Recently, a compensation research company called Payscale surveyed a large group of people – 248,000 of them in fact. While the survey was primarily intended to gather information on salary and other compensation for various jobs, they went further than that: Given the importance people place on college degrees (as evidenced by the recent college bribery scandal), they wanted to know whether people had any regrets about the degrees that they earned.

If you have regrets about some aspect of your postsecondary experience, you’re not alone: According to their survey, you share those regrets with 66 percent of the degree-carrying public. The kinds of regret that people feel, however, varies widely by age and degree held.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Baby Boomers are the ones with the least regret – 51.3 percent reported having no regrets at all – and, coming from an age when college was much more affordable, they are also the least likely to regret taking on debt in order to fund their education (only 13.4 percent had regrets about student debt). This is in stark contrast to the Millennial Generation, where only 28.7 percent had no regrets related to their degrees, and 28.8 percent regretted their student loan debt, the top category of regret for that group.

There are some other interesting breakdowns as well, such as the fact that those with MBAs and Masters Degrees are most likely to regret their student loan debt, possibly because they carry the most with the fewest marginal benefits. Those with Ph.D. degrees are the least likely to carry regrets.

But what was most interesting was the breakdown by major. There was a clear trend showing that those who majored in “hard” subjects, like computer science, engineering, and math, were not only among the least likely to regret their debt loads, but also the least likely to regret their majors. In contrast, those in majors such as the humanities and social sciences carried the highest level of regrets, including regrets about their student loan debt as well as regrets about choosing those majors in the first place.

What conclusions can we draw? First, that student loan debt is a real problem, particularly among Millennials (which shouldn’t be a surprise given the increase in college expenses over the last twenty years or so). Beyond that, it’s really interesting to see that the more practical degrees – those that lead most directly into high-paying jobs – result in the fewest regrets. While I’m a believer in the value of a traditional liberal arts degree, I also think it’s true that some percentage of people in degrees such as sociology or history are people who felt the need to go to college but didn’t have the kind of direction that would allow them to focus in a specific career-related field. The lack of a direct career connection could certainly explain, at least in part, the dissatisfaction with those majors, and with the inability to handle the resulting debt.

Take a look at the survey for yourself – it’s fascinating stuff, and will certainly provide you with your own insights based on your experiences.

 

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

ORIGINALLY POSTED JUNE 2017

Are you one of 10 million people who bought a copy of the job hunting classic “What Color Is Your Parachute?”  I am.

In fact, I just read reread this book for the first time in more than 30 years. I was 23 years old when I first read “Parachute.” At the time I was the classic case of a young person who graduated from college and then realized that what I had just majored in – electronic media – wasn’t really something I wanted to do as a career. I was a young married man with a child so I really needed to work. I had a job at a conference center using some of my media skills but doing a job that didn’t really require my BA degree. More importantly, it had no future for me. I stepped back, looked through my career fog, and knew I had to completely re-start my career journey.

I really didn’t know where to start, but fortunately my wife Lisa had met an interesting author a couple of years earlier when she interned at a local daily news-lifestyle show. His name was Richard Bolles and he was the author of the “Parachute” job-hunting book. She told me about it, so I found a copy of the Parachute at the local bookstore and started devouring it.

I was a highly motivated reader and the concepts I discovered really transformed my thinking and understanding about how to develop a career and how to find a job. At the time, the most revolutionary idea was the concept of “informational interviewing” – the idea of reaching out to professionals, not to ask about a job opportunity, but to learn about what they did for a living, and explore whether it might be a good fit for me. In the process, I started to build a network of new relationships, and develop confidence and conversational skills that paid off later in the job search process.

Another important concept was taking a self-inventory of the skills that I had already developed, and thinking about my interests and aptitudes. I didn’t use any formal assessments to do this; just a simple pen, paper, self-reflection, and talking to my wife and some close friends. This led to my growing understanding that a career in public policy was probably going to be a good fit. Over the next few years, as I entered into this career, I later found an even better fit in education policy and practice.

Over the last week, I just re-read the 2012 edition, and at the end of the text, Bolles listed 47 principles that he had explained during the course of the book.

Here are 10 of those 47 Principal Ideas that really stand out to me:

#5.  Job-hunting has become a survival skill.

