Jeffrey Young, senior lecturer of history, teaches students to use data visualization software in his classes. By incorporating digital technology into their coursework, students learn valuable skills with broad applications on the job market. (Photo by Steven Thackston)
written by Maya Kroth
When freshman Brittani Smith enrolled in professor Jeffrey Young’s required lower-division history course last spring, she thought she knew what she was in for.
“I thought history was just going to be dates and remembering information,” says Smith, who was born in Jamaica and is the first in her family to attend college.
But she quickly realized that this was no ordinary history class. Instead of being forced to memorize the names of dead generals, Young’s students were required to learn data visualization software called Tableau to process complex historical datasets. Each week, they created charts, graphs and color-coded maps in Tableau to understand and explain historical events like the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“At first, I was like, ‘How is this really going to help me?’” recalls Smith, who isn’t sure what she wants to major in but is leaning toward marketing. “But when I thought about it again, I realized this isn’t just for historical data. I could see it being beneficial in accounting, math, finance and entrepreneurship.”
Getting students to understand the link between their undergraduate coursework and their future dream jobs is precisely what a new university-wide initiative called College to Career is all about. Rolling out in the fall as Georgia State’s new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), College to Career will attempt to inject career readiness into nearly every aspect of campus life, inside and outside the classroom.
At a time of rising student debt and a shaky job market, when many are questioning the value of higher education, College to Career aims to ensure Georgia State grads can pursue the fields of study they’re passionate about and emerge equipped to face the challenges of the 21st-century marketplace.
Will it work?
When freshman Brittani Smith enrolled in professor Jeffrey Young’s required lower-division history course last spring, she thought she knew what she was in for.
“I thought history was just going to be dates and remembering information,” says Smith, who was born in Jamaica and is the first in her family to attend college.
But she quickly realized that this was no ordinary history class. Instead of being forced to memorize the names of dead generals, Young’s students were required to learn data visualization software called Tableau to process complex historical datasets. Each week, they created charts, graphs and color-coded maps in Tableau to understand and explain historical events like the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“At first, I was like, ‘How is this really going to help me?’” recalls Smith, who isn’t sure what she wants to major in but is leaning toward marketing. “But when I thought about it again, I realized this isn’t just for historical data. I could see it being beneficial in accounting, math, finance and entrepreneurship.”
Getting students to understand the link between their undergraduate coursework and their future dream jobs is precisely what a new university-wide initiative called College to Career is all about. Rolling out in the fall as Georgia State’s new Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP), College to Career will attempt to inject career readiness into nearly every aspect of campus life, inside and outside the classroom.
At a time of rising student debt and a shaky job market, when many are questioning the value of higher education, College to Career aims to ensure Georgia State grads can pursue the fields of study they’re passionate about and emerge equipped to face the challenges of the 21st-century marketplace.
Will it work?
SKILL BUILDING
On the second floor of Student Center West, University Career Services is quiet. The vacant chairs and workstations serve as an apt metaphor for a worrying statistic: Sixty-four percent of Georgia State’s 2016 graduating seniors didn’t visit University Career Services until their senior year. That’s way too late, says Timothy Renick, vice provost and senior vice president for student success.
“That’s a bad recipe in general but an even more problematic recipe for low-income, first-generation students,” Renick says.
While the university has notched a number of well-documented achievements in closing racial and income-based equity gaps — such as graduating more African-American students than any other public or nonprofit college or university in the country — Renick says more needed to be done.
“While we were doing increasingly good work in getting students to the point of graduation, we were not necessarily making the same dramatic impact on them once they graduated,” he says. “Our students need support professionalizing toward careers — not just in their last semester of enrollment but throughout their academic careers.”
So, as part of the university’s once-a-decade accreditation reaffirmation, Georgia State selected a QEP focused on career readiness, aptly titled College to Career.
“College to Career is an attempt to recognize that, from their very first semester at Georgia State, students should be engaged in significant activities that get them ready for life after graduation,” Renick says.
