and encouraged them to follow their dreams were more than twice as likely to be engaged in life and work after graduation—meaning they were curious, interested, and had a passion for what they were doing. The same was true for graduates with outside-the-classroom experiences, internships, research projects, campus clubs, and athletic teams. But here’s the problem: only 14 percent of graduates recalled having a professor who made them excited about learning and encouraged them.
College is the start of lifelong learning.
In the future, more education will be “just in time” rather than “just one time.” Enrollment in graduate school is stagnant as 20-somethings instead seek out short-term basic training programs at places like General Assembly, Koru, Coursera, and Lynda.com, with one goal: to get them a job.
New grads are taking longer to launch than ever before.
In the 1970s and 1980s, college graduates, on average, reached financial independence by the time they turned 26 years old. Today, college graduates don’t hit that mark until their 30th birthday.
There is no “career track.”
When I graduated from college I wanted to be a newspaper reporter or a magazine writer. The year before I graduated, the first commercial Web browser was launched. I spent the first summer after college reporting on this thing called the World Wide Web for the Arizona Republic. Little did I know at the time how much what I was reporting on would disrupt my career track. Within a decade the newspaper and magazine careers that I imagined no longer existed. Today’s graduates are not navigating clearly marked career tracks, but rather wide open seas.
While I wouldn’t want to apply for my first job all over again, after two years of reporting and writing about life after college I remain hopeful. The options for students to start their own careers and to find training throughout their twenties are much greater and more diverse than they were in my generation. The challenge for young adults now is to learn to manage the many pathways available to find the right kinds of education opportunities, at the right time, to achieve the life they desire.
