Goodbye College Career Services & Hello 1-on-1 Coaching with Real Talk to Get a Job

An item from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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NOV 15

Goodbye College Career Services & Hello 1-on-1 Coaching with Real Talk to Get a Job

		MICHAEL B. HORN

Why don’t career services work at colleges? For those in higher ed, the answers are often well known, but for those who don’t work in higher ed—particularly students and families—they just assume a college’s career services should… help them get a job. Yet these offices aren’t all that good at doing so for the most part. My guests, Mike Goldstein and Geordie Brackin, explain why—and add a few reasons to the list that other researchers haven’t pointed to before. And then they suggest a way to move forward, which departs from the solutions most people have offered to fixing career services. Their solution revolves around some real talk—being honest about where a student’s experience will or won’t help them out—and to understand deeply a student’s circumstances, struggle to get a job, and desire for progress so that a mentor can help them make progress. Subscribers can check out our conversation to help unlock far more people’s potential by listening to the podcast, watching the YouTube video, or reading the transcript.

Michael Horn:

Welcome to the Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose that’s far from what we have today, needless to say. And it’s a critical reason why my guest in today’s show argue that if we’re just not being truthful, frankly, to first-gen students, particularly as they enroll in college, about what it takes to really enter into a productive career. And they are highly critical of the career services offices at a lot of colleges. And they suggest some ways that they would do it differently that don’t necessarily match with what a lot of the research has been. And it’s a super intriguing set of findings that they have. And they are the founders of a really intriguing organization called 1Up Career Coaching. And we have today with us none other than the director of 1Up Career Coaching, Geordie Brackin, who’s a co founder of it as well, and then the other co founder who’s now also an advisor to 1Up Career Coaching and a serial entrepreneur in the education space, my friend Mike Goldstein. Mike, Geordie, it is great to see you both.

Geordie Brackin:

Thanks, Michael.

Michael Horn:

So you all have this fascinating new report and we’ll get into what 1Up itself is in a moment. But this report that you’ve put out and the title is called peeling the “College Career Services Office Onion: Why They Are Terrible and What to Do About It.” And then you have this asterisk where you say that they’re terrible for any college student with low social capital, particularly first-gen students. So that’s the framing that you have come into this. And Geordie, before we dig into this report now, tell us what 1Up Career Coaching is and how you’re coming into the conversation. And then, Mike, I’ll ask you a similar question.

Mike Goldstein:

Sure.

Geordie Brackin:

So we come to the conversation from the question of social mobility. So 1Up Career Coaching is a small nonprofit that does two things. We do direct coaching for first generation college graduates who are stuck in their job search. They’ve landed a job, but they’re unhappy in that job, and we provide direct coaching to those people to help them find better jobs that pay more and that make them much happier. And then second, we try and publish the lessons that we’ve learned through that direct coaching.

Michael Horn:

Now, Mike, tell us, of course, how you came to this work. You’ve obviously, as I mentioned, up top, been a serial entrepreneur in the world of education. You founded match charter schools, for example. You’ve had a number of interesting roles in a lot of interesting organizations internationally as well. What was the question that puzzled you that caused you to found this organization and then dig into this research we’re about to talk about?

Mike Goldstein:

So Michael, as you know, there’s sort of these two tribes of people in terms of how they understand colleges and what they really do in real life for different types of people. So I think for many years I worked in space of education, but I was in the naive tribe. And I think when you live in the Naive tribe, you sort of say, hey, you can say to a bunch of people that are from poor families, listen, you’re not on track necessarily to get the best K–12 education. But if you can change that part and you can persist through high school and do really well and kind of achieve, then you can get on this path called college. You can be the first in your family to graduate from college and you’ll get out of poverty. So I was in that naive tribe when I started Match Charter School, along with a lot of other people in the education reform movement.

And you know, and your listeners know pretty well, a lot of that turns out to be far less true than had been commonly believed. And even today I think the general narrative remains this overwhelming college is good for you even if you’re a fairly marginal student, and it’s going to help you do better economically. What I was seeing anecdotally from our own charter school was a lot of alumni that did exactly what we asked of them. They persisted in high school, they did well, they go through college, they graduate and we’re like yay, and then we check in like a year, two years, three years later, and they’re stuck in these dead end jobs. And then when I try to raise this with some other charter founder colleagues in this kind of education reform group, it felt like a very inconvenient story.

© 2023 Michael Horn