The March 7th issue of MacLean’s magazine features their 6th annual Student Guide. A miniature sized version of the University guide they publish every year, the Student Guide is mainly for over-involved parents of high school students or keener high school students gearing up for the next stage of their academic careers.
In this issue, they featured a great articled in the Get Hired section called “Get me a job – or give me my money back.” Here’s a quick synopsis of the article: in the last decade, universities and colleges have decided to shift the focus on the quality of education you get at their institution to making sure their graduates get hired after they leave the institution. After the job market was crippled in 2008 after the great recession hit, institutions are still reeling from getting their students placed in “good” jobs that their university programs trained them for. The University of Regina has gone so far as to offer students that don’t get hired within the first six months after graduating in their chosen field, they get a free year of tuition to go back to school.
Before I get into my opinion on whether or not this is a good or terrible idea for our post-secondary institutions to launch programs such as UofR’s Free Tuition program, I thought I would share with you my own experience as a student.
I was one of those keeners in high school that was already planning for university when I was in grade 10. Yes, I attended the university fair from grades 10 – OAC (mostly for the swag) but also to figure out a whole array of academic choices put in front of me. When I finally made my decision after sifting through countless university brochures, I shipped off my applications and felt a huge weight fall off my shoulders.
That weight was to come back not three years later when I entered my program at Ivey. This time, the weight was something called “Getting a job” – that was everyone’s focus…get a great summer internship in finance or consulting. If you can’t cut it there, go for accounting, they’ll hire anyone. Failing that, go for the marketing jobs. And if you really suck, perhaps a summer being an “entrepreneur” (cough…unemployed) will help you reflect.
To make a long story short, my internship hunt went poorly. I did everything our Career Management department told us not to do – I applied for everything, sent out templated cover letters and resumes and memorized the standard interview questions to ask a perspective employer during an interview. Fuck, I was dumb. So I disguised my failure well by running for student government and ended up working for the school that summer (thankfully, the election worked out, otherwise, I would have had to “entrepreneur” it for that summer).
It didn’t get any better during my last year at Ivey either. Recruiting started even earlier, and by October 15th (of all days, my birthday), all the good paying 75K+ jobs were gone – offers went out and those people were able to strut their stuff like their shit didn’t stink and go for an academic wank for the rest of the year. Then the 2nd round came where accounting firms and marketing companies came in to swoop up the remainder. By the time that round finished, I’d say 75% of our graduating class had an offer in their hands.
Then there was me. The only offer I had was an internship opportunity with Export Development Canada in Ottawa after I won a scholarship by writing an essay about how trade was important for Canada’s future (seriously, I won a scholarship for writing an essay with that broad of a topic) and why this scholarship will help me pursue my aspirations of international business. Besides that, I had nothing. I repeated all the mistakes from the year before and then just kind of gave up. I was deflated, angry and embarrassed. Having had several student council predecessors land great gigs when they held the role, I was certainly the black sheep, and that May, I packed my bags for Ottawa for the internship.
While I did well at my internship, it was clear, it wasn’t for me. I came back to Toronto in September and became a gentleman of leisure. Clearly, at this time, my educational institution wanted nothing to do with me. I was pulling down their graduate stats. Then I did something even more outrageous – I got ANOTHER internship, this time in Advertising. Advertising wasn’t even a path up for consideration in my business program. We had one elective on it and well, let’s just say out of my 2006 graduating class, there’s one other person in advertising with me now. Big shoutouts to Rebecca Ho. Why was it not up for consideration? The pay sucks when you start, certainly nowhere close to what the school pumped up your salary expectations when I was there. While some of my friends in banking their first year cleared well over six figures after bonus, I made about $4000 during my four-month internship and when I was promoted to an Account Executive, I swore to myself everyday that I would get to the next level ASAP in order to make an actual return on my educational investment.
This story does have a happy ending. Heading into my five year anniversary after graduation, I’ve gotten myself to a place in my career where I’m doing well, I’m happy and I like what I do. Not to say there were bumps along the way, but I’d say less bumps than some of the big hurdles some of my other classmates had to jump over when they found out their career choice wasn’t right for them. Overall, I think if my university education was to be judged upon how well it prepared me to get a job immediately after I graduated, it did poorly. But in the long run, I'm doing okay.
Now that I’ve bored you to tears with my own personal trials and tribulations with the job hunt, back to the point of the article. Should universities and colleges measure their success on how well their students do in their job hunt? In my opinion, while getting a job is important, this shift towards focusing on getting and guaranteeing grads jobs is dangerous. The strain it’s putting on graduates these days to focus on job hunting while they are still there to learn is unbelievably cruel and actually does a disservice to the student’s academic development.
There are three reasons why this outlook is dangerous:
1) The pressure of finding a job leads graduates to pick a career they had no interest to begin with.
I go back to my experiences and see how some of my fellow classmates struggled a year or two after they were in the workplace. Many were unhappy and disenchanted because they thought this career would be different than in reality. In some cases, people had to stop their career, and pick a completely different discipline and start at the bottom again. They gave up on pursuing what they really wanted to do by bending to the pressures of getting that top paying job. It’s a terrible lesson to learn.
2) Job-focused academic institutions prioritizes job finding over academics.
I remember that in the year that followed our class, they were given an extra week of break in order to recruit for jobs, much to the chagrin of my classmates. We complained how these “kids” had it so much easier than we did (very “when I went to school, I walked barefoot over a mile on broken glass” kind of mentality). What we failed to even talk about was the fact that these “kids” paid the same amount we did, for one less week of education. Academics really took a back seat in my last year of university. Once people secured that job offer, less cases were read, more people showed up hungover or didn’t bother showing up at all, and the hands up to answer questions sat firmly planed on their laptop keyboards, playing games or picking out what to buy for the new condo downtown.
3) What every happened to enjoying life after graduating?
Remember those stories of people going to “find themselves” after university? They are as rare as people in Ivey and working in advertising. While people travelled during the summer between graduation and September when they started their jobs, perhaps one person went and took a full year off to really travel or do volunteer work and take a break for themselves. What I would pay to go back in time to tell my stupid self to go and blow my little to no savings on a round the world adventure and experience life as people had done decades ago after they finished a degree. Nope, I too conformed to the pressures and decided to work. Now, I struggle to get in vacations (my last having been well over a year ago).
All the while, university programs (in particular commerce or business programs) have succumbed to salary/hiring-rate hysteria, reflective of how publicly traded companies will do whatever it takes to deliver a good quarterly investors report. I often get reports from my school on how well our graduates are doing with a 90%+ hiring success rate…blah, blah, blah. Job placement should not be the top Key Performance Indicator of any educational institution.
These universities are short-changing their students of the experiences they actually deserve - learning and developing critical thinking skills that are actually required in the workplace. Their focus now on getting them resume and interview ready in order to make themselves look successful too. Some might compare it to the crazy parent that forces their child to go through 16 levels of piano, and meanwhile, the kid has little to no desire to play that piano.
The UofR program of “we’ll get you a job or your money back” reeks of so much desperation that it was actually sad to read when I came across the article. A money back guarantee doesn’t instill any confidence in me that this is the type of education I want from an institution.
It’s time for our educators to really reflect upon what post-secondary institutions were meant to do. They should not be factory-churning out grads to replace aging baby boomers and checking their percentage of students hired box at the end of the day. They should be focused on creating an environment where students get stimulated to explore academia, think critically and absorb as many new experiences as possible.
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