Is "Experience" the New Degree?

Students Come to College Today to Land Good Jobs. Why Are Their Colleges Not Helping Them?

How my students used a design sprint to address this basic disconnect about the college degree.

I wrapped up my teaching semester a few weeks back at George Mason University feeling, as usual, that I learned more than the students. I teach design thinking at Virginia’s largest public university. We use college itself as our canvas to practice the art of human centered design. In design thinking, we study the needs and behaviors of end users, particularly outliers, for whom a system or product isn’t working. To learn what innovations could make them more successful.

One of the biggest disconnects for my students is that today most of them come to college because they’ve heard it’s the surest way to a professional career, but they are starting to realize that most colleges don’t actually deposit them at the doorstep of their first career-related job. They were surprised to hear that 52% of college graduates reportedly do not work in fields that even needed a degree ten years after graduation. Unless you are in a really hot field like cybersecurity or nursing, employers expect entry level hires to have 2-3 years relevant work experience. How do students get it when they are in college? A true chicken and egg conundrum.

So this is the 10-week design sprint they chose: How might we recommend smoother and equitable paths from college to desired careers?

In design thinking, outliers are called “extreme users,” and they are revered as muses. We got the typewriter because the inventor’s blind mistress needed a way to write letters. Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone for his deaf students to pick up sound waves through the receiver. It turns out that what works for extreme users, often ends up being adopted by everyone.

Who are the extreme users in higher education? I asked the class. They tend to be the students who are struggling to afford college, are perhaps going part time or working a side job while in school full time (a majority of students). They are perhaps veterans (my university hosts a lot of veterans) or single moms. Perhaps they feel underprepared after attending a poorly ranked high school or they are first in their family ( one third of our students are) to attend college.

You could argue that higher education is under attack because it’s not meeting the needs of these extreme users as they actually begin to make up a majority of the population of students in the US. College wasn’t designed to work around their barriers, like time, finances, social capital, academic preparedness. College enrollment has dropped 15% at the same time we’ve made strides to make it more inclusive.

My class, mostly sophomore and junior undergrads from all majors, were too early in the journey to be jaded. Many students who I interviewed for my upcoming book, Who Needs College Anymore? feel misled as they finish college. Humanities, science, and social science majors, in particular, report that their degree prepared them for few of the job descriptions they scroll through on job sites. Even my students, as sophomores and juniors, were starting to see the lopsidedness of WHO gets approached for paid internships. Not the English majors. And extreme users, if they have to work at retail jobs or work-study jobs in the cafeteria, are less able to build a resume.

The Harvard Project on Workforce, in surveying top ways to help students navigate careers, points to internships as the most effective intervention here, but there aren’t enough of them to go around. Six in 10 college students nationwide land at least one internship during college. Only half of those are paid, and it is the paid ones that are more likely to lead to a job offer. And, as the National Association of Colleges and Employers has surveyed, who gets internships is also highly inequitable. Internships might be part of the solution, but they also replicate many of the problems they are trying to solve.

For our design sprint, the student teams went through an arc of problem framing, user research, ideation, and prototyping to land on recommended solutions that George Mason might implement. I was sort of hoping they would land on big systemic ideas like embedding internships in the college degree across the board (as Northeastern University does) or paying employers to hire students using federal work study dollars.

But the prototypes they chose addressed two more basic and fundamental student needs that are much closer to home for them: motivation and time poverty.

Yes, they have heard that internships are helpful. But they found that many students in this information-overload are not motivated to do the inefficient networking it takes to land an internship or gain experience. They are too busy with school work and their jobs at Chick-fil- A or the school gym. Their bottom line to the college: “If we need career skills/experiences to get hired, why aren’t you making it part of college? We only have time and energy to check the required boxes to earn our degree.”

Design thinking requires us to get underneath the initial needs of users to understand the deeper needs driving behavior. Example: The whole class interviewed one recruiter from a software company who told us that she gets 1000 applications a day for most openings. “I’m only going to consider people I have connected with,” she warned. “So, you need to network.” Students have grown weary of folks telling them to network. Our students and the others they surveyed, said: “We don’t know how to do it effectively, efficiently. (I was struck this week by a report that a UK college that is offering a class on how to use the telephone.) Where to start, who to cultivate. Fear of rejection. I’m underqualified. It’s awkward in the current Gen Z dynamic, where to be ‘sales-y’ is cringe.”

Where did this exploration lead?

We ended up with student-focused prototypes that aim to solve for the problem before the problem. i.e., caring now (as a sophomore, e.g.) about what will propel them into successful careers once they finish the gauntlet.

To address lack of motivation, students recommended:

• a required ‘how to network’ class. Putting the class on the mandatory schedule, students said, is a signal from the administration that this is a priority for earning your degree.

• another required class that serves as a career counseling concierge service. Nationwide, less than half of students use their Career Services offices more than once. This idea brings the office into the required curriculum.

And to address time poverty:

• a matching platform with alumni mentors.

• a service to help faculty and students figure out what industry certifications could help a student stand out among the sea of online applicants, if he or she doesn’t have experience. In many fields where certifications are considered important, such as tech or cybersecurity, professors are not embedding them in their classes.

Zooming out to the broader theme, I believe design thinking is an essential tool for Gen Z. It builds on what I venture to suggest is this generation’s more natural predilection to empathize and research the needs of others, but doesn’t ask them to write long research papers, read book chapters for homework, or listen to professors “lecture” (which I learned the hard way they are not willing to do). I am on a mission, along with others, to elevate human-centered design as one way to create an applied version of humanities, fit for the age.

The World Economic Forum lists the top 3 skills workers will need in 2025. All three are central to a design thinking process: analytic thinking, active learning and complex problem solving. Design thinking sprints allow us to break down the large and small problems that cause us to disengage, to actively listen and learn from users with empathy and to apply a disciplined and analytical frame to our creativity. For their last assignment, I had students write a design brief for a problem they want to solve. They took on problems ranging from food insecurity in the Republic of Congo to reducing the environmental impact of Christmas lights in their hometown. I am feeling good about the next generation. They approach learning differently, on their terms, but they are natural problem solvers.