The initiative is measured by three outcomes: awareness, connection and demonstration. Awareness begins in freshman-year orientation courses, where students are introduced to key career competencies and asked to complete a career exploration project that includes visiting University Career Services and learning how to draft a resume.
These courses also introduce students to Portfolium, an electronic portfolio platform where they can upload “artifacts,” such as term papers, audiovisual presentations or videos of themselves (say, delivering a speech or performing in a play), and tag each artifact to its corresponding competencies. (In the first year after Portfolium’s deployment, students and alumni uploaded more than 700,000 artifacts.)
Next come connection and demonstration. New lower-level major and pathway-specific gateway courses will help students connect the skills gained in their coursework to careers in their field of study. As students progress toward graduation, they will also be encouraged to articulate the connections between their co- and extracurricular activities and the career-readiness competencies they’re acquiring.
For instance, when Smith completed a data visualization project for her history class about U.S. morbidity rates broken down by county — a detailed, color-coded map based on data from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, complete with captions explaining the story the numbers tell — she would have the option to upload it to Portfolium and tag it as an example of her fluency with the Digital Technology competency. Ideally, by the time Smith graduates, her e-portfolio will be full of such examples. That way, when she goes to apply for internships and jobs, she can curate the artifacts that best showcase her skills to employers.
“This is a university-wide way of making it clear to students that everything they do on this campus has some connection to some skill,” says Angela Christie, the QEP’s faculty director who’s in charge of helping academic departments incorporate College to Career concepts into their curricula. These career-oriented upgrades to the college experience even extend to dorm life.
“University Housing has a curriculum that talks to students about being part of a community and how to resolve conflicts,” Christie says. “Those are very important skills to learn. Now, they are changing that curriculum so it’s clear the message students are getting is not just, ‘This is teaching me how to live in my residential hall,’ but ‘This is teaching me skills that will help me be successful.’”
The Competencies
College to Career aligns nearly everything a student does on campus with one of eight key career competencies identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. These are skills that employers value most highly in the modern workplace.
The idea behind the initiative is that, regardless of what students study, whether sculpting or neuroscience, they’re acquiring the skills they need to ensure they remain marketable in a changing economy.
The Competencies
College to Career aligns nearly everything a student does on campus with one of eight key career competencies identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. These are skills that employers value most highly in the modern workplace.
The idea behind the initiative is that, regardless of what students study, whether sculpting or neuroscience, they’re acquiring the skills they need to ensure they remain marketable in a changing economy.
The Competencies
College to Career aligns nearly everything a student does on campus with one of eight key career competencies identified by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. These are skills that employers value most highly in the modern workplace.
- Critical Thinking/Problem Solving
- Oral/Written Communication
- Teamwork/Collaboration
- Digital Technology
- Leadership
- Professionalism/Work Ethic
- Career Management
- Global/Intercultural Fluency
The idea behind the initiative is that, regardless of what students study, whether sculpting or neuroscience, they’re acquiring the skills they need to ensure they remain marketable in a changing economy.
FACULTY BUY-IN
According to a 2018 national survey, 66 percent of college seniors felt they were not well prepared to succeed in a job search, and three-quarters said they didn’t know which jobs were an appropriate fit.
“With student debt so high, the idea that a student would get out of college and not have the faintest idea of where to get a job is terrifying to me,” says Christie, also a senior lecturer in the English Department. “As much as I love teaching literature, I need to know my students are going to be OK.”
Christie’s office is tasked with getting faculty on board with College to Career — no easy feat at a time when professors are already wary about administrative requirements impinging on the way they teach.
“Faculty don’t like to be told how they need to teach material that they are experts in teaching,” Christie says. “They want to make sure they’re not sacrificing the content of their courses for the need to professionalize their students.”
The administration gets that, so College to Career starts with recognizing faculty as the authorities they are.