#6.  Every job is temporary. By their very nature, jobs are mortal; they get born, grow, prosper, decline, die. Jobs and job-titles are endlessly being born, and then dying.

#9.  Even when you feel utterly powerless, you must work on what is within your control, even if it’s only 2 percent.

#12. The business world is like a foreign country; if you visit it, you must learn its language, and how employers think.

#13.  You must learn that employers hunt for employees in exactly the opposite way that job-hunters search for employers.

#18. Your self-inventory must be a search for what you did right, not for what you did wrong.

#20.  There are three key elements to a self-inventory; your answers to three questions, WHAT, WHERE, and HOW.  WHAT skills do you most enjoy using; WHERE do you most want to use those skills; and HOW do you find the person who has the power to hire you for such a job.

#23. Your uniqueness does not consist in any one subject that you know, but in how you combine two or three different fields that you know.

#26.  In job-hunting, don’t wait until a place has declared it has a vacancy; explore any company that interests you, whether it has a vacancy or not.

#38.  In the employment interview, answer each of the employer’s questions no shorter than 20 seconds, no longer than 2 minutes, at a time.

So, if you’re looking for a great gift for any young person who perhaps is finishing high school or has just finished college and is floundering, this is it. Get a copy and share it (the most recent edition is 2017). You can also learn more at Bolles website.

P.S.  I also discovered that Richard Bolles just passed away in March of this year at the age of 90. I never met the man, but his work and passion touched me very personally; I am very grateful for the legacy he left!

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

If you’ve been on our newsletter list for any length of time, you’re likely familiar with Seamless WBL, our new work-based learning, and advisory board management tool. Hopefully, you’re aware that the system is going to see a major “Phase 2” expansion in August, with new portals for employers and students (including the ability to track student work-based learning history!).

What no one knew – until now – is what happens after that. We’re finally ready to unveil details on “Phase 3,” which will be in place by December 2019.

What kinds of things will you be able to do in December? How about:

• A point-and-click interface that will allow you to easily build training agreements for student internships, externships, and apprenticeships, with detailed lists of the knowledge, skills, and activities to be covered in their WBL experience. These agreements will be able to be signed online by all parties.
• A job board attached to the Employer Search area, allowing students to search for internships, job shadows, and other employer-hosted opportunities.
• A place for students to enter their work hours and have employers sign off on those virtual time sheets.
• The ability to automatically generate advisory board sign-in sheets and track attendance over time.
• Additional reporting capabilities, especially for those with multi-school accounts.

Thanks go to our current users, many of whom have weighed in on the kinds of features that would make their jobs easier. We’re looking forward to rolling these components out by December, and announcing our Phase 4 in the process!

 

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education. 

ORIGINALLY POSTED MARCH 2017

By now, you have probably heard about “Hillbilly Elegy,” a captivating memoir by J.D. Vance. In the book, Vance tells the story about his life as a child and young man growing up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town whose people were struggling with the social and economic aftermath of de-industrialization of the 1980s and 1990s.

The book was released in Summer 2016, and it really caught fire with the press and opinion makers because it hit the market at an opportune time – right during the 2016 election season when there was a great deal of attention to Donald Trump’s courting of disaffected white working-class voters. “Hillbilly Elegy” focuses on a subset of Trump’s electoral lynchpin – Appalachian families from Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia who made their way north after World War II to Ohio and Indiana, leaving coal country to work in manufacturing.

I’ve been fascinated by the cultural and social experience of the white working-class for years – because these are my roots too. My mom grew up as the child of tobacco farmers in central North Carolina, and they exhibited some of the characteristics of life described in Vance’s book. Mom never missed a day of school in her entire 12 years of schooling, even when she was sick, and I think that was partly because school offered a respite of peace and stability from home that she really needed. Life on a tobacco farm without electricity and running water and too much alcohol was hard, even though she has a lifelong affection for her extended family and roots there.

Also a few years ago, I watched Diane Sawyer’s profile of Appalachia on CBS, and it made me aware of the depths of white poverty in that specific region that was shocking and sad.

Vance’s book is fascinating because he speaks as someone who grew up in the experience, not from the outside perspective of social scientist. While Vance has moved past his small town life and succeeded in the larger world, he speaks with knowledge and authority about people who seem trapped in economic and family circumstances. Of course, his observations don’t universally apply, but they are compelling.

