College graduates appear to be struggling to find and retain their jobs today. Alarmingly, many graduates report they did not develop employable skills in college. The reasons for this predicament may be due to generational factors, growing mental health issues, and what the present chapter will term the “rubric paradox.” That is, rubrics are used widely in college to mitigate student stress, though the stress reappears later when there are no rubrics for other more ineffable aspects of life and success. The chapter considers how to build a better employment future for college graduates by overcoming the rubric paradox. Solutions will be presented that can be implemented by both administrators and individual educators. Pre-tenure and contingent faculty contexts are highlighted throughout.
TopIntroduction
Twelve years ago, in my first year as a college professor, I asked a luminary senior professor a question: “students pay such high tuitions here, so as their instructors, what do we owe them?” He pondered the matter and replied: “I owe them nothing. They pay tuition to work with a working professional.” At first glance, the statement seems callous and out of touch with modern thinking. But as a woman of color, and the first in my family to go to college, I found the words somewhat liberating. Specifically, the statement introduces the concept of servant-leadership, which is not only important in academic and professional contexts, but is an advantageous strategy for minoritized faculty (Martinez, 2023). Even so, the statement sets a very high bar of expectation; that faculty should model the kind of successful professional work that students aspire to.
The current employment reality of many of the faculty workforce adds a sharp edge to the story above. According to recent data, the majority of U.S. faculty (68.0%) hold contingent positions (Colby, 2023). In considering how to improve student employability, the aim of this book and chapter, it should not be forgotten that many faculty members are not fully pleased with their employment (Martinez & Martinez-Gongora, 2024). Some of the reasons for this include debt (Hershcopf, et al., 2021), COVID-19 pandemic-related fatigue (Stringer, 2023), discrimination (Couch, 2019), and lack of resources and other stressors relating to burnout (Xu & Wang, 2023).
But despite these stresses, and across many different types of institutions of learning, university faculty care deeply about student outcomes, especially relating to employment. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) Faculty Survey asks a nationally representative sample of U.S. university faculty about their perceived roles as instructors to students (Stolzenberg, et al., 2019). The most highly endorsed goal was to promote students’ ability to write effectively, as 73% reported that they strongly agreed with this aim. Behind that came employment-related goals, such as: preparing students for employment after college (69.2%) and preparing students for graduate or advanced education (61.4%). There was less agreement towards personal and social-change-related goals to: enhance students’ knowledge of and appreciation for other racial/ethnic groups (44.3%), help students develop personal values (37.0%), and provide for students’ emotional development (26.8%).
These data show that faculty, in the midst of their own challenges, dearly want to help students succeed professionally after they graduate. However, there are indirect indicators that a college education may not be leading to the success that university educators hope for. Academics have highlighted these concerns in books with troubling titles such as Higher Education?: How Colleges are Wasting our Money and Failing our Kids (Hacker & Dreifus, 2010), and The Dream is Over (Marginson, 2016). More recently, U.S. colleges are closing, and college enrollments are decreasing in the face of growing skepticism surrounding college education, what it is, and its ultimate worth to students (Castillo & Welding, 2023; Kaufman, 2023; Moody, 2023). Although the U.S. Report on the Condition of Education (Irwin, et al., 2023) reports higher employment rates for higher education levels, culminating in an 87% employment rate for 25–34-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree or higher, the report does not detail the types of jobs that new college graduates obtain, nor whether and how the jobs help them pay the remaining 78% of their educational loans still owed, on average, after four years post-graduation (Irwin, et al., 2023). More to the point, a recent survey of 1,600 college graduates reported that 58% of respondents were not convinced that employers should require a traditional degree to apply, 38% said that they did not learn people management skills in college, and 33% said that they did not learn time-management skills (Graduate Employability Report, 2021).