By Matthew Bisanz

One of the things we were all told growing up is “you need to go to college to get a good job.” That seems to make sense as most want ads require college degrees. What doesn’t make sense is that many finance majors take courses such as Math Explorations during their senior years and journalism majors take weight-lifting as a senior-year elective. We all know the reason they take these courses, and it’s not to expand their minds or gain new insights. Rather, it’s that they’ve determined certain classes require minimal amounts of effort and skill to pass, and that they’d rather suffer from senioritis than gain insights in other fields.

Should it be any surprise then, that only 48.6 percent of the University’s MBA students are employed at graduation? Or that on an employment basis, our numbers are closer to New Jersey Institute of Technology (51.4 percent), SUNY Buffalo (45.1 percent), and Auburn (46.7 percent) than our regional peers of Rutgers (73.2 percent), Binghamton (81 percent!) and Boston University (71.2 percent). Even Emporia State University of Kansas, the least-selective business school in the nation, has an employment rate more than 25 points higher than ours. These numbers are scary for students facing graduation in May in a stagnant economy, with student loans that come due 180 days after crossing the stage.

Now, we have a diverse career center over by Shuart Stadium with a great online job system. A sampling shows 92 jobs for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 226 for the School of Business, 69 for the School of Communication and 43 for the School of Education. However, if you wait until your junior year to visit the Career Center, you’ve probably already signed up for the majority of courses you will take as an undergraduate and have declared your major. That’s a problem!

See, in my experience, most advisement outside the Career Center is with professional advisers or professors. For most students, the interaction with advisers is limited to getting a signature on an add/drop form or reeling off a list of course you “like” to get your alternate pin number. Recently, I saw a professor’s advisee list. The professor had over 60 students to advise, besides teaching their three courses, doing research and other university services. For professional advisers, the number is somewhat more staggering, with an advisement dean supporting over 400 students. Assuming an adviser only meets with students, that no student has a “special” problem requiring extra attention, and that students can come in over the summer, it works out to roughly five hours a year per student. Of course we know that advisers do other things such as attending meetings, supporting university events and maybe even teaching a workshop or two. And students’ lives are just as busy. Between full schedules of classes, clubs, intramural sports, work, dorm-life, relaxation, homework and other activities, we don’t have the time to sit down with an adviser and take a career aptitude test or review what electives are not just the “easiest,” but also the best suited for our future interests. The finance major may find Math Explorations to be an easy “A,” but might find Intermediate Chinese Politics far more relevant to his life plan.

So what is the solution? Hire 1,000 advisers and force students to come to office hours? No, that would be cost-prohibitive and wouldn’t be student-friendly. One idea that has worked well is a career planning course. It’s a three-credit liberal arts course during one’s second semester of his or her freshman year, or during the first semester of his or her sophomore year. It could even be used to fill that amorphous “interdisciplinary studies” distribution requirement. Granted, this course is not offered here at the University, but it is offered at many other schools. I had the chance to take this course at Broome County College. I took several aptitude, career interest, personality, intelligence and work-preference tests. I learned which majors lead to which career paths, as well as how I might change careers and jobs many times in my life and how to prepare for those changes. By the end of this course, one might not know exactly what you want to do, but he or she will know how to find out.

That way, when you are a chemistry major in the interview with a big pharmaceutical company during your senior year and you’re asked why you took the foreign language you did, you don’t have to answer that Spanish was the easiest language. Instead, you’ll be able to proudly say that someday you want to study natural extracts in Central Africa because you have an interest in traveling and that you took Introduction to Swahili to be better prepared.

Matthew Bisanz is a graduate student. You may e-mail him at [email protected].

(Ryan Broderick)