Here are four key insights I gleaned from his story:

1. The Myth of Hard Work. While the value of hard work was talked about freely, it was not actually experienced by many of the men and women he knew. Economic opportunities were sparse since large-scale manufacturing evaporated, and the lack of a true work ethic was undermined by drug and alcohol addictions and the relative ease of receiving public assistance.

2. Family Trauma Impacts Learning. Vance and many children he knew grew up amidst a torrent of angry fighting and turbulent home environments. When he was forced to live only with his mother and her various husbands and boyfriends, Vance struggled with depression and poor school performance. Yet, when he was able to live with his more functional and supportive grandparents, his school performance and well-being improved significantly.

3. The Path to Social Mobility isn’t Obvious to Everyone. Vance observes that poor children and their families believe in the importance of education, but they really don’t understand how to advance to higher levels of the workforce. He also notes that many folks don’t really see a connection between hard work and success. He says that many children and adults believe that if you’re successful, it’s because you’re either lucky or naturally smart, not because you worked hard. He also pointed out some examples of children like him who excelled and rose out of poverty. They were children who had at least one parent from a family outside of the “hillbilly” subculture, or like Vance, had other impactful influences, like grandparents and a military experience.

4. The Power of Caring, Consistent Adults. While Vance’s mom did love him, she was also a troubled person who battled addiction time and time again, usually losing the battle. For him, his grandparents were the change agents. By the time he was born, they had gotten sober and stable, so they could provide some stability for him in spite of his mom’s turbulent lifestyle. Even though they weren’t well educated, they valued education and they offered consistent support and love (albeit a rough and raw version of love compared to middle class norms). Their love and consistency kept Vance afloat, and the military experience helped him break out limiting mindsets he had about himself. He grew in self-discipline and self-confidence, and after finishing four years in the military, attended and graduated from Ohio State University and then succeeded at Yale Law School

(I think it is interesting that for Vance, he didn’t feel ready to go straight to college and instead chose to join the military as the better path. His intuitive experience echoes that of millions of vets who have utilized GI Bill benefits to gain education and training after they had grown in maturity through their military service.)

Throughout the book, Vance doesn’t communicate his story with a pedantic or moralistic approach – he just tells an unflinching story of his difficult childhood and later success, and it’s up to the reader to make some of the connections like the ones I just shared. For all of us who care about helping youths achieve and reach their potential, his story is a teachable moment.

 

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions.  (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

 

When people talk about finding partners, they’re either explicitly or implicitly talking about industry partners – those businesses in the area that employ students in the fields they’re studying. If your sole focus is on industry partners, you’re probably overlooking a whole host of great prospective partners that could help your students learn about various careers and prepare for the real world.

Have you thought about:

Your School and District

In many counties, K-12 education is the largest employer and handles a wide range of business functions, including food services, transportation, technology, communications, finance, and many more. Yet we often don’t think to look internally for work-based learning opportunities, even when a student is interested in something being done directly by the district.

Of course, there are still partnership negotiations to be done – people working with students will have to have time budgeted for that task, and you’ll still need to work to make it a quality experience. However, it would be shortsighted to overlook the largest employer in your area, and one in which you have an inside track.

Government agencies

Like your school or district, government agencies in your area can serve as excellent sources of WBL experiences. Many CTE programs already partner with law enforcement, fire departments, and emergency medical services for students interested in those fields. However, there are other government operations that can help to provide students with valuable career experiences. What about connecting with the courts for students interested in law? What about parks, environmental services, recreation, or public works? And what about all the office functions in every agency, are they a great fit for students interested in business?

Nonprofit

Service learning has long been considered to be a valid source of work-based learning experiences and the development of workplace skills. Consider connecting with the nonprofits in your area, who are hungry for volunteers, and often have the flexibility to align service projects with a student’s area of concentration. As a bonus, students can connect with a cause they care about, ranging from animal shelters to food banks and beyond, while feeling that they’re making a real difference in the lives of others.

Military

If you have a military presence in your area, you may not realize that members of the military can be enthusiastic partners, both for general support and for introducing students to life outside of the school walls. Make contact with base leadership to explore opportunities for your students to connect with service members.

