One particularly useful question from our senior survey asks students to respond to the statement, “I am certain that my post-graduate plans are a good fit for who I am and where I want my life to go.”  Students have the choice of five options from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” and for analytical purposes those five options are assigned scores from 1 to 5.  The average score for the 2012 senior class was 4.06, which roughly translates to the response option “agree.”  On first glance, that seems pretty good.

But as with any examination of a large dataset, an overall average score can be deceptive.  For example, all the students’ responses could have been clustered between 4.00 and 4.10 – suggesting that no matter the major or the individual’s post-graduate plan (grad school, work, volunteer circus clown, etc.), all of our students were pretty certain that their plans for life after college were a good fit.  However, it is also possible that just under half the students chose “neutral” (scored as a 3) while just over half chose “strongly agree” (scored as a 5) – suggesting a troubling disparity between two groups of Augustana students.

So last week we began to dig deeper into the data beneath that overall score of 4.06.  First, we divided the responses based upon whether the student intended to go to grad school or intended to go directly into the workforce.  Then, we looked at those two groups across seven categories of majors – humanities, social sciences, biological sciences, physical sciences, fine arts, business, and education.

It turns out that our overall average masks a substantial gap between students who intend to go to grad school and students who intend to go into the job market.  For students going to grad school (161), their certainty of post-graduate plan fit was 4.49.  For students going into the workforce (352), their certainty of post-graduate plan fit was 3.97.

Interestingly, this gap largely repeats itself across all of the major categories, although the gap among biological science students was a little larger and the gaps among physical science and business students was a little smaller.  I’ve put all of that data into the table below.

Student Group	Going to Grad School (# of students)	Going to Work (# of students)
Overall	4.49 (161)	3.97 (352)
Humanities	4.35 (20)	3.78 (56)
Social Sciences	4.52 (27)	3.95 (56)
Biological Sciences	4.56 (87)	3.84 (62)
Physical Sciences	4.42 (12)	4.17 (24)
Business	4.33 (12)	3.99 (87)
Education	0.00 (0)	4.29 (55)
Fine Arts	4.00 (3)	3.50 (12)

So what should we take from it?  First of all, I’d suggest that it’s entirely realistic to expect students going to grad school to be more certain of their post-graduate plan fit.  After all, they seem to know what they want to do enough to know that additional and specifically focused schooling is necessary.  Moreover, in many cases they probably know the exact career they plan to pursue and have long since investigated the path required to get there.  They also possess the intellectual capabilities to get to a point where their career plan has been validated by their grad school acceptance letter – an additional affirmation that they are on the right path.

Second, although we need to be cautious about making too much of some of these subgroup averages (for example, the mean score of 0.00 for education majors intending to go directly to graduate school is explained by the fact that no education majors intended to go to grad school), we should remember that this dataset includes responses from virtually all of our 2012 graduates.  As such, these scores accurately represent the experiences of an entire class of seniors.

I think these numbers can inform our efforts to improve the degree to which we set up our students to succeed after college.  Students who intended to go into the workforce and majored in the fine arts (3.50) and the humanities (3.78) indicated the lowest levels of career certainty.  By comparison, the highest levels of career certainty among those who intended to go into the workforce were education (4.29) and physical sciences (4.17) majors.  This gap is large enough to indicate that the difference between the two groups cannot be attributed to mere chance.  Some of you might suggest that the relatively low certainty among fine arts and humanities students shouldn’t be surprising given that these majors either don’t have direct links to particular professions or have been long associated with the stereotype of the “the starving artist.”  In both cases graduate school provides a clearer career path, and that likely explains the higher certainty for students from those majors going to grad school.

I fear that the students who need assistance with career planning early in the course of their major are the ones who are too often the least likely to get it.  These students are often in majors where faculty have little experience outside of academia and are therefore less likely to know as much about how to help a student translate the knowledge and skills developed in that major across a wide variety of career paths.  This seems like a perfect opportunity for faculty in the humanities and fine arts to partner with the CEC to lay down early guiding pathways for these students and to help correct the erroneous assumptions about the lack of career options available to students in these majors.

In addition, I’d suggest that this is not something that we should expect the faculty to solve by merely adding another class or some other one-off experience.  Although we can share some of this information with students through short presentations, this information translates best when it is repeatedly infused into many different experiences – both inside and outside of the classroom.  In the end, that is the epitome of the liberal arts; that we take the fullest advantage of the comprehensive learning environment to help students make connections across a wide range of educational contexts and disciplines.  In so doing, each of our students, no matter their life aspirations, are well prepared to succeed in life after college.

Make it a good day,

Mark