“They’ve stepped back and said, ‘Faculty, you’re the experts. Tell us how to transmit this material to your students,’” Christie says.
When overhauling her own department’s curriculum with College to Career in mind, Christie and her colleagues made a list of about 60 interpersonal skills — accepting criticism, thinking critically and communicating clearly, for example — English majors learn in existing coursework, and they connected them to the National Association of Colleges and Employers competencies.
For example, Christie teaches a poetry course that already requires students to learn a graphic design program to build 3D replicas of artifacts mentioned in the poems, describe the items and their relevance on a WordPress blog and present their work in front of the class. College to Career ensures students understand they’re not just learning about Victorian verse but are also using critical thinking, honing their digital technology fluency, and developing oral and written communication skills.
“Nothing about that course has changed,” Christie says. “Students are reading the same poetry. They’re doing the same assignments. But now, I have made sure that they are expressly aware of how they’re learning those three skills in this class and how to apply them to any job.”
While it might sound like a step toward making universities more like trade schools, some see College to Career as a boon to arts and humanities disciplines in particular, where majors such as art and English are so often pilloried in popular culture as useless, expensive degrees.
“English majors are really good at grit,” Christie says. “We’ve been the punchline of many jokes, but we’re in industries all over, in sectors that are not typically connected to our degree, because our degree gives us so many skills.”
She cites a personal example: “I can recite Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ word for word. No English teacher ever told me that, when I was learning those things, I was picking up skills that I have used in every single job I’ve had since I got out of college: how to interpret, how to analyze, how to present material, how to take cues from an audience, how to recover when I make a mistake. All of those things are very valuable skills in the job market.”
Seated in his office on the 16th floor of 25 Park Place, Jeffrey Young, senior lecturer of history, shares Christie’s point of view.
“The history major has been shedding students nationwide,” he says, attributing the decline to factors that include a failure to convey the practical uses for the skills students learn in history courses, such as using logic and evidence to craft compelling arguments and present ideas clearly. “These are instrumental to practically any job that involves critical thinking, but as a discipline, we just haven’t been able to articulate that.”
So, when Young and some of his colleagues learned the new QEP would have a career focus, they were excited. Young had already been using Tableau and historical data in his teaching.
“Every imaginable corner of the economy is filled with companies that are hiring people to do this kind of work,” says Young, gesturing at his computer monitor, which displays one of the colorful map presentations that his students created this semester in Tableau.
Christie’s office has also helped connect 27 faculty Fellows with grant money and training to bring College to Career concepts into the classroom. Over at the School of Public Health, for example, assistant professor Christa Watson-Wright is showing her students how they can develop critical thinking, writing and public speaking skills while investigating environmental health issues.
“College to Career is an attempt to recognize that, from their very first semester at Georgia State, students should be engaged in significant activities that get them ready for life after graduation.”
— Timothy Renick
Timothy Renick, vice provost and senior vice president for student success, is helping the university prepare students from all majors to start successful careers as soon as they graduate. (Photo by Ben Rollins)
“College to Career is an attempt to recognize that, from their very first semester at Georgia State, students should be engaged in significant activities that get them ready for life after graduation.”
— Timothy Renick
Timothy Renick, vice provost and senior vice president for student success, is helping the university prepare students from all majors to start successful careers as soon as they graduate. (Photo by Ben Rollins)
FLEXIBILITY FOR THE FUTURE
There was another thing Brittani Smith didn’t expect to see when she enrolled in that required history course: an extra-credit assignment challenging students to take a stab at writing a resume.
A key piece of College to Career is strengthening the relationships between students in every course of study with University Career Services (UCS). Starting this fall, incoming freshmen will have contact with staff or peer advisers from UCS from the very start of their college careers.
“We hear it all the time: ‘I didn’t even know we had career services,’” says Catherine Neiner, director of UCS. “We hear our seniors saying, ‘I wish I had known to get this experience or make time for this internship.’ We need them to be thinking about this earlier so they can make strategic decisions and get the experiences, coursework and knowledge they need to progress into a career and thrive.”
