“You’re told your entire life, ‘Go to college, get a bachelor’s degree and your life is gonna be gravy after that,’” said Alexander Wolfe, 29 years old, a 2018 graduate from Northern Kentucky University who currently works security at a corporate facility in the Cincinnati area. “In reality, it hasn’t really helped me that much.”
–Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22, 2024
The opening quote appears in a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “Half of College Grads Are Working Jobs That Don’t Use Their Degrees,” covering the high rates of underemployment for many college graduates and continuing a larger conversation over the value of a college degree and the growing distrust in higher education. The authors define underemployment as graduates who end up in jobs where their degrees aren’t needed. As such, they point to three main factors in underemployment: choice of major, first job out of college, and internships.
Such reports grab my attention due to my regular teaching of a 300-level course titled “Intro to Writing in the Professions.” The course, as I teach it, offers students an overview of the many job and career opportunities in the wide world of “writing.” Students represent a variety of majors from communications to psychology to English to writing and rhetoric to education. In my version of the course, I invite guest speakers from various writing-related professions to share their stories and we examine various aspects of the job and career search process; for example, we discuss resumes, interviewing, freelancing, and the learning of new genres.
Of late, I’ve used the first week or two of class to introduce and practice lifestyle-centric career planning. Within these class sessions, we discuss personality assessments, lifestyle preferences and goals, and values. I see this focus on lifestyles and values as a key framing for the remainder of the semester and as a heuristic for students to imagine their futures. Such discussions also ask students to reflect on themselves on who they are or want to be; for instance, I title one class session, “Know thyself,” and ask them to look inside regarding their future life and selves before they jump to looking outside and start job or internship searches. I rely on the work of Cal Newport for this section of class. We read a blog post from Newport related to lifestyle-centric career planning and we watch a video from his podcast in which he offers suggestions and advice to the question, “How do I design a life I love?” Ultimately, this framing asks students to work backwards: “Fix the lifestyle you want. Then work backwards from there.”
Some of the practical aspects of this class session involves students looking five or ten years into the future and imagining their lives. Some of the invention questions I ask students to consider are:
How much control do I have over my schedule?
What’s the intensity level of my job?
What’s the importance of what I do?
What’s the prestige level?
What type of work?
Where do I live?
How much money do I make/need?
While these early in the semester class sessions may appear hypothetical, imaginary, and out of touch with the realities of getting a job, I find myself, students, and even guest speakers coming back to these lifestyle-based discussions throughout the remainder of the semester. For example, recently we had a fairly recent college graduate visit class. She had recently started her second job in her career field of technical writing. When prompted to reflect on what she enjoyed about her current job, she replied that the job “really fit her lifestyle.” She openly admitted that she made “enough money” to support her lifestyle, echoing Newport’s advice that money should factor into our vision of a future life but only in so much as it allows for the future lifestyle. Her initial job after graduating, while in the field of technical writing, didn’t quite work well with her lifestyle and she initiated a process of leveraging that job and its experience into another position within the field. In other words, she imagined a different future beyond her current employment.
