Beware colleges’ job placement claims

Career Services Questions to Ask

1.  Are career services and experiential learning separate  offices at your university or do they work together?

Career centers will usually handle the non-academic aspects of finding an internship or other experiential opportunity. They will manage the employer contact database and coordinate any meetings between the student and faculty involved in approving the student’s assignment as well as the academic credit for the position. They will also vet any legal agreements between the student, the school and the employer. These are to help ensure that the student has a relevant work experience; too often employers used interns as “go-fers.”

2. When does career services first engage students? Is it to help them choose a major?

More and more the career services office has become involved in “University 101″ classes, working with the faculty instructor and the student peer mentor to include units on resume preparation and/or research on careers and employers. Some schools have bought packages such as FOCUS where a student may do an online search by major for jobs or a search of careers for majors.

3.  How many employers come to campus each year through job fairs and on-campus interviewing?

The number of fairs is more important, because fairs are organized for internships as well as full-time jobs by major. A large state university will typically host job fairs for business/liberal arts, engineering, health care, government/non-profit and education. Other schools also have job fairs through the major departments where the faculty are very well connected. For example, the University of Rhode Island’s College of Pharmacy handles a job fair for the BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences and their PharmD students.

4.  What majors are most sought by employers?

I ask this because I want to know how the employers know of the school. For example, Purdue, where I just visited is well known to recruiters for engineering, computer science and agriculture within the Fortune 500 and consulting forms. The undergraduate business program is a “management” degree that has been popular with manufacturing firms for decades. Purdue may be a better school for a student who is interested in working for a consumer products company than, for example, Indiana, which has aggressively targeted corporate finance and investment banking positions.

5.  What cities/states do most employers come from? Does this match with student interest in terms of places where they would like to work?

State schools such as Indiana, Miami (OH), New Hampshire, Penn State, Purdue, Rhode Island and West Virginia now attract at least 30 percent of their students from outside their state. Sometimes, especially if they come from California or New York, students will want to return home to work. It helps parents to know if the career services office has connections or has worked with alumni in those cities. Sometimes schools will also collaborate on live or virtual employment events in popular cities. The Big East schools, for example, host a live career fair in New York City in conjunction with the Big East basketball tournament.

6. How many jobs were posted last year?

I am more interested in a trend, whether the number of jobs posted has gone up or down, as well as the numbers for internships and full-time jobs, if the school separates them. At a good school the volume should go up, if for nothing else because the career center has made it easy for employers to register and post online for no charge. In the past many schools referred employers to a service called JobTrak that charged to type their jobs and shared revenues with the school.

7. What share of the students continue their education vs. accepting employment?

This has become more important because more career centers handle graduate and professional school advising or work closely with others who do.

8.  What do employers like most about your students?

I’m curious to know what the employers report in a survey as opposed to anecdotes. To be honest, I get more anecdotes. But the appearance of the office and how they manage the interview rooms (for larger schools) tells a lot.

9. What does your office offer them that comparable schools do not?

Career service directors at the larger schools have placed more emphasis on coordination to help the employer get more from their campus visits. While interview schedules may be set across different schools, there is more care taken to help the employer complete all interviews for all positions over a period of two or three days as opposed to several repeat visits.

10. Is your school a part of jobs networks or job fairs in partnership with other schools?

Both large and small schools share jobs across regions, states or sports conferences. Networks are more beneficial for smaller schools that cannot fill on-campus interview schedules on their own and/or do not have a large alumni base to work with. Events can be live, for example, a job fair at a conference center in a large city where the students want to work, or they may be online. “Last chance” events where employers are still seeking to fill positions after the end of March, are popular for online platforms.

This is the time of year when college students are making plans to study overseas in the fall.

Many students attend colleges overseas during their junior year. Curiously enough, most of those students are women. Young men only represent about a third of the 270,600 American students studying overseas. That percentage, by the way, has remained about the same for more than two decades.

I thought my son Ben was going to be among the young men who remained in the U.S. for college. Before he started college, he insisted that he had zero interest in pursuing a semester abroad. Even after a family trip to visit our daughter, who was spending two semesters at the University of Barcelona, Ben was insistent that he wasn’t going anywhere.

During his first semester in college, however, Ben slowly started to change his mind. His academic advisor urged him to consider an experience abroad and he said he might be open to studying abroad, but only in an English-speaking country. Ireland, England, Australia or New Zealand were on his list.

My husband and I were surprised when he called us recently to tell us that he would be studying in Budapest, Hungary in the fall!  Hungary offered the classes in math and art that interested him.

I can think of a couple of reasons why Ben relented.