Neiner stresses that College to Career is not meant to pressure 18-year-olds into making binding career decisions right out of the gate.
“We don’t want to overwhelm them,” she says. “Not everybody knows what he or she wants to do.”
Instead, she hopes to expose students to all the resources the career center has to offer, from career counseling to help with resumes, internships and meetings with employers. Thanks to a recently developed pilot program, they’ll also have the opportunity to talk through their career concerns with peer advisers.
Like many of her peers, Smith is already nervous about finding a job even though she isn’t slated to graduate until 2022.
“It can get confusing and frustrating,” she says. “Ambitions change, your path changes. I’m curious about where I’m really going to end up. What kind of job am I going to end up doing? It makes me anxious sometimes. Most times.”
Rather than viewing the university as a training ground for a very specific job, Neiner aims for something broader. She uses the term “future-flexible.”
“Half of the jobs we’ll have over the next 20 years don’t even exist right now, and most people do not stay in their first job,” she says. “Often that first job doesn’t even set you on your path to your ultimate career, and yet that’s traditionally what we’ve been preparing our students for. That’s what makes our College to Career initiative so important.
“The unspoken goal of these activities is that our students feel confident presenting their credentials to employers. It’s important to us that others in our community are able to see that all of our citizens — regardless of economic background, race, gender, educational status — have all the potential to be contributors to our community.”
Angela Christie (left), senior lecturer of English and the faculty director in charge of College to Career, and Catherine Neiner, director of University Career Services, are helping students take advantage of career resources at Georgia State and graduate with the skills and confidence to get a job. (Photo by Steven Thackston)
MIND THE DATA
As College to Career weaves its way throughout the Georgia State student experience, the question remains: How will we know if it’s working?
One way is by tracking how many students have found satisfying, meaningful employment after graduation, making sure to account for those who pursued graduate study or paused to raise families instead.
Right now, such student outcomes — at any institution — are chiefly measured using surveys, which are not reliable for getting good data. Only about 5 percent of those invited to fill out surveys actually do so, and it’s usually not a representative sample.
“If only 5 percent fill it out, they’re probably going to be alumni who are really happy about what they’re doing and want to brag about their great accomplishments — and also, disproportionately, alumni who are dissatisfied, who feel things maybe didn’t turn out the best,” says Renick.
That makes it hard to establish good benchmarks, so Georgia State is now among the very first institutions to use big data to collect outcomes for graduates.
By combing through publicly available information that alumni post to sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, Georgia State has been able to locate about 90 percent of its alumni — a more holistic picture than the self-selecting 5 or 10 percent who respond to surveys.
The university is also using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics in creative ways to make it easier to interact with alumni after graduation. Renick hopes those data-driven efforts yield better benchmarks soon.
“At Georgia State, the goal is always to make sure the outcomes are improving,” he says.
As a religious studies professor, Renick knows there’s more to college than just getting a job.
“I’m a humanities professor; I’m the first to say that college is not all about career — maybe not even primarily. It’s about learning and experience and growing,” he says. “But in addition, it’s about giving students the opportunity to have a fulfilling career after graduation.”
Like Renick, Christie hopes that College to Career will encourage students to stick with the subjects they love.
“The career competency skills students learn in anthropology, English and history are the same they’d learn in every other major here,” Christie says. “We know that when students have a passion for what they’re learning, there’s nothing to stop them.”
Maya Kroth is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New York, Southern Living, Sunset and The Washington Post.
MIND THE DATA
As College to Career weaves its way throughout the Georgia State student experience, the question remains: How will we know if it’s working?
One way is by tracking how many students have found satisfying, meaningful employment after graduation, making sure to account for those who pursued graduate study or paused to raise families instead.
