#245 What Can Get Missed While Earning a Liberal Arts Degree Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  00:00

Academic exploration is only answering the question of, What am I interested in learning more about? Career development, what employers are going to be looking at on the other side of graduation that will get our kids to the launch line, are really want students answering, Where can I create value in the world of work? Related questions? Yes. Adjacent questions? Yes. The same question to answer? No. So, liberal arts can be a trap. Not the liberal arts themselves, but the trap of believing that earning the degree now will result in a career that you can figure out afterward. There’s a pattern I’m seeing with my 20-something college graduates I coach, and every parent, every young person, actually needs to hear this, especially if you’ve ever considered the liberal arts. Because what I’m noticing is happening disproportionately among the liberal arts graduates that I work with who are in their 20s, sometimes in their 30s, and have already graduated from college. These are like really good students. Some of them are even Ivy League graduates. They did everything that they were- not everything, but they they did college well. Let’s put it that way. They got good grades. They have great recommendation letters from their professors, all the things. Yet after graduation, many aren’t just struggling with interviewing. They can’t even get in the room. That’s a problem because the employers are screening them out during the process. So if you’ve got a younger person in high school, in college, a high school graduate that’s not going to college, this is also important for you, not just if you have a 20-something. See, employers are looking for young people to signal their professional identity: skills, proof of those skills, how they got those skills through their relevant experiences, and their career direction. And when I say this, and I say, Oh, this is happening happening disproportionately among those who majored in the liberal arts, bam, immediately I get labeled by a lot of people, college counselors, those in higher ed, parents, everybody, that I’m anti-liberal arts. And here’s the thing: I’m not. One of my favorite episodes that I’ve done this year of our College and Career Clarity Podcast is back just earlier this summer, number 237, when I had Julia Lapan from UVA on, and she was talk- she works in their College of Arts and Sciences, and she talked about what they’re doing with liberal arts education and intentional career design. It was one of my favorite episodes this year. So, the Here’s the deal: I’m not anti-liberal arts, but I have identified a problem on the other side for many- not everybody- who’s earning a liberal arts degree. The problem isn’t the liberal arts, the liberal arts degree. The problem is the assumption of parents, of students that a liberal arts education will automatically create the career readiness that employers are seeking. And here’s what I found: the less career structure your your degree provides—we’re going to talk about that in a second—the more career structure you need to intentionally create for yourself. And parents, counselors, you can’t do it for them, right? You can’t lead the horse to water and force them to drink. So, let’s talk about how this works here on College and Career Clarity, where we are supporting families, parents, young people, 15 to 25, 30 years old, successfully launching out of their parents home. Now, what is it about professional degrees? So, when I say this, when I tee this up, I don’t want to overstate the importance or or what’s happening with professional degrees. So, engineering, and business, and nursing, and education, they are not the answer, okay? If you’ve been listening for a while, you know I don’t believe that that’s what we start with. I don’t believe that’s the answer. I think liberal arts degrees can be fantastic, but here is the difference: engineering, business, nursing, education, these are pathways that have the career exploration and validation and building of skills built into the structure of the program. There’s a reason why UVA chose their Arts and Sciences College to build this from freshman year forward, they’re doing a great job, intentional career discovery and design. They didn’t go over and build it and it’s not that they’re not doing a good job, but they didn’t go over and intentionally start building something new in engineering because it’s already baked into the experience.

Lisa Marker-Robbins  05:21

But just because it’s baked in, engineering is going to be the wrong degree for most students. I see business students pursue that degree for the wrong reasons, and still have no idea where they fit under the business umbrella. I see nursing students who worked so hard to get into that major, and they get in, and they hate the clinical work when they get in there, and they have to pivot. So, what I want you to hear me say is not anti-liberal arts, it is that if you’re going to pursue a liberal arts degree, your student will still need, and have even a greater need, for career development. See, liberal arts give students greater freedom of what they study, okay? They do, and and freedom, it can be wonderful. I’m personally wired for great freedom, but with that freedom comes a greater degree of ownership on the part of the student, because it’s not already baked in. If you’ve been watching the news, the college news, the higher ed news, there’s another thing about this that brought this to my attention that has me really thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about this for a while because I’m living it with our Launch Career Clarity clients, but University of Michigan, for the Literature, Science, and the Arts program, their college, just announced first-semester freshmen will have grades covered up. They’re moving to pass/fail. And I thought, gosh, why just the arts and sciences degrees, right? Why not everybody at the University of Michigan? And so when I dug into the breaking news—if you haven’t read that breaking news, I’m just going to like give you the synopsis—first-semester freshmen, no grades. And their stated purpose was, they want to lower the pressure on students, part of that is mental health reasons. They want to encourage intellectual exploration widely, and they want to allow the students to try some unfamiliar subjects, follow their natural curiosity. That, I really like. See, that’s part of the beauty of liberal arts and why I’m not anti-liberal arts. Think you might be interested in anthropology? Go take a course. Philosophy? Take a course. Political science? Yep, we got that, right? But here’s what I worry about when we do this: that those people on that path are confusing academic exploration with career development, and they are two different things. Academic exploration is only answering the question of, what am I interested in learning more about? Career development, what employers are going to be looking at on the other side of graduation that will get our kids to the launch line, or really want students answering, where can I create value in the world of work? Related questions? Yes. Adjacent questions? Yes. The same question to answer? No. So, liberal arts can be a trap—not the liberal arts themselves, but the trap of believing that earning the degree now will result in a career that you can figure out afterward. Four years of classes, grades, papers, academic accomplishments, awards in psychology, history, English, political science, whatever it is, is great. But the wrong time to first ask, what can I offer employment-wise after graduation? Absolutely. Academic evidence used to be, when I was growing up, evidence of employability, and if you’re following employment trends now, you know that’s no longer the case. Employers want broader evidence. I went back earlier this summer, and people thought I was going to be talking about the Why This Major? college essay, but that episode, episode number 238, if you want to go back to it, was actually about accumulating the evidence that both colleges and employers want. That accumulated evidence shows that they can succeed in college, but that’s one set of evidence, right? Academic. But what employers need is evidence that they can create value at work, because by the way, they’re investing in them when they hire them, okay? And when we start accumulating the evidence after graduation, which by the way is still possible, so I don’t want anybody to listen to it and go, oh, my gosh, this is too late—it’s never too late. Can be too early, it’s never too late, okay? It’s never too late, hear me. But there is a cost to waiting until after graduation. I’m working with some of these kids that are in their 20s, and they’re accumulating their evidence now, right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  10:32

