Is college worth it in this economy?
It depends on whether you build social and cultural capital.
Colleges and universities are struggling. From campus protests to federal government funding freezes and Executive Orders, higher education is in a moment of reckoning. This political moment brings to a persistent question: is college worth it?
When I worked in student affairs, I was often perplexed watching students who did all the “right” things during their college experience — internships, extracurriculars, study abroad — flounder trying to find jobs after graduation. This curiosity led me to do on the American college-to-career transition. I was interested in how young people who followed conventional advice — do well in school, go to college, get a good job — made sense of their experience when they were NOT able to land that “good” job after finishing their degree.
Picture two students who sit in the same classrooms with the same professors, getting the exact same degree. Six months after graduation one is working in a full-time job in their field and the other is bartending at a local restaurant. Why? How does this happen?
“I looked at my resume, and it’s just like you’re not as special as you’ve hyped yourself up to be and it’s a big slice of humble pie”.
This is what Elena told me when I interviewed her. Elena is a Hispanic woman who majored in the social sciences and graduated from University of Maryland (UMD) in 2016. Elena was the first in her family to graduate from a four-year institution. She was very engaged on campus and was surprised, upon applying to jobs post-graduation, that everyone she was competing with had many of the same experiences and qualifications she had worked so hard to achieve. Elena was unemployed for several months after graduation before, desperate to make her rent payment, she resorted to a temp agency to find a job — any job.
I talked with 60 recent UMD graduates about their experiences in college and what happened after graduating as they tried to translate their degrees into jobs. I found that students who engage on campus and work in professional settings are often able to translate those experiences into “good” jobs after graduating. These campus experiences are important because they build what sociologists call social and cultural capital. Social capital facilitates the flow of information and creates connections with people who may exert influence, such as telling someone about an open position (). While attending college, students meet new people, develop relationships with peers and faculty members, and access campus resources, which collectively builds their social capital (). Cultural capital conveys how you show up in a social space, such as knowing how to put others at ease, display appropriate excitement, and demonstrate appropriate conversational timing during a job interview (; ).
By participating in campus programs and activities, students discover interests, build social networks, and explore possible career pathways. Students who engage on campus and work in professional-track jobs typically have smoother college-to-career transitions because they’ve built social and cultural capital during college.
If these experiences are so important, why don’t colleges simply encourage all students to participate in activities that help them build social and cultural capital? I identify two important structural factors that shape building career-relevant social and cultural capital: institutional gatekeepers and opt-in involvement.
Access to Opportunities via Institutional Gatekeepers: Faculty and staff play a key role in providing access and connections to opportunities unknown to students. Students who arrived on campus with little social or cultural capital–those most likely to use college as a pathway to economic mobility–often acquired cultural and social capital through structured programs. These experiences included experiences such as Living Learning Communities and structured summer research experiences.
Professional Track Work Experiences: Almost all graduates I talked with worked at least a part-time job during their time as a student. However, there was a discrepancy between students who worked in jobs that provided career-relevant cultural and social capital and those that provided income but did not build this type of capital. Students who worked in professional-track jobs gained supervisors and mentors who could serve as future references, signaled on their resume that they knew how to work in an office setting, and exposed students to new career pathways. These experiences contrast to the other half of students I talked with, who were working as nannies, bartenders, servers, GrubHub drivers, and custodians. While positions in the service sector and gig economy provided income, they typically did not build career-relevant cultural and social capital.
Why does this matter?
It is critical for colleges and universities to consider how they can facilitate career-relevant social and cultural capital building for students not coming from advantaged backgrounds. This intervention is especially critical for students who commute to campus, are transfer students, and have few touchpoints to college beyond their coursework. The value of higher education continues to be questioned within an uncertain economy. Establishing programs that shepherd all students through career-relevant capital-building activities could pay dividends for both institutions and graduates.
This summary is based on Dr. Brittany Dernberger’s academic article, “”
