Do your kids want the life you have?
I recently asked a group of two dozen high school students how many of them want a work life like their parents have. Only one student raised her hand: She said that her father is a diplomat, and she likes the idea of being able to live in different countries while doing the same job.
Then I asked how many students definitely do not want a work life like their parents: five students raised their hands. One student said he wants to be a professional soccer player; neither of his parents are professional athletes. Another student said that her parents are in the hospitality industry and they’ve had to move every year, whereas she’d like to be in a job where she can stay in one place and build community.
This discussion was at the end of a ‘career day’ of panels organized by field: law, medicine, diplomacy, etcetera.
But why do we continue to advise students on careers by field—by directing them to think about the job they want—instead of encouraging them to think about the life they want?
Some are trying. Emily Griffen is director of the Amherst College Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning (whose advisory council I serve on, having graduated from Amherst). She told me that her team is working to emphasize the “exploration” in the center’s title, offering workshops to articulate values and long-term career and life goals, but for many students those activities seem too abstract.
Digging into the neuroscience, she found that the frontal lobe architecture in the brain that enables perspective and long-term thinking doesn’t develop until ages 19-20. “We were literally working against biology to counsel them to think long-term.”
Most students who come to her center are thinking about a specific next step: “We have these really talented, capable students,” she told me. “Yet when they show up to talk about career options, it feels like they think they can only do one of two things” that are similar: medical school or scientific research? Banking or consulting? “It's rarely, ‘Should I be an actor? Or should I be an actuary?’” It is almost unheard of to start with a question of first principles: What do I want out of life?
Students seem to have a limited view of what are “acceptable” professions, whether they’re first generation college students whose parents have sacrificed so much for them to get to college that they feel tremendous pressure to do what is expected of them next; or legacy students who see only a small range of what jobs are possible.
Griffen told me: “They have a really narrow sense of what they can do. They're looking at, ‘What are the boxes that I can fit into? And then, which feel palatable? And then, how do I then tactically get into one of those boxes?’ So by the time they reach us, it's a very tactical conversation.”
Griffen and many of her peers in career counseling are trained as coaches, who typically aim to help the client identify ways to achieve goals that they set for themselves. But Griffen wonders “if it’s actually a fit for career counseling with undergraduates; if actually, the framing needs to be more generative. It certainly needs to be more reflective.”
But again, their brains simply aren’t ready. Griffen gets many well-intentioned alumni (like me) who want to come to campus to “share all of our life lessons,” as she put it. But she has to point out that students won’t hear us. “The reason you didn't know that then is that you couldn't know it then, and neither can they.” There is a small subset of students who do want to talk about their values and how they might balance work and family down the road, but they are in the minority.
Griffen is okay with that: “I don't think our job is to tell the students everything they need to know about life: Life will do that.”
Then what is her responsibility? Amherst’s post-graduation employment rate is 98%; “I'm not worried about Amherst students getting jobs,” she said.
She is, however, interested in what she calls “alignment”: not just whether graduates are employed, but developing metrics for “how closely aligned is your job to your values; does your current position provide you an opportunity to gain traction towards longer term goals, or for learning about things that are valuable to you?”
So providing tools to evaluate alignment is important, as is knowing how to proceed when those tools show that alignment isn’t there: in other words, preparing them for the multiple professional transitions that they will inevitably face. “They actually need navigation skills, far more than they need technical preparation,” she said. “I want them to land with a toolkit so that they can land again, because two years later, they're going to need to land again.”
Griffen is not alone in believing that preparing for the future of work means training people in resilience and flexibility, not technical skills. Jeff Hittner runs Project X, whose mission is to help one million people build more purposeful careers and lives by 2020. One of Project X’s pillars is micro-experimentation: in Jeff’s words, “act first, reflect later, learn how to dip your toe into the water in small steps and see how the world responds—and then do it again.” He aims to have participants “constantly prototyping and experimenting with all aspects of their life.”
Hittner’s belief in micro-experimentation aligns with the importance that Griffen places on meaningful summer internships for students. “There's nothing to replace boots on the ground,” she told me, “to get closer and closer to what is the right alignment for you.” She has staff dedicated to securing high-quality paid internships for students.
A cynic might suggest that colleges and universities want to ensure career success for their graduates in order to secure the future cash flow of alumni donations. That might be a reasonable win-win—but for the fact that Amherst prides itself on demonstrating the value of a liberal arts education, with alumni in the arts and sciences making significant contributions to society while probably not topping the donor lists.
Indeed, centers like Griffen’s at institutions like Amherst are smack in the middle of the current challenge to the cost and value of higher education. So Griffen is in constant conversation with faculty about how their interests align: Faculty, after all, don’t want to see all of their best and brightest students becoming mere cogs of capitalism, however lucrative that might be for the college coffers. (My words, not hers.)
That debate is nestled into an even broader one, beyond whether education is serving our capitalist society to whether our capitalist society is serving us all. So is the question of whether higher education is “training” students for the future the right question? Should college be merely a funnel into the world of work? A last gasp of intellectual indulgence before entering a universe where we are measured on our contribution to GDP?
Or: Can college be a place where students can have a protected, supported, affordable space to go deep in learning about the world, and reflect on their role in it, and experience a few examples of the reinvention that they will go through many times in their lives, and different ways that they can effect change?
In other words, can educational institutions help put students on a path towards living the lives they want, and creating the world we all want?
For all of her grappling with how to advise students to think beyond their jobs, Griffen herself is modeling how to do so. When she accepted the job with Amherst, she and her husband decided to live with their young son in Northampton, eight miles away, informally known as one of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in the United States. Griffen likes being surrounded by “people who’ve had to think more intentionally about how to put together family structure and life. It’s in the water here.”
Indeed, given the developmental stage of the students she’s working with (we’ll explore career advising for millennials and older grownups in later posts), the limitations of the coaching approach she’s been trained in, and the interests of her faculty colleagues in teaching research and observation, Griffen might direct students to study the adults in their world, and apply those liberal arts critical thinking muscles towards creating the lives they want.
What is the best (and worst) career advice you’ve ever received? What resources have been most (and least) helpful to you? Tell us at hello@thelifeiwant.co.
Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash
