Here is a question that crossed my mind recently: “Is anyone holding college academic advisors responsible?” What twigged my curiosity was a pleading post to a LinkedIn board by a fellow trying to find an entry level position. Problem is he had a B.A. in something like Creative Writing. In the first place, I can’t think of any prominent author who had a creative writing degree. If a prominent author had a degree at all, it was usually in some other field. But beyond that, even in the glory days of literary magazines--roughly from the end of the Civil War to World War I when motion pictures began to be popular--most articles came from free lancers. There was very little use of staff writers at the prominent literary magazines of those days such as Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, North American Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. The article that launched Mark Twain’s literary career, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” was submitted when Clemens was working as a reporter for a San Francisco newspaper. Even when literary magazines entered their decadent phase with Bernarr Macfadden’s True Confessions (which were anything but) in the 1920s, most of the material came from free lancers. An entry level job as a staff literary writer largely never existed and does not exist today. The only thing I can suggest to the fellow is start writing and submitting while pushing French fries at MacDonald’s. I learned a shocking lesson late in life. I thought I might be useful as a college academic counselor for the simple reasons I have five degrees so have a lot of experience in the academic labyrinth, and have been in a line of work, technical writing, which involves frequent job changes, so I have a lot of school of hard knocks experience in the job market. However, I expected the colleges I wanted to apply to would want a degree in Guidance and Counseling and I would be facing a hard sell. To my surprise, the colleges did NOT want someone with a Guidance and Counseling degree as you would expect, they wanted people with a background in SALES! It then hit me that an academic advisor is not really a counselor, but a salesman for the college. His job is to fill seats in classrooms. That isn’t altogether bad. Students who are guided into a successful education experience which leads to a successful career makes both the counselor and the college look good. But the pressure to fill seats in programs of dubious utility in the job market can be very strong indeed, especially when the department is struggling for survival and in competition with other departments in the college for resources. As long as the student remembers this fact and does his own market research on the demand for the skill sets he is interested in acquiring, all well and good. But if a student accepts the advice of counselors uncritically and combines that with the natural optimism of young people, you can end up with the tragedy of both an education and a life wasted. We end up with the phenomenon of graduates unable to find jobs and employers whining about the shortage of new graduates in certain fields. You end up with a disconnect between what the universities are graduating and what the job market needs. Students get routed into unmarketable fields such as Women’s Studies, Creative Writing, Fine Arts, many branches of History, many branches of Political Science, and others. Or graduating in fields in which supply far outstrips demand such as Journalism, History, Drama, and Alternative Energy. Someplace, somewhere, in the counseling process someone ought to have told the students that these degrees would leave them worse off when it came to finding employment than if they just went out into the world with their high school diploma. The student must accept the advice of his academic counselors with a few shakers full of salt. He must remember that the job of the counselor is to fill classrooms and to justify department budgets first, and provide the student with an intellectually enriching and potentially profitable education experience second. In this day and age everyone is “You Inc.” With little in the way of job security, everyone must treat himself as his own business who supplies his employer with a service but who could be left seeking a new employer or be sought by better employers at any time. Thus, like anyone going into business, he must do his market research before investing heavily lest he simply waste both his financial and intellectual capital. In the meantime, I propose that academic counselors who recommend students work towards degrees which will leave them unemployable ought to be publically horse whipped. Or, at the very least, suffer the sort of public opprobrium reserved for card sharks, used car salesmen, and many politicians.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 08:18:30 +0000