There Is Life After College by Jeffrey J. Selingo

Author:Jeffrey J. Selingo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

A First for College Graduates: Negative Feedback

ON A RAW, EARLY JANUARY DAY, I ARRIVED AT KORU’S headquarters in Seattle’s Lower Queen Anne neighborhood a few blocks from the city’s famed Space Needle. The sixteen students in the Koru class were designing a social media campaign for a local company, Porch, that connects homeowners with contractors. Working in groups of four, the students developed surveys, fanned out into the city to interview potential customers, and studied competitors.

On this day, the students were practicing their presentations for a final pitch to executives that would take place the following week at Porch. Koru leaders evaluated everything from the language students used to how they dressed and their nonverbal cues. Jarrett peppered the groups with questions about the lack of specificity in their survey questions and how they analyzed the data. He was particularly tough on their storytelling skills. None of the groups’ pitches was persuasive or focused. Jarrett told them to use more precise language so busy executives could follow along. At times, the Koru team’s criticism was harsh, and from the students’ reactions it was clear they had probably never received such negative feedback.

The afternoon was a short course about the basics of business communication. The students were accustomed to communicating by text, and writing an e-mail to someone they met at a networking event seemed like a foreign concept. In college, they had learned to write research papers and the proper style for footnotes, but little of that matters in the job search or on the job. The instructor showed examples of e-mails sent by previous Koru students. They were either too casual or too long, and many lacked a point or any specific request. These e-mails had been written by graduates of some of the country’s best colleges and universities, but it was clear they were incapable of writing a simple message to someone they wanted to work for.

I wondered about all the unemployed college graduates who weren’t here, who didn’t want or couldn’t afford to pay a few thousand dollars for Koru (after what they’d just spent on a bachelor’s degree)—the graduates who had received diplomas on commencement day with a promise that the very expensive piece of paper was a ticket to a better life. Most colleges don’t worry about what happens to their students once they cross the stage at graduation, except when it comes time to solicit them as alumni for a donation.

In 2015, the federal government mandated that for-profit colleges demonstrate that their graduates earned enough money to repay their loans or risk losing access to federal student aid. About 1,400 programs were under scrutiny as a result. Traditional nonprofit institutions, however, were largely exempt from the rules. Their role isn’t to prepare students for a specific job like the so-called career colleges. Their mission is to give teenagers a broad education that is supposed to make them employable for life. That’s their job even though at one out of every ten American four-year colleges, a majority of their undergraduates end up earning less than $25,000 a decade after enrolling.

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