VCU news

By Michael Rao

In three decades as a college president, I have watched a major shift in what society and students need.

They are looking for colleges to prepare them for careers. To do that, we have to consider how they learn. Historically, higher education was built around getting students into lecture halls. Now we need to get them out of the classroom.

Incorporating professional skills and the mindset of professionalism into teaching requires us to challenge long-held concepts of what a college — especially a public college — is and should be.

Our idea of a four-year college is often focused around giving students the tools to become critical thinkers. We teach them concepts and arm them with a classical education, assuming they will be ready for the world. And we are right — students do need intellectual development to understand how to think, how to learn, and how to be contributing members of society.

But that is not all they need. Students, their families, and employers, tell us that we should do more to connect intellectual development with professional development. That we need to teach skills that are career-related.

When graduates find work in their fields, connected to what they studied, they are more likely to view college as worth it. And that is more likely to happen when they get professional experience outside a classroom.

The traditional internship is a great example. We know that students who have one are more likely to get jobs after graduation. A recent Strada report found that about half of college graduates are underemployed — but the odds of underemployment for graduates who had at least one internship are 48.5-percent lower than those who had no internships.

And students are often hired by their internship employer. The National Association of Colleges and Employers annual survey has consistently found that 50 percent to 60 percent of eligible interns convert to full-time employees.

But we also know that there are more students than internships. Recently, the National Survey of College Internships from the Center for Research on College-Work Transitions, in partnership with Strada, found that 63 percent of college seniors wanted an internship, but only 41 percent had one — and not all of those were paid.

Higher ed needs to build relationships and partnerships with businesses and employers to expand the opportunities for students to have professional experiences while they’re still in college. In fact, students need different professional experiences each year of college, as they advance in their skills and in their majors.

When we integrate those experiences with what we are teaching in classrooms, students benefit. Over the years, I have seen too many of them conclude that they do not gel with the field they are studying — but they don’t discover this until they are three-quarters of the way to their degree.

As leaders, it’s our responsibility to evolve how we fulfill our most basic mission: to give students the best preparation for the world in which they will live and work.

Michael Rao is the president of Virginia Commonwealth University.