And the cost is not just to the young adult who can’t land an interview. I’m not talking about landing a job; I’m talking about landing an interview. I’m talking to 20-somethings that have 80, 100 applications in, and they’ve not landed the interview. And almost all the time, they studied a liberal arts major, and they did not accumulate the evidence. And the problem, short-term is for the student, but long-term it becomes a family problem. The young person is frustrated, and their confidence is declining, and they feel the pressure of falling behind their peers and where they thought they might be now. And then they began treating their parents as not only the emotional backstop to support them, which is moms and dads, that’s what we want to do, but also the financial backstop. And then for parents, their empty nesting years are getting delayed, and they begin to wonder, did we make the right investment on college? How are we here now, and how do we all get to the bridge over to where we want to be? The degree did not fail you, but you missed the bridge between education and employment. So let’s talk about what doing liberal arts right looks like. Okay, I I earlier mentioned that I had Julia Lapan from University of Virginia on episode 237 of the podcast. Go back and listen to it, it’s fantastic. I think it was right at the end of July. So what they’re doing is not saying, Pick something practical. They’re starting freshman year with both academic exploration at the same time as building real-world career exploration and evidence. You can explore academically, explore professionally, and they’re happening concurrently, and so that starts to build the bridge. And here’s the deal: The symptoms that a graduate has missed this when they’re in their 20s is they can’t get interviews, they feel like they submit applications and they disappear. They’re they’re looking at job postings, and they have no idea what to target. They have a resume that doesn’t list skills, just experiences, right? They don’t even know how to network because they haven’t established a professional identity. Their degree is completed, but their career bridge isn’t. So the way that you have to do this, everybody, no matter what your major is—high school, college, whatever it is—is the same process. It’s just that those that are pursuing the liberal arts, my experience anecdotally has been they need to be more intentional about it because it’s not baked into their degree. So step one: build deep career awareness, and then that becomes your lens or your filter from you can be anything down to a manageable list for exploration that fits. Number two: then begin to explore the aligned careers, the shorter list that you know fits. After you do your exploration, get out into the real world and validate. When you’re doing the validation side, that is when you begin to accumulate evidence. That’s what builds the skills, the proof of skills, and the experiences. So by graduation, kids aren’t just saying, I majored in X, I got this GPA. They’re instead saying, Here’s what I did, here’s what value it brought, and here’s what I-who I know I am, and where I’m headed. So you see, I’m not anti-liberal arts. I’m just anti-assuming a degree will do something that the degree itself is never designed to do, especially in a liberal arts education, which can provide an incredible education, but it doesn’t always lead to a career plan. That’s what I want you guys thinking about. So you know I’m a huge fan of conversation. So as you’re sitting around as a family, whether you’re dropping your kid off at college, or you’re visiting for Parents Weekend, or you have a high schooler who’s getting ready to apply or just starting the college-bound process, I want you asking, What are you doing now to build the bridge? Do you have more than just academic evidence? This can start as early as high school. Are you accumulating proof of skills and developing a professional identity? And perhaps, most importantly, are you taking ownership of the process, particularly if the experiences aren’t already baked into the academic pathways?

Lisa Marker-Robbins  15:07

Now, if you’re listening to this and you’re starting to think like, Oh, gosh, we haven’t even talked about it, and as I think about my young person, I’m not sure they’re doing any more than building an academic portfolio, and you want them to begin intentionally doing the career work, that is exactly why I created my free Career Identification Compass video. I walk you through what I see families messing up and how to correct, so that by graduation they can not only land the interview, they have the the professional identity to land the job. So, go over there and get it at flourishcoachingco.com/video, and you’re going to see how we move students from self-awareness through exploration, real-world validation, and then they are ready to go, so you all get to a thriving next chapter. Okay, my friends, I will see you next week for another episode of College and Career Clarity, a Flourish Coaching production.