Helping students explore majors and careers in an efficient and focused way that keeps them from wasting time and money is the focus of a chapter by CCRC researchers in a new book released August 23 by Harvard Education Press.
In the book, Matching Students to Opportunity, Thomas R. Bailey, Davis Jenkins, Clive R. Belfield, and Elizabeth Kopko discuss the problems with the way colleges currently help students make college and career decisions and how the process can be improved. Because college majors are so closely associated with earnings, helping students make a good match with a major is critical to their future well–being.
Their chapter, “Matching Talents to Careers: From Self-Directed to Guided Pathways,” broadens the larger discussion in the book about matching students to colleges by examining how students who attend community colleges and broad-access four-year colleges select majors. The process is haphazard, and the authors argue that it is not enough to simply provide these students with more information. Instead, students need to go through a counseling process that allows them to explore their interests and learn about their options before deciding on a major and a path to a career.
Community colleges in particular offer few such supports. Moreover, they typically offer a confusing array of poorly defined programs of study. Students often flounder and take courses that do not count toward a degree. To help students choose a major wisely early in their college career, the authors argue, colleges must do two things: They must implement a counseling system that allows students time to discover, develop, and reflect on their goals, and they must redesign college majors to make both the course sequences and end goals clearer. The authors provide examples of colleges undertaking these efforts. They also discuss other innovative reforms underway at some colleges, such as creating exploratory majors that allow students to experiment within a broad career topic category, such as social sciences or health, and then narrow down to a specific major.
The book is available from Harvard Education Press and Amazon.
