My previous post was a Gen Z success story. This post is a warning to exercise some skepticism about Gen Z success stories! In this post, I share my reflections on a typical college marketing and communication practice, bragging about graduates’ successes. There are a lot of ways to view the bragging: natural pride, inspiration to current students through role modeling, a competitive tactic intended to raise the profile of the college. Most of these motives are reasonable, and the bragging seems harmless, possibly slightly annoying, but easy enough to ignore, akin to a single-spaced multi-paged family Christmas letter.
My hot take is that The Bragging has an unintended negative consequence on students’ mental health. My own school is currently claiming in social media posts that 99% of the bachelor’s degree students who graduate find professional work in the field they studied. On the posts I have seen, there is an asterisk that reports the survey response rate in small font. But the student who walks across the graduation stage without a job offer must feel bad being in this version of “the 1%,” i.e., the one-in-a-hundred who is unemployed. There’s no way to sugar coat an extended job search, but we shouldn’t shit coat it, either. I propose no coat at all, by sharing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in communications about where a school’s graduates land.
“Scare Tactics”
I’ve been contemplating this unintended consequence of bragging about students’ successes at least since 2022. It was in that year that I heard a senior undergraduate student on a career search panel say to her younger peers, “Leeds uses scare tactics to get us [students] to find internships.” Inside my head: What?! Scare tactics, like the message that having an internship is helpful for your job search for your full-time job after graduation? I chatted with the panelist student later and, she confirmed that yes, that was indeed the “scare tactic” she meant.
Hmmmmm.
The message that having some professional experience before graduation is helpful in finding a full-time job is not a scare tactic. It’s common sense. The student panelist’s “scare tactics” interpretation really bothered me. And it got me thinking about how well-intended messages for students can twist and land wrong. (See my related post about Crossed Wires.) Is the 99% claim experienced as a “scare tactic”? It must be, by some. If it were the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I would feel better about asking students to accept it, even if it were scary.
Comparative vs. Absolute Bragging
Each school has its own customized form of exaggeration. For some years at my school, the exaggeration was that students who didn’t answer repeated inquiries about the status of their search were excluded from calculation of “placement rates.” That exclusion is a problem because those non-answerers are disproportionately likely to have no job to report, biasing upward the estimate of success. Was my school’s type of exaggeration worse than others’? I doubt it.
The fact that “everyone does it [brags]” carries weight in this context. The brags cancel each other out, so they make for decent comparisons across schools. Each school has about the same incentives and about the same latitude to exaggerate. But once a student is enrolled at a school, students are not focused on the relative numbers. So the harm isn’t done at the college choice stage, a comparative process. The harm is done to the students within a school, who are comparing themselves to an exaggerated standard presented as the truth.
Standards
The National Association of Colleges + Employers (NACE), is a non-profit professional association of people involved in helping college students find employment. One of the services that NACE provides is a set of standards for how to faithfully report “placement” (or, as they call it “first destination” post-graduation). Having a transparent standard is an excellent idea, as it helps make comparisons between schools meaningful.
However, there is a serious flaw with the NACE standards, the laughably low standard for “knowledge rate.” Knowledge rate is the percentage of the graduating class for which the school has information about their post-graduation plans. Quoting from the NACE “Standards and Protocols for Collecting and Reporting Career Outcomes for College Graduates“: “The goal should be the highest possible rate, but institutions should strive for a minimum knowledge rate of 65%.”(p. 7) Only 65%? If a school adheres to the standard and reports a positive career outcome rate of 100%, that 100% might actually mean 65%.
The MBA Career Services Council expects 85% knowledge rate. Better, but 90% of 85% is 76.5%, which is not the same as 90%.
My Proposal
What do I propose be done about this? I urge schools with moral courage, or NACE itself, to change their standard to full-class reporting. When saying what percentage of students are [employed full-time in a professional job, underemployed, going to graduate school, ski bumming, not in communication with the school about their plans, etc.], the percentages should be out of the whole class of graduates. This might not make for a great poster in an airport: “33% of our graduates won’t respond to our survey!” But it would provide a more honest picture of the post-degree activities of students.
Plummeting trust in higher education is a hot topic in the news right now. My proposal is a way that my industry can take a baby step toward repairing it.