Right now, such student outcomes — at any institution — are chiefly measured using surveys, which are not reliable for getting good data. Only about 5 percent of those invited to fill out surveys actually do so, and it’s usually not a representative sample.
“If only 5 percent fill it out, they’re probably going to be alumni who are really happy about what they’re doing and want to brag about their great accomplishments — and also, disproportionately, alumni who are dissatisfied, who feel things maybe didn’t turn out the best,” says Renick.
That makes it hard to establish good benchmarks, so Georgia State is now among the very first institutions to use big data to collect outcomes for graduates.
By combing through publicly available information that alumni post to sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, Georgia State has been able to locate about 90 percent of its alumni — a more holistic picture than the self-selecting 5 or 10 percent who respond to surveys.
The university is also using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics in creative ways to make it easier to interact with alumni after graduation. Renick hopes those data-driven efforts yield better benchmarks soon.
“At Georgia State, the goal is always to make sure the outcomes are improving,” he says.
As a religious studies professor, Renick knows there’s more to college than just getting a job.
“I’m a humanities professor; I’m the first to say that college is not all about career — maybe not even primarily. It’s about learning and experience and growing,” he says. “But in addition, it’s about giving students the opportunity to have a fulfilling career after graduation.”
Like Renick, Christie hopes that College to Career will encourage students to stick with the subjects they love.
“The career competency skills students learn in anthropology, English and history are the same they’d learn in every other major here,” Christie says. “We know that when students have a passion for what they’re learning, there’s nothing to stop them.”
Maya Kroth is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New York, Southern Living, Sunset and The Washington Post.
MIND THE DATA
As College to Career weaves its way throughout the Georgia State student experience, the question remains: How will we know if it’s working?
One way is by tracking how many students have found satisfying, meaningful employment after graduation, making sure to account for those who pursued graduate study or paused to raise families instead.
Right now, such student outcomes — at any institution — are chiefly measured using surveys, which are not reliable for getting good data. Only about 5 percent of those invited to fill out surveys actually do so, and it’s usually not a representative sample.
“If only 5 percent fill it out, they’re probably going to be alumni who are really happy about what they’re doing and want to brag about their great accomplishments — and also, disproportionately, alumni who are dissatisfied, who feel things maybe didn’t turn out the best,” says Renick.
That makes it hard to establish good benchmarks, so Georgia State is now among the very first institutions to use big data to collect outcomes for graduates.
By combing through publicly available information that alumni post to sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, Georgia State has been able to locate about 90 percent of its alumni — a more holistic picture than the self-selecting 5 or 10 percent who respond to surveys.
The university is also using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics in creative ways to make it easier to interact with alumni after graduation. Renick hopes those data-driven efforts yield better benchmarks soon.
“At Georgia State, the goal is always to make sure the outcomes are improving,” he says.
As a religious studies professor, Renick knows there’s more to college than just getting a job.
“I’m a humanities professor; I’m the first to say that college is not all about career — maybe not even primarily. It’s about learning and experience and growing,” he says. “But in addition, it’s about giving students the opportunity to have a fulfilling career after graduation.”
Like Renick, Christie hopes that College to Career will encourage students to stick with the subjects they love.
“The career competency skills students learn in anthropology, English and history are the same they’d learn in every other major here,” Christie says. “We know that when students have a passion for what they’re learning, there’s nothing to stop them.”
Maya Kroth is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New York, Southern Living, Sunset and The Washington Post.
By the Numbers
50%
Of employers’ overall full-time, entry-level hires in 2018 were recent college graduates
27
Faculty Fellows at Georgia State with grant money and training working on the College to Career program
66%
College seniors in the U.S. feel underprepared to succeed in a job search*
80%
Of employers said they look for evidence of leadership skills on a candidate’s resume*
71%
Of students in the U.S. visited their university’s career services two times or fewer during their college careers
64%
Of Georgia State’s 2016 graduating seniors didn’t visit University Career Services until their senior year
* National Association of Colleges and Employers
