How Do We Make Every American College Graduate Employable?

A professor and former corporate banker, a career and internship counselor, a policy analyst and former federal agency official, a director of a skills coalition, an expert in career pathways for black students, and an experienced higher education journalist. When you put several incredible and varying minds together in a room to discuss solutions to a problem, you are bound to find golden moments of wisdom in the avid search for new, but evidence-based solutions. This is precisely what the Chronicle of Higher Education succeeded in recently with a roundtable discussion of experts about a topic that is currently ripe in national and campaign discussions alike: college, job-training, and careers.

The Director of our Center on Education & Skills team, Mary Alice McCarthy, was fortunate enough to be a part of this thought-provoking, and at times even diplomatically contentious, discussion about how to make colleges not just the traditional model of “getting an education”, but environments rich with options to acquire practical skills for careers and where opportunities are available to go out and effectively apply them.

“College is about getting an education and a job, but these days there’s more emphasis on the latter,” said Sara Lipka, senior editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education and moderator of the roundtable.

“College is about getting an education and a job, but these days there’s more emphasis on the latter.”

McCarthy had the opportunity to contribute thoughts in the discussion, including in a healthy debate about how apprenticeship models can best provide broadly-applicable skills rather than siloing individuals into one industry, thoughts on what it means for a student to become “employable”, how innovations in community colleges should connect our nation’s most vulnerable students to a valuable bachelor’s degree, why federal work-study needs to be improved to provide rich and relevant new experiences, and the importance of “earn while you learn” models for effectively developing a future worker.

We highly recommend you review the full, freely-available Chronicle report entitled “Preparing Students for 21st-Century Careers” to consider all the expert opinions and contributions to the discussion and how we can prove that “every American college graduate is employable” as asserted by McCarthy.

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