A Practical Education, page 25
What may be most impressive about these students’ volunteer work in vocational guidance was that these women and men, who invested so much time and effort into getting speakers and rounding up students to attend, were willing to help their fellow students with career planning rather than only pursue their own professional interests. The student organizers had not secured their own futures; they were beset by worry about the unknown, too. (We, looking back, can see what they could not: how, for example, Derek Bok, a political science major who would graduate as a member of the Class of 1951 and was an active volunteer on the Senior Vocational Committee,34 would eventually become the president of Harvard University.)
The distribution of information about careers subsequently became institutionalized and professionalized. “Career planning” formally became part of the name of Stanford’s placement center for a while, and the altruism that had infused the earlier era of student-volunteer-led vocational guidance disappeared.
In 2013, Stanford appointed a new director for its Career Development Center, Farouk Dey. Dey, who had been the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Career and Professional Development Center was charged with remaking Stanford’s center.35 After a steering committee was organized and the planning for the center’s future, “Vision 2020,” was complete, Dey was ready in 2015 to declare, “The days of a ‘brick-and-mortar’ career services are over.”36 Dey described the new model for career services in grand, if rather indistinct, terms: “Our career educators are connected everywhere on and off campus to help expand and leverage the Stanford ecosystem for our students.”37
Dey and his colleagues wanted their organizational unit to have a new name to reflect the new mission, but they apparently could not think of a good replacement noun for “Center.” What they devised was an acronym, BEAM, a grammatically strange concoction that omitted the final noun: Bridging Education, Ambition, and Meaningful (work).
BEAM’s description of its new identity emphasized that “we educate, rather than place people in jobs.” Specifically, BEAM would educate students “about the process of cultivating their personalized networks to shape their professional journey and bridging their education and ambitions with meaningful work.”38 The importance of personal networks is a motif that runs through the narratives of the graduates presented in this book. It should be noted that engineering students do not need those personal networks; it is humanities and other liberal arts majors who need them.
Without a “Center” at the center of its name, BEAM might have been expected to shrink considerably in size, as students took on the networking that the university used to handle for them. That did not transpire. A new director, with a new vision and a new name for his program, can lay claim to more resources. Dey, whose group had twenty-six full-time positions when he arrived in 2013, doubled the size of the staff by 2016. BEAM was organized into new subgroups: Career Communities, Career Catalysts, Career Ventures, and Branding and Digital Communities.39
The dramatic expansion of BEAM can be seen as reassurance theater, responding to the heightened anxiety experienced by liberal arts students—and, perhaps even more important, their parents—about future job prospects. Like all universities, private and public alike, Stanford must convey to all interested parties that it assiduously helps all undergraduates find work upon graduation, particularly those whose major likely will not attract multiple job offers. The commitment is displayed with an enlarged career-services staff that can project tireless busyness on behalf of students who will soon graduate.
I am skeptical that the makeover of career services will make any difference whatsoever. But I do not fault its staff members. They cannot effect an economy-wide shift in employer attitudes that would open doors to liberal arts majors. I see abundant evidence that students have greatly lowered their own expectations of what career services can do. Institutional help is largely absent in the stories of the students presented here. I can also point to the Stanford students who are pushing full-time career counselors to the side and taking a more active role in career planning by enrolling in great numbers in a two-credit, pass/fail course that Stanford began offering in 2010 titled “Designing Your Life.”40 The course was developed by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, instructors in the Stanford Design Program. The course description says that it “uses design thinking to address the ‘wicked problem’ of designing your life and career.” Vocation makes many appearances in the course description and among the course objectives: “vocation formation throughout your life”; “vocation development, now and in the future”; and in the student’s “own vocational vision.”41
In the earlier era, faculty members and students alike treated “vocational guidance” as, essentially, the process of supplying students with richly detailed information about many vocations. The students did not need to be literally guided; they just needed plentiful information, obtained principally from campus visits by experienced practitioners who could ideally provide “the inside dope,” as a Stanford Daily article about a speaker’s series promised in 1940.42
The contemporary form of vocational guidance at Stanford, that is, vocational development, as embodied in the “Designing Your Life” course, gives less attention to the particulars about careers and more to the process of selecting, which will be employed not just once but many times. Instead of talking about “the career,” the course talks of the transition “from university to first career.” The syllabus is a potpourri, including New Age-y psychology (Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment); more serious psychology (Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience); career planning (Richard Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute and Marty Nemko, Cool Careers for Dummies); and job-related oral histories (Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do).