To some, envisioning lifestyles five or ten years into the future may seem like playful imagination that distracts from the key concepts and skills of a field of study, as well as the day to day work of studying and, in turn, graduating. However, as Jane McGonigal contends, such imagination, found in the practice of episodic future thinking (EFT), induces the brain to engage in “mental time travel,” in order “to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.” According to McGonigal, ““Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it’s a powerful decision-making, planning and motivational tool. It helps us decide: Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?” EFT or mental time travel encompasses three kinds of sense-making, many of which could be incorporated into classroom discussions of future careers and lifestyles. First, our brains need to build a future world or scene: “Whatever you see in your future will always come from information your brain has already perceived and processed…That’s why an important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call ‘clues to the future,’ concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out. When you have a hippocampus full of clues, your brain will have better data to draw on, and the scenes you construct will be way more interesting.” We are responsible for encouraging and facilitating students’ gathering of these “clues to the future,” whether those come from classrooms, internships, or other learning contexts. After a scene is constructed, we then engage in opportunity detection: looking for ways to achieve our goals. This stage relies on the brain’s putamen: “The putamen helps keep track of which specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you…The putamen is like a reality check on your future imagination. Since the putamen is trained on real experiences, the future actions it suggests will be heavily influenced by strategies that worked for you in the past.” Again, this stage relies on the opportunities and experiences students gather throughout their academic journeys. Finally, we imagine the feelings of our future lifestyles. Describing this final stage, McGonigal shares, “As your brain works to transport you to the future, feelings will kick in. The insula and amygdala, emotion centers in the brain, fire up to give you a preview of how you might feel in the future.” Such a connection to the feelings we may experience in this future lifestyle, echoes Newport’s initial questions suggested in sketching out the future–how do you want to feel as you engage in your job/career five or ten years from now? Further, as McGonigal explains, such future thinking provides “an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”
Approaching discussions of careers and jobs and lives after college in this manner doesn’t necessarily solve the concerns shared by the Wall Street Journal report. However, it does positively reframe the discussion, especially for those of use in the humanities. It also asks us to not shy away from discussions of jobs and careers, or to simply point students towards career services. In a graph showing the levels of underemployment per area of study, the majors representing my course all fall within the 50-55% underemployment group. Humanities graduates, specifically, report a 55% level of underemployment five years after leaving college. In contrast, engineering graduates report a 23% level of underemployment five years beyond graduation. To be clear, that 55% worries me. I served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for my department for six years and I had numerous discussions with parents and students regarding employability after college with our degree. Those discussions didn’t lend themselves well to lifestyle-centric career planning conversations, leading me to echo some of the WSJ’s suggestions–find internships and map an education/career path that makes you employable in your field after graduation. The caveat in these percentages, however, is that some fields of study have a more clear and direct career path–a student earns an engineering degree and takes a job as an engineer or a student majors in nursing and finds a job as a nurse. Even in terms of internships, many of these graduates may have interned with an engineering firm, so something directly in their field and future. In these fields and perhaps others, we see an imagined and/or actual reality in which a student goes to college, graduates, and gets a good job in their field–the “gravy” noted in the opening quote.
That equation does not translate as well to the humanities, including English, writing, rhetoric, as well as other degrees like communications (and maybe even to many students in traditional STEM fields, wondering when life becomes “gravy.” Earning my degree in the humanities does not mean I go work for a humanities company after graduation. However, it also doesn’t mean that we throw our hands up and say, “Oh well” or point to the hardships and difficulties of such fields of study. This means doing more than just acknowledging the future and careers. We must take an active role in engaging with jobs, careers, and employability. While I may have some gripes with the WSJ report and its use of underemployment measurements across college majors, I do agree with its encouragement of internships. Across the board, internships prove beneficial to students and not just because they may get credit and experience. Beyond classes, internships provide an actionable means to begin achieving the future lifestyle. Rather than limiting, we can see such experiences, as well as first jobs out of college, as “bridges” to the lifestyle students’ envision five or ten years after graduation. A recent visitor to my class reflected on her first job after college and how miserable it was. However, rather than fall into the underemployed college graduate from the WSJ report, she shared how she reframed the entry-level job as a “bridge” to elsewhere. As such, she reflected on how and what aspects of the job could help her build that bridge. This echoes the technical writer’s experience described above–she reflected on her initial job in order to find the bridging qualities for a future move. As the WSJ report notes, first jobs are important; however, they need not be dead ends, regardless of a graduate’s field of study. In this sense, students are given some power and influence over their future lives; in other words, they have autonomy (see self-determination theory!). However, as faculty in humanities-based fields of study, we need to encourage and assist in creating a framework where students can envision, invent, and consider a future lifestyle. Maybe we even need to make internships and experiential opportunities required. Further, we may need to consider how the skills, practices, and theories we teach in our courses translate to work or an imagined future lifestyle. Which means we may need to imagine future jobs, careers, money, and employment and the bridges leading to a life students love, even in the wake of reports highlighting underemployment, long job searches, and post-college lives lacking the promised “gravy.” After all, as McGonigal concludes, “there are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not think about, let alone actually experience, someday.“
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