> too many universities are in the business of signing in students and not finding them a job
If you are a university in the "business of finding students a job" you are university'ing wrong.
If you are a university in the "business of finding students a job" you are university'ing wrong.
Then everyone is university'ing wrong!
Universities spend an enormous amount of time and money getting students jobs. Maintaining relationships with recruiters, developing alumni networks, and entire departments of full time staff dedicated to "career services".
There's a solid critique of education programs that are overly sensitive to industry fads [1], but IMO universities and educators should definitely include "finding students a job" as an explicit curricular goal -- balanced, of course, with "ensuring students have a long and healthy career beyond that first job".
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
However, it's certainly the expectation of most people that going to university for four years is going to improve their employment prospects--often in a field directly related to their undergraduate study. And as someone else noted, schools absolutely put effort into relationships and programs that improve their graduates' job prospects.
They also put in efforts in a bunch of other places as well.
I will admit that, coming from a lower middle class background, university education to a 17 year old me was mostly a way to optimize my career prospects. But in hindsight, I would say it is a lot more than that. The two most important skills I learned were probably critical thinking and team work. There were also many side-benefits, that you get merely from being in close quarters with so many different kinds of people... to learn that diversity is important, that even people from different cultures are awesome etc. These soft skills are very important, and I don't see a way of acquiring them otherwise.
However, I think a way to remedy this would be to be very clear with what a university provides instead of being vague about it. e.g. if you pursue CS in Uof Something, you have x % chances of getting a job here right out of college. I agree Universities have been co-opted into being preparatory schools for the job market, but that is too narrow a purpose for them.
That said, there's also a general expectation that, barring graduate school, university grads will also go on to earning their own living. Some do so with just generalized university education--which is more or less what you have if you majored in medieval German literature. But it's easier with an engineering degree or something else that ties directly to what a company is specifically hiring for.
Maybe the economy is just changing so much that we simply don't have the capacity to absorb so many workers. Or maybe we need to direct more resources to create employment in those areas (i.e. more funding for arts, history, archaeology etc.). I don't know what the solution is.
Hey hey! I tend to agree!
Finding students a job should be a secondary byproduct of first giving them a world class education where you prepare and enable the student for society through being able to learn. Universities are to teach students how to learn so they can learn and be more aware and active about what is happening around them in society. Universities gives you exposure to a wide array of subjects for a purpose. It isn't random, and if you are attending a university where it does feel random, then find a better university.
"The goal of university education is to help build a fairer, more just society" - Steven Schwartz. [0]
Indeed this aligns with Plato's view on education -- "Plato regards education as a means to achieve justice, both individual justice and social justice." [1]
[0]: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/comment/columnists/the-...
[1]: http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations/AAI9517932/
But when I apply this philosophy to concrete curriculum design questions in CS, I end up caring about placing students at internships and jobs.
First, internships are a form of education, and I find that students who complete internships come back the next Fall as much more mature programmers. I can then leverage that maturity in programming to dig deeper into interesting theory. Because I'm not helping debug for loops, I can students debug proofs or design more complex algorithms. So I consider internship placement a major goal for the first two years of a CS curriculum, even when my goal is to teach pure theory.
Second, I have a hard time justifying the situation where students are debt slaves to banks. How does that achieve individual or social justice?
Third, your work output is an enormous aspect of your contribution to society. Someone who can build a software platform that helps rural poor in Nigeria get access to micro-loans under a fair terms is making a much greater impact on the world than a philosopher with a perfect understanding of what it means for the world to be just, but without the means to act on that knowledge.
Imagine all that extra time college graduates could spend learning if they were easily able to provide for themselves because college prepared them for the real world and they were able to get a good job.
It's nice to have a society that has people who are more aware and active about what is happening around them in society. But what about the average worker that's been unemployed for six months and just want's to be able to afford to raise a family?
We need to meet our basic needs first. Universities used to be for the upper few, but as they are required more and more for the majority of jobs, either the universities need to change or the job requirements need to change.
I'm just a single point of data, but none of my friends ever found the career services people to be helpful in any meaningful way. In my world, their success rate is 0%.
My post wasn't intended as praise for career services... it was intended as praise for departments and universities that prepare their students for internships and jobs.
> and their goals don't matter to their customers -- students
I don't know this, but I think a lot of the dedicated professionalized career services people are mostly there more to placate clueless parents. It's marketing, and it works.
> none of my friends ever found the career services people to be helpful in any meaningful way
Absolutely. The scare quotes in my original post are there fore a reason...
That said, good career services people are usually work closely with or are even embedded in the department -- not a separate service in the admin building. They ensure that there are regular talks from the alumni network or local community. That companies are invited to come in for an evening and talk about what they're working on / what skills they need. And then ensure those companies are invited back to job fairs etc. in the Fall, with companies who take it as a serious opportunity and who you think are most likely to fast track your students' resumes.
In fact, at smaller universities/departments, the best career services employees are typically professors who keep in contact with graduated students are former colleagues.
If that's how universities are positioning themselves, if they're opening their doors to students who are clearly not the best of the best and destined for academia and/or highly technical careers that demand high-level theoretical knowledge, then you bet your ass they should be teaching practical skills and helping students find jobs. Otherwise they're just taking (a lot of) money from kids who clearly don't know any better, and leaving them high and dry after graduation.