No. 1. He likes his academic advisor and the professor was persuasive.

No. 2. Many of this friends will be studying abroad in the fall and he didn’t want to be left behind.

Why Men Don’t Study Abroad

Insiders offer plenty of reason why young men are more interested in staying put for college.

Fifty seven percent of American colleges students are women so they are going to represent the majority of students overseas, but that still doesn’t explain the large gender disparity.

Some suggest that young men gravitate to majors that haven’t traditionally gone overseas such as business and engineering, but business majors now represent the second-largest group studying abroad after social science majors. Engineering majors heading abroad has experienced record growth. When adjusted for the gender imbalance in these majors, women still predominate.

Some study-abroad administrators also suggest that men are less willing to leave their friends behind. Interest in studying in another country is greater among men if they have been involved in diverse experiences at their schools.

Parents are much more likely to influence their daughters into studying overseas than their sons, who are more apt to take their cues from their friends.

Universities have been encouraging men to attend school abroad by targeting them with a different message. At Michigan State, for instance, women receive the traditional message that emphasizes the cultural and experiential benefits. In contrast, men are told that studying aboard can help boost their job prospects. Some schools are even offering internships abroad, which are particularly appealing to men.

If you want to learn more about this subject, here is a lengthy article that appeared this week in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In Study Abroad, Men Are Hard to Find

 Read More About Studying Abroad

Studying Abroad: 7 Things Parents Need to Know

5 Study Abroad Tips for Parents

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The last  couple of days, I’ve been  exploring why some teenagers can’t emotionally handle their freshman year in college while other students behave worse than toddlers. Here are the posts:

 A Nightmarish Experience at an Ohio University
Could This Student’s Freshman Year Have Been Saved?

I was ready to move on to other topics – some parents have been asking questions about the FAFSA – –  but I decided to linger one more day on this important topic because of a note that I received last night from a woman who has spent more than two decades working with college students.

I think you’ll find her observations fascinating yet sobering. And some parents don’t come off looking good either – they are enabling a lot of this inexcusable behavior. Next week, I promise I’ll tackle the FAFSA and other topics.

An Insider’s Take on Bad Behavior

I spent 25 years working as a student affairs administrator at six different colleges, and was the director of residential life at two. I did my master’s thesis on college roommate compatibility. Sadly, this is an issue that is rampant at colleges across the country, and across the different strata of colleges–elite to open admission. My daughter experienced similar at a small Roman Catholic college.

Without writing a thesis here (which I could), I believe this stems from a convergence of two trends:

No. 1:

First, students go off to college having had unprecedented luxuries growing up. They have never shared a bedroom. Many have never even shared a bathroom. They have their own cars, their own phones, their own credit cards, and have been given a great deal of personal freedom while still in high school. Their parents have leveraged their own lives to provide the financial support such that students have little concern for the price of attending college.

Transitioning to a largely unsupervised residence hall just kick starts their desire to live a life like they have seen on MTV and in the popular media. And although their college may have asked them questions about their lifestyles to encourage roommate compatibility, too often, their parents filled out the questionnaire, or the student was afraid to be honest (“I smoke weed, I drink four nights a week, and my partner and I have been intimate since we were 15″) for fear their parents will see the questionnaire.

No. 2:

Colleges, in their quest to recruit students, provide accommodations and amenities that are more like cruise ships. Free high speed internet, free laundry equipment, 24-hour a day food service catered to each student’s whim, free health club, free 24-hour a day medical care, free counseling services, free tutoring, non-stop activities, parties, movies, clubs. They have private rooms in suites with living rooms and kitchenettes and free cable TV.

What’s Wrong With the Parents

Legal restraints and a fear of losing enrollment have made colleges unwilling to impose strict discipline or oversight. Many parents don’t make it any easier by refusing to allow students to take responsibility for their behavior, calling constantly to intervene or plead for special consideration. I was even offered bribes to “overlook” issues, but more often I was threatened with lawyers.

What will it take to change this? A fundamental shift in how we view college from a time of extended adolescence to a time for learning real-life skills for careers and adulthood. Instead, they graduate, deeply in debt, and wondering why they can’t find a job that will pay enough for them to be able to afford a private apartment, internet, health club, vacations, health insurance, and a housekeeping staff to clean up the vomit in the bathroom every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night.

What Do You Think?

As always, please weigh in with your comments at the bottom! I’d love to hear what you think.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I will be holding two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4.  At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable.

You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. As you’ll see, you must register with UCSD Extension before you can enroll.

Thanks. Lynn O.