While the local industry is a critically important partner, they’re not the only ones who hire in your area, and they’re not the only ones who perform many of the roles in which your students are interested in. Expand your horizons and build partnerships in entirely new areas for the benefit of your students!

 

 

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

 

For several years, I helped put on an annual awards ceremony for principals in Tennessee. The awards were based on schools’ TVAAS scores (the state’s measure of value-added performance), with the highest-performing elementary and middle schools in the state receiving cash awards, banners, and publicity in a ceremony hosted by the state Secretary of Education.

For those not familiar with the value-added assessment, it seeks to remove those variables that the school has no control over, like poverty and students’ academic proficiency at the beginning of the year. It measures their progress from year to year as compared to how well they would be expected to perform based on their previous history. If a student is expected to make eight months of academic progress over the course of a year based on their track record, and instead makes a full year of progress or more, they produce a very high value-added score. If they’ve consistently made a year’s worth of academic gains in the past but post less than that this year, they produce a low TVAAS score.

It’s not without controversy – not everyone agrees with its use or its accuracy – but it’s supposed to be a measure of true academic progress, compared with traditional proficiency scores that correlate strongly with poverty rates. The idea is to measure what the school brings to the student, and not what the student brings to the school. And whether or not everyone agrees with its use, it is an official state measure, so it’s supposed to be important to administrators.

I got to know several of the repeat winners over the years and sometimes asked whether they were inundated with calls from other principals seeking to learn how they performed so well. Each year, I was surprised to hear that no one had actually received such a call. (There may have been one or two exceptions over the years, but hardly the flood of interest you would imagine.)

What I learned from them – and what I’ve confirmed time and again with others over the years since – is that the people who are getting exceptional results are eager to share them, and disappointed when they don’t get that opportunity. My advice for you: If you hear about someone doing great work in your field, get in touch with them. Take them to lunch, meet them at their school, or ask for a tour of their program. I can almost guarantee that they’ll be thrilled to hear from you and that you’ll learn from the single best source of knowledge: Someone who’s already excelled at something you want to do.

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

My colleague Brett Pawlowski recently talked about important lessons drawn from the sports world: “Go where the ball is going to be,” and “Know what you’re going to do once you get the ball.” These are great ideas to keep in mind, particularly if you are tasked with implementing the new Perkins Act requirement about doing a Comprehensive Needs Assessment.

As you may have heard, the new federal Perkins Act (Perkins V) requires each local recipient of funds to conduct a “comprehensive needs assessment” every two years. Using the findings from that assessment, the local school system or college will develop an action plan and use of funds directly tied to those findings. Every dollar of local Perkins spending will have to link back to this needs assessment, so it’s a BIG deal.

The six topics you’ll need to dig into are:

• Performance on federal accountability indicators;
• Alignment to labor market needs;
• Scope, size and quality of programs offered;
• Progress toward implementing programs and programs of study;
• Recruitment, retention and training of faculty and staff; and
• Progress toward improving access and equity

Even though your school district or college may not have to officially conduct the assessment until the new Perkins requirements fully kicks in, it makes sense to get started now because there is a lot to cover.

Here’s a great tool from the Association of Career Technical Education to help you get started.  It has the “comprehensive” title “Maximizing Perkins V’s Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment & Local Application to Drive CTE Program Quality and Equity; A Guide for Local Leaders.” Click on this link to download a copy.

Many areas of the assessment deal with looking internally at your programs, student participation, and connections between secondary and postsecondary. The one which will take more legwork is doing the external analysis of the labor market to ensure your programs have a strong alignment with local and regional needs. The guide gives excellent tips about who to talk to, and what materials and resources to draw upon.

Once you’ve got the materials and contacts, what are you looking for?

Here are a set of questions from the guide to ask as you’re doing the labor market analysis:

• What industries are projected to grow the most in my local area? What occupations?
• Are my CTE program offerings broad enough to expose students to all the in-demand industry sectors or occupations in my region?
• How do my CTE program enrollments match projected job openings? Where are the biggest gaps?
• What are the emerging occupations in my area to which students should be exposed?
• What skill needs have industry partners identified as lacking in my programs?
• Which graduates of my programs are thriving in the labor market, and why?
• What opportunities exist in my local labor market for students with disabilities, English learners or other special populations?

