Oh, I get so excited when I find an article to discuss in The HEat Index that’s actually good news! So, let’s just dig into this week’s issue without further delay.   

The Continued Importance of College Degrees 

From Survey: 48% of Employers Say AI Will Make College Degrees More Important | Inside Higher Ed 

A new survey from the Lumina Foundation and Gallup finds employers believe college degrees are still important.  

Our Thoughts  

While the headlines are all about employers' thoughts on AI and the college degree, the statistic that stuck with me more was this: “According to the survey, 80 percent of employers said they would prefer a candidate who has a college degree, regardless of whether the job requires one.” Eighty percent! Four in five said they prefer candidates with degrees even as public confidence in higher education continues to decline. This tells me that employers still want something that a college degree provides even if we’re having trouble measuring it or demonstrating we can produce it. 

As I thought about this, I was transported back over twenty years ago to my graduate school classrooms when I first learned about student development theory. If this is your first introduction to this idea, welcome to the party! Yes, we’ve actually studied how students change and develop while they’re in college and the impacts college has on them. Researchers like Astin and Pascarella & Terenzini spent decades showing that college does change students. One of their core findings is that college has real effects on critical thinking, verbal and quantitative skills, and psychosocial development beyond what could be explained by simple maturation or existing pre-college traits. Those effects are diffuse and cumulative and depend more on what students do in college than where they go. In the article, Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning, said that employers are hiring for judgment, critical thinking, communication...that list sounds an awful lot like the effects of college.  

Of course, some argue it can be tricky to separate the impacts of college from the type of person the student was even before they came. Maybe the kind of person who chooses to enroll in college and sticks with it for four years to get a bachelor’s degree was already somehow different from a person who doesn’t. Either way, completing college still seems to be a strong signaling mechanism for employers, telling them, “This person is persistent and can work through the hard stuff to the end.” While this may be the result of only one Gallup survey, I think employers mean what they said. A few years ago, there was a big push to drop degree requirements for a number of jobs, and plenty of companies made a show of doing just that. However, when Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute looked at who those companies went on to hire, the impact was tiny—fewer than 1 in 700 hires. 

So, what explains the disconnect? The public is losing confidence in higher education, but employers still value it. We even have some recent confidence research that found even Americans with a bachelor’s degree were no more confident in higher education than Americans with no degree at all. It’s quite a pickle when the people who went to college aren’t sure it did much for them, but the people hiring them are pretty sure it made a difference. While I won’t discount what a person feels about college because there’s probably more wrapped up in that than just whether they got a job, I do understand why they might feel that way. Development is hard to see from the inside. Most people don’t suddenly wake up and realize that they are better at weighing evidence or explaining their reasoning today than they were before they started college. Like getting older, it’s gradual. It’s one thing to realize you know a lot more about organic chemistry after finishing the course and entirely another to see the incremental upward shifts in your critical thinking skills. Plus, memory has a way of convincing us that we’ve always been like that. BUT, on the other hand, an employer reading through a stack of applications gets to see those differences side by side across candidates. In a way, employers are running the comparison most of our institutions have struggled to run for decades, just one hiring decision at a time.

My takeaway from this article is: if development is hard for our students to see from the inside, part of our job should be helping students see it before they walk across the stage. Graduates who can name how college changed them are probably a lot more likely to tell a future Gallup poll it was worth it. That could be as simple as more reflective conversations with their advisor or having students reread something they wrote in their first year and reflect on what’s changed. It could also mean having a more complete learner record, but that’s a post for another day. Ultimately, if employers can see the differences, we should look for creative ways to find those differences in the data we’re capturing about our students. By better connecting the experiences research says matter, like advising and high-impact practices, to outcomes, maybe we can finally show the difference college makes for our graduates.   

Sparks 

• Companies invent credentials without proof they pay off (The Hechinger Report) - Sarah Butrymowicz investigates the explosion of industry credentials that may or may not actually lead to better jobs. There are over a million industry credentials; no wonder students are confused.
• College Living Cost Estimates Vary Widely (Inside Higher Ed) - A new study by the Hildreth Institute found wide variability in how institutions estimate the living costs in their cost of attendance. As the public gives higher education costs even more scrutiny, what was once a simple financial aid office exercise looks more like an institutional policy.
• US Higher Ed. The K-Shaped Sector (Dan Greenstein) - Dan Greenstein, the former chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, looks at the data and finds an increasing split in higher education enrollments. Institutions run on enrollments, so the more you understand about how the market is shifting, the better prepared you’ll be to help your institution navigate it.