Bill Burnett explained how the methodology essential to design applies to choosing a life work as well: “You prototype, you test, and you constantly change your point of view.” Students in the course are required to develop three entirely different five-year plans for themselves—“Odyssey Plans”—and then select one of them as the basis for developing a fully fleshed-out ten-year plan. The exercise is supposed to force students, in Burnett’s words, to “prototype different versions of the you that you might become.”43
Ten-year plans do not seem suited for humanities majors, however, at least without contemplation of graduate school or other post-graduate education. The stories of the professional paths taken by the graduates told in this book, who were selected partly because they did not head to graduate school, could not have been mapped in advance. When two economists of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz, used data collected in the 2010 census to look at how well college graduates’ majors matched their jobs, they found that, after excluding those with graduate degrees, only 27 percent of college graduates with only a bachelor’s degree were working in a job that was linked to the graduate’s major by the federal government’s classification scheme. This encompasses all disciplines. To be sure, the scheme is not very generous in defining matches: only 1 percent of liberal arts majors were found to be in jobs matched to their particular major.44
Some students who themselves are comfortable with the unknown must fend off parents who apply pressure on their wayward offspring to select a major that works like a conveyor belt, delivering the graduate to a destination known in advance. Steven Pearlstein, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University, wrote a piece in 2016 for the Washington Post: “Meet the Parents Who Won’t Let Their Children Study Literature.”45 It told of a conversation with his students after the class had read and discussed David Nasaw’s eight-hundred-page biography of Andrew Carnegie, a book that many of the students thanked Pearlstein for assigning. He learned that of the twenty-four students in the class, an honors seminar on wealth and poverty, none were history majors. Nor English majors. Nor philosophy majors. He asked them, How could this be? Half a dozen of them replied, “Our parents wouldn’t let us.”
It is not only the parents of students at state universities who direct their children away from the humanities. Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard, told of one student who had come enthusiastically to her home for an event promoting Harvard’s history and literature program and who while there received a torrent of urgent text messages from her parents: “Leave right now, get out of there, that is a house of pain.”46
Amanda Rizkalla, a freshman at Stanford, wrote an essay for the school paper in the fall of 2016 about the difficulty she faces, as a first-generation college student coming from a low-income background, in explaining to her father why she would like to major in creative writing and not follow a pre-med track expected by him. Were she to tell her father about her wish, she expected he would say, “You already know how to write. You don’t need to go to school for that. You need to be practical.” She was not willing to let him dictate her choice, however. “I am the one who got into Stanford, not my parents,” she wrote. She concluded with stirring words: “Yes, I am first-generation. Yes, I am low income. Yes, I lack a safety net to fall back on. And wholeheartedly, unapologetically, I choose passion over practicality.”47
I hesitate to touch Rizkalla’s phrasing, but I would not place “passion” in opposition to “practicality.” I see graduates’ passion for their chosen majors in the humanities running through the stories gathered in this book, passion that carries over into their first jobs, post-graduation—or, if the jobs were intrinsically uninteresting—passion for learning new things, taking on new projects, finding ways to make themselves useful to their employer outside of the boundaries of their formal job description. Their passion proved to be quite practical.
On the surface, the stories in this book may seem tied closely to one school. In many of the individual accounts, a school-based network was used to get in the door that led, it turned out, to a first destination after graduation. It is only natural that in the process of reading these narratives a dismaying assumption would take shape in the reader’s mind, that anyone who did not go to that school would not have access to that network. I would argue that the recurring mention of the role of Stanford’s alumni network in the narratives makes it seem more determinative than it deserves to be. I am emboldened to make this argument because of the work of two economists who have done two large, ingeniously designed studies that get as close as anyone has gotten to quantifying an answer to the question, What is the economic payoff to attending an elite college or university?
Stacy Berg Dale, an economist at Mathematica Policy Research, and Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, looked at applications, transcripts, and earnings into middle age of two cohorts of students at Stanford and other schools, including highly selective schools such as Princeton, Yale, and Williams College, and some less selective schools such as Penn State and Xavier University.48 Previous studies had found that among students with the same SAT scores or high school grades, those who attended selective colleges that attracted students with high SAT scores or high school grades were likely to end up with higher earnings.
Dale and Krueger were able to look at not only the colleges that the students attended but also the ones that they applied to, being accepted by some, rejected by others, and when that data was analyzed, something unexpected came into view. It turns out that after controlling for similar SAT scores and grades, what most matters in predicting future earnings is not the selectivity of the school a student attended but the selectivity of the most selective school the student applied to, even if rejected by that school. A hypothetical student who applied to both Stanford and Xavier, who was admitted by Xavier and was rejected by Stanford, would earn as much, on average, as the peer who had similar SAT scores and high school grades and was admitted and graduated from Stanford.