While labor market data sources are a good place to start, there is no substitute for face-to-face discussions. You should plan on some talks with individual labor market and economic development experts, and several talks with small groups of employers from different industry sectors. The talks will be more to the point if you focus on individual sectors, rather than bringing everyone together in one big meeting. 

IDEA TO CONSIDER — To avoid wearing out your local employers with multiple requests from many school districts, you might band together with workforce experts, other schools, and colleges to conduct these meetings on a regional basis since the information you glean is going to be the same. You can start planning these meetings now.

Working with this guide over the summer months and planning actions for each area of work will give you an excellent agenda for the upcoming year. Even though it will entail a good amount of work, by getting started now and the early months of the Fall, you’ll be ahead of the game in doing this analysis. Starting up, revamping, and/or phasing out programs is a long-term proposition and takes strong political will and sometimes funding. You’ll need these external partners working with you to make any substantive programmatic changes.

By developing strong connections now, you’ll be able to make informed recommendations and decisions, and create a long-term strategy for better labor market alignment.

Good luck!

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

Growing up, my Dad was a sports nut, and most of my life lessons came in the form of sports metaphors. Two that I heard often, and that stick with me to this day, are:

·Go to where the ball is going to be, not where it is; and

·Know what you’re going to do once you get it.

It seems to me that these are directly on-point for those working in the arena of CTE and Pathways.

Go to Where the Ball is Going to be

In baseball, you see the outfield shift left or right (or in little league, sometimes in) based on the hitting history of a certain batter. In basketball, you see people pick and roll to get free and ready for an open pass. We should adopt the same thinking.

In education, we have the luxury of a lag time between legislation being discussed and when it’s finally passed, and the components of that legislation is usually well-telegraphed. If you knew that the new Perkins Act was going to eventually pass, and you knew that there are several components (like increased employer engagement) with universal support, it makes sense to get ahead of the legislation and start moving in that direction. Similarly, we know that workforce changes are clear but gradual; as you think about aligning your programs to the needs of industry, take a look at the trends now to see what your programs need to look like in three years. That’s how long it will take to modify your courses and for new graduates to start emerging.

Know What You’re Going to do Once You Get the Ball

You see it all the time in youth basketball: A kid breaks open yells for the ball (“I’m open! I’m open!”), then freezes once he actually gets it. He got open alright but had no idea what he was going to do after that.

In CTE, a little planning goes a long way. You might be hoping for an introduction to one of the big industry players; if it happens, maybe a chance meeting at an industry event, are you ready for it? Do you know what you want and what’s in it for your partner? Maybe you’ve argued for a big funding boost or a new resource; if you get it, are you really prepared to make full use of it for greatest impact? I’m not suggesting that you need a complete implementation plan for every whim or interest, but you do need to be ready to capitalize on opportunities as they come up (often unexpectedly).

Here’s to hoping that my Dad’s wisdom helps you think about how to get open and take the shot you want to take – it’s certainly been helpful to me.

Brett Pawlowski is Executive Vice President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.

Last week I was in Rapid City, South Dakota and had the privilege of attending the press conference where Rapid City Area Schools Superintendent, Lori Simon, and community partners announced the forthcoming development of Career Academies and related Career Pathways in the district’s two comprehensive high schools. The high school’s work is part of a full pathways system approach.

This approach includes career development across all grade spans, developing and acting on the Profile of a Graduate, Engaging Employer and Community Partners, Investing in Teaching and Learning, and building strong Cross-Sector Collaboration.

I’ve had the privilege of working with the leadership team and the pathways task force in Rapid City for almost exactly one year. They have done some really amazing work developing a thorough pathways implementation plan with the help of a community-based Pathways Task Force that met monthly, as well as created several pathways planning teams of teachers and community members.

This press conference was the opportunity to formally announce the work to the broader community and move into the early phase of implementation. The next phase involves specific curriculum development for the pathways, creating new academy advisory committees, continuing to ramp up employer engagement, and prepare the new freshman seminar and high school Grad Time (an advisory program). I give kudos to the many staff and community members who are making the work real in Rapid City!

Here are some links to the press release and some local news coverage of the press conference.

TV Coverage: KNBN News Center

RCAS Press Release

Rapid City Journal

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com). NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.