I want to thank everyone who commented on the plight of a bright young woman, who left the University of Dayton after her freshman year. Her first roommates were pigs and her experience unnerved her and her mother. If you missed the post and the accompanying comments, here is where you can find them:

A Nightmarish Experience at an Ohio University

I asked for people’s reaction to the story and what could have been done to avoid this situation or ameliorate it. Here are my thoughts in no particular order:

1. Is the school a good academic fit?

The mom shared that her daughter had earned a 4.5 GPA at her high school, which made me wonder if this was the right school for her. (At least one poster questioned whether this school represented an academic fit.) Frankly, I don’t know much about the University of Dayton except that it is a Jesuit institution in Ohio.

I did take a look at the academic profile of the freshmen attending Dayton and clearly the California teenager possessed a higher academic profile than most of her peers.  According to the College Board figures, 27% of Dayton’s freshmen were in the top 10% of their high school class.

Now let’s compare that to the percentage of students attending two Ohio colleges that attract many high achievers. Here are the number of freshmen in the 10% of their high school class at Oberlin College (68%) and Kenyon College (63%).

If the teenager was a studious girl, she probably would have been better off at a school where there is a large concentration of teenagers who are  high achievers.

2. Did she make friends?

A study released last month suggests that the odds that a child return for a second year of college could hinge on whether she has friends on campus. According to the study published in the Social Psychology of Education, friendships were more important in freshmen retention than a student’s academic abilities, financial aid, ethnicity and other issues. Here is a brief story on the study in Inside Higher Ed.

3. Did she have to live in a quad dorm!

I don’t know what the chances of getting along with your college roommate are when only two students share a small room, but they have to plummet when four strangers are stuck together in a quad.

One of my daughter’s friends suffered through a similar experience as a freshman at George Washington University. Among other issues, Caitlin’s friend was living in a quad with girls who partied late into the night and had sex with boyfriends in the room without regard to the roommates. She was utterly miserable and it played a part in her decision to leave the school. She took a semester off and ended up transferring to Georgetown University.

If I was a freshman, I’d try to avoid quads. This living arrangement can be fine for older students because they can pick their own roommates after they’ve made friends on campus. Tip: submit your housing preferences as soon as possible!

4. Was she able to designate the kind of roommates she wanted?

Many schools have incoming freshmen complete roommate questionnaires that might cut down on some of the friction. I wonder if the University of Dayton offered this.?

5. Did she have good coping skills?

Kids who are used to handling their own problems are often better able to cope with adversity including piggish roommates. When my son and daughter were growing up, my husband and I made it clear to them that they were expected to work out differences on their own. We knew we weren’t helping their development if we always interceded when they were squabbling and played referee.

When one of our kids complained about a teacher or any situation that they considered an injustice, we’d sympathize, but then we’d ask  them how they could turn the situation around. We didn’t tell them what to do, but instead urged them to think on their own. I believe this helped when they got to college.

6. Did she let her mom take over?

I loved this observation from Susan, a mom in San Diego, who wrote this yesterday:

Once parents get involved, and I know they might have to sometimes, then I think some teens might feel they can’t handle it (or anything?) on their own. Once the parent is stressed and unhappy on their teen’s behalf, then I think the teen might think the situation or school is unfixable and they HAVE to come home.

“Sounds like you are at the end of your rope, do you think I can take any action that would help?” has been a good approach for us with high school. We’ve had one time where we got a “yes, I am too angry to handle dealing with the school”, and on all other occasions our help has been declined, with a certain amount of horror expressed at the very thought of our involvement.

What’s the good news?

What I hope no one overlooks is this: leaving your first college doesn’t mean that you can’t have a positive college experience and move on to a meaningful career.

My husband and I were talking about this last night when we were walking our golden retriever. I asked him to talk about his own experience and those of his three best buddies in high school in Denver, whom Bruce described as close as a band of brothers.  Three out of the four ended up transferring someplace else.

Two of his friends started out as freshmen at Pomona College. Dave had planned to attend Brown University, but Leigh talked him out of it and they both ended up at Pomona. Sometime during the first semester they stopped talking to each other and one transferred to Colorado College and the other went to the University of Colorado.

My husband also ended up bailing on his first school — Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR — and transferred to UC Berkeley. He decided that Lewis and Clark was too homogenous. He thought the school attracted too many white affluent students, which was the same environment as his school — Cherry Creek High School — so he bailed and transferred to UC Berkeley. (Note: he never visited Lewis and Clark nor UC Berkeley, which will seem alien to parents today!)

