The career services office is a necessary stop on any good college campus tour, as it offers prospective students a sneak peek at all the help the staff within can provide—resume writing, mentors in many different employment fields, interview prep, job fairs, and much more. Those services are especially important for community colleges, as they are key players in current efforts to boost postsecondary attainment and grow the workforce in many specific industries. A new report from the RAND Corporation throws open the office doors to examine how current career services and industry partnerships—as well as state policy—facilitate student employment.
Data come from remote video interviews conducted between May 2020 and November 2021 with 134 individuals working at or associated with sixteen different community colleges in California, Texas, and Ohio. These states were chosen because they cover a variety of industry, policy, and employment contexts and offer a wide range of settings and sizes of community colleges. One of the institutions, Texas State Technical College (TSTC), focuses nearly exclusively on workforce development education and, thanks to an innovative state policy, receives all of its public funding based on the earnings of its graduates. That makes it a valuable comparison point for the others, which focus simultaneously on workforce outcomes and four-year college transfer readiness. Interviewees included presidents, provosts, directors and staff of career services and student affairs, deans, faculty, navigators and counselors of workforce development education programs, employers, regional coordinators, and state policymakers.
It is important to note that no outcome data are included or analyzed as part of this report. While TSTC’s efficacy in training students for and placing them in jobs is key to its existence, none of the other institutions studied had such information readily available. Additionally, data on students’ use of services were very limited and thus are also not part of this report. As a result, any claims of “success” or “quality” are based almost entirely on inputs—state policy landscape, services offered, business partnerships created, and the like.
For example, the report states that “student use of career services appears generally to be low.” This is a negative, of course, but we have no numbers to analyze. Worse, the only clues in the report as to why this might be are that most schools do not heavily market their career services to students and that most schools opt for a centralized model of service provision that does not focus on supports for specific career fields. (More on that below.) But even if less-than-exemplary practices were to be improved at any of these schools, there is still no guarantee that students would take advantage of them.
Similarly, the researchers find that all three states have numerous policies and incentives in place to encourage a greater linkage between community colleges and the many industries for which they are increasingly training students, but none of the states have any actual requirements for schools to provide services or confirmation that any services were provided.
This is where the RAND report can be helpful. The interview subjects were quite willing to discuss the systems their institutions have put in place. The most common services provided include career exploration for students trying to home in on a field of interest, preparing students to search for and apply for jobs, and matching students with specific job openings. Service models generally took one of two forms: centralized, which means a single office/similar set of services for the entire school, or decentralized, which embeds some or all career services into separate and specific academic areas. The researchers considered the latter to be a stronger model, allowing services to be targeted to specific majors and career fields, especially when career exploration was made part of the academic track in the form of mandatory, graded courses.
In terms of workforce development offerings, work-based learning was widespread among the colleges, including practical, industry-related class projects; job-shadowing opportunities; and facilities and labs that mimic the workplace. However, apprenticeships—actual work in the field—were much less prevalent due to the stronger commitments required by both employers and career services staff to make these happen. In fact, most colleges in the study relied upon advisory committees for creating partnerships with local industry players. Unfortunately, committee members interviewed explained that the terms of membership and the infrequency of meetings limited most members’ ability to build partnerships in a meaningful way. A few colleges in the sample did stand out strongly in this area, structuring advisory committees to ensure employers’ continued involvement, establishing industry partnership offices in the community, partnering with other colleges, and sharing their institutional resources with employers to help build and maintain connections.
Once again, the researchers note a lack of clear and consistent measures for partnership accountability and performance assessment and little in the way of established infrastructure or protocols for data reporting, monitoring, and sharing. Added to all of these limitations is an expressed competition for resources and attention between career-focused majors and four-year-college transfer preparation, with the latter generally seen by interviewees as more favored.
The majority of recommendations emerging from this analysis involve more: more personnel, more industry partnerships, more internship opportunities, more technology, more outreach to students, etc. And it all boils down to more money. But first and foremost, data systems are needed to track who is coming through the office door, how they are served, and what outcomes are achieved.
SOURCE: Rita T. Karam, Charles A. Goldman, and Monica Rico, “Career Services and College-Employer Partnership Practices in Community Colleges,” RAND Corporation (June 2022).