Their explanation of the phenomenon is that admissions offices cannot see critically important attributes such as ambition and confidence, which are revealed by where a student chooses to apply, and which are far more important than differences in school’s faculties or in the reach of alumni networks. They noted a famous example: Steven Spielberg, who was rejected by the film schools at both the University of Southern California and UCLA, attended California State University, Long Beach, without apparent detriment to his career.49
When Alan Krueger was interviewed about these findings, he offered this advice to students: “Don’t believe that the only school worth attending is one that would not admit you.” Find a school whose academic strengths align with yours, he urged. He added, “Recognize that your own motivation, ambition and talents will determine your success more than the college name on your diploma.”50
The unifying theme that runs through the stories presented in this book is the overarching importance of character, encompassing an appetite for intellectual challenge, the defiant rejection of the easiest paths, the capacity to work hard, the drive to reach higher. Students at any campus who happen to love studying a liberal arts subject, who are willing to dive deeply and excel, should take heart in the stories here. It is character that shines through. Parents should take heart, too.
As for prospective employers of tomorrow’s graduates, I hope that these stories will help to restore the willingness shown in the past to consider the entire gamut of liberal arts majors for entry-level positions that do not require a specialized degree. This requires abandoning the expectation that every new hire can be completely prepared on the first day of work. If formal on-the-job training cannot be supplied, then time for informal on-the-job learning should be. The ability to learn quickly is a hallmark of those who have majored in the liberal arts; for that ability to shine, however, the candidate needs a first chance.
When employers are surveyed, they say they value the very things that a liberal education emphasizes. A 2013 survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 95 percent of employers agreed that “our company puts a priority on hiring people with the intellectual and interpersonal skills that will help them contribute to innovation in the workplace” and 93 percent agreed with the statement that “candidates’ demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than their undergraduate major.”51
To put these professed convictions into daily practice, however, the managers and teams who actually do the hiring must shed acquired habits of looking for particular majors when hiring nonspecialists and turning away all others. The wisdom captured in that 1919 vocational guidance pamphlet, that “it is not so much the knowledge but the training gained in securing that knowledge,” deserves to be appreciated anew. “The training can be secured by study in almost any field”—and students should not forget the final piece—“provided the study is earnest and extended.”52 Opening more doors to students who elect to major in the liberal arts—and who study diligently—would bring a multiplicity of perspectives for understanding a complex world and a well-practiced facility for communicating that complexity to others. Nothing yet discovered is more practical for preparing for the unpredictable future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent, who oh-so-gently imparted a practical education, nudging me away from an ill-conceived plan and back onto solid footing. She also found a wonderful home for this project at Stanford University Press. There, Jenny Gavacs was enormously helpful in guiding me through several iterations of the project’s plan, and Kate Wahl supplied perspicacious suggestions that resulted in a much-improved book. Gigi Mark looked after production details with tender care. Stephanie Adams, Kalie Caetano, Ryan Furtkamp, and Kate Templar were assiduous in their preparations to spread word. And Michel Vrana, the designer of the inspired dust jacket, is a master at his craft.
I am indebted to the students who shared their experiences for the project and thank all of them: Kyle Abraham, Mark Bessen, Doug Blumeyer, Amanda Breen, Olivia Bryant, Michael Crandell, Truman Cranor, Magali Duque, Elise Grangaard, Stephen Hayes, Meredith Hazy, Trent Hazy, Gus Horwith, Marie Hubbard, Liam Kinney, Carly Lave, Jessica Moore, Jennifer Ockelmann, Jess Peterson, Andrew Phillips, Steven Rappaport, Mike Sanchez, Arielle Sison, Alexis Smith, Dylan Sweetwood, Brian Tich, Makshya Tolbert, and Judy Wang.
I am grateful for the time Daniel Davis and Derek Draper shared with me, supplying material used in the profile of Andrew Phillips.
For the profile of Doug Blumeyer, Kush Patel of App Academy supplied me with an interview and a tour of the academy, and Jon Wolverton kindly indulged my request to go through a coding-skills exam (the sweat that poured off me testified to a realistic experience).
At Stanford, I received helpful assistance from Mehran Sahami, professor of computer science; Juliet Charnas, Alice Hu, and Jake Sonnenberg, students; Arthur Patterson, Miriam W. Palm, and Michelle Futornick in the Stanford News Library; Drew Bourn, historical curator at the Lane Medical Library; and the patient staff of Special Collections & University Archives.
