Help is available for departments to provide career assistance for their students. You can learn more about the Career Services Departmental Initiative here. Preparing students--ensuring they are ready--for life after graduation is one of our obligations, and this readiness includes careers. None of this means that we discourage students from exploration or that we model ourselves as vocational education.
Many of our students come from families or from backgrounds where they will have help translating the liberal arts into internship opportunities or career paths through social or professional networks of their parents or other relatives. They may have seen siblings before them go through college. But many of our students come to us without those backgrounds, networks, or family experiences.
Focusing on career readiness helps all our students and it has particular benefits for those students who come to college without some of the opportunities some of their classmates have had. To me, there is a strong element of justice and creating a more even playing field in our career readiness efforts. We all know that studying the liberal arts is a great decision. In today’s environment of a highly competitive job environment and significant student debt, however, prospective students and their parents worry about choosing the liberal arts. Our job is to erase those worries. We don’t have the luxury of saying that students and their parents should not be focused on such things.