The two teenagers who ditched Pomona — one is a successful lawyer in Denver and the other is a chief technology officer at a Boston company. My husband is a highly respected technology writer in San Diego.  The only one of Bruce’s best friends who didn’t transfer (a Stanford finance grad) made enough money to semi retire in his 40s.

Bottom Line:

I hope this young woman doesn’t consider herself a failure. She’s a little wiser now and today is the only day that counts. (I hope that didn’t sound too much like a Hallmark card!)

I also agree with many of my posters who observed that this could have happened anywhere. I don’t think attending school out of state increases your chances of having a miserable college experience.

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I wanted to let you know that I will be holding my next two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable. You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. Lynn O.

I wanted to share with you today a comment that I received yesterday from a California mom, who shared the heart-wrenching experience of her bright daughter, who started college in Ohio. She was prompted to write after reading my college blog posts about students who desire to attend schools far from their homes. Here are two of them:

 Snobs, Pushy Relatives and Misinformed Parents

California Teen Gets Grief For Liking Southern Universities

Please read the mom’s story and after reading it, I’d be curious what you think. What advice could you give to students so they don’t encounter the same problems? Or what could students do when they encounter this kind of all-to-common behavior at college?  Just let me know what you think by filling out the comment box at the bottom of this post. I’ll share my thoughts tomorrow.  Thanks. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

One Mom’s Story

I want to share my daughters experience about leaving California and attending a well-know university in Dayton, Ohio. A year and a half ago my daughter graduated in the top 5% of her class, from a prestigious high school in a small town in California. She was able to get into every school in California that she applied too! She chose to attend the University of Dayton, Ohio. She picked this school because she wanted to go to a well attended university outside of California.

Nightmare Roommates

She didn’t know a soul in Ohio! She was placed in a quad room( 4 people) in freshmen dorms. She had done all she could to prepare her self for her new roommates. They talked on the phone, corresponded through Facebook, etc., but  nothing could have prepared her for the experience that was to follow. The first week, they had boys staying the night, partying all night long, blaring the TV and music. The final straw was a boy urinating on my daughters bed! The roommates stated wasn’t their problem!

We were able to get an emergency move after much threatening and many, many phone calls. A complete stranger that was an employee at the school finally took pity on my daughter and her inability to get help from the staff and she was able to facilate a move.

Emails phone calls to faculty and even the university president were never answered or returned!! This is a school, where the president addressing us parents and incoming freshmen, promised they would be “home away from home.” They would be there for our children!

Too Traumatized To Return

My daughter ended up going through 3 different sets of roommates in her freshmen year. It was so terrible that she begged to not go back, to her dream university! She gave up her scholarship and is now attending our local junior college and preparing to transfer next year, to a California school.

I share her story only to show there is another side to leaving California schools. I realize that my daughter’s experience was exceptionally bad and only heightened by the lack of communication, compassion, and help provided to us by the University of Dayton. It pains you greatly to hear your child cry everyday for over 9 months. To know that no one is able to help her! I can’t begin to describe the torture it was for our whole family.

When my daughter finally returned home to California, she was humiliated because she had a 4.5 GPA leaving high school and now her only option was to attend a junior college to get enough units to transfer.

I told my daughter, she should not feel bad for having followed her dream. At least she tried it!

What Do You Think?

Now that you’ve heard the mom’s story, what do you think?

Does a winning college football team make it’s students stupid?

Maybe. At least the men.

That’s the conclusion you could reach after reading a study released right at the beginning of the college bowl season by economists at the University of Oregon. The researchers examined the grade point averages of the student body at the University of Oregon and compared them to the performance of  Oregon’s football team.

“Our results support the concern that big-time sports are a threat to American higher education,” the authors wrote.

The New York Times wrote an article yesterday about the college football study. Here is an excerpt of the key findings:

The greater the football team’s success, the wider the gender gap in academic performance. Glen R. Waddell, one of the researchers, was quoted as saying, “I teach these students and I know that on Thursdays there’s this subtle distraction in the classroom, and the game isn’t even until Saturday.”

The economists looked at Oregon undergraduate transcripts of close to 28,000 non-athletes from 1999 through 2007. During that period, the Oregon Ducks had an average winning percentage 68%. The economists included interviews with students during this period of time and discovered that 24% of male students said Oregon football wins definitely or probably decreased their study time compared with nine percent of women.

What’s my take on the study? I think it’s just another indication that college football has gotten out of control. Coaches salaries, player exploitation, a wide variety of scandals (Penn State just one of many) are just some of the problems, but I don’t see this genie ever getting shoved back into the bottle. Sad, but true.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller,  and a financial aid workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Price of a Bachelor’s Degree, which is only available on her website.