Over the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve been paying close attention to the question of how young people get launched in careers. I’ve taught courses with this focus, watched several family members go through the transition from school to work, and worked with a big-data vendor that significantly contributed to my understanding. What follows are some reflections on a big, complex question: what are some of the best (and worst) ways we launch our youth into the working world?
I’ve found the notion of capital to be useful in studying the question. Capital comes in many forms but we will consider three of them here: physical, intellectual, and social.
Physical capital in relation to vocation dates back centuries. The whole nature of indentured servitude, or of sharecropping, hinges on the person’s inability to pay for land, capital equipment, or even seeds and fertilizer before a crop is harvested. While slavery technically ended in the U.S. in 1865, for decades afterward poor farmers, both Black and white, were imprisoned by the debts that accrue during an agricultural year. Not surprisingly, when the crops came in and were sold, the store-owner was always owed something, perpetuating the relationship for another year. (One outcome of this situation was farmers forming co-operatives to build crop storage such as grain elevators: having all the local crops flood the market at harvest time significantly depressed the price. Storage allowed farmers to wait out the glut and sell at a higher price. Later, storage was joined by transportation, allowing farmers to escape local market surpluses by selling to areas that didn’t produce the crop in question with the same efficiency or on the same timeline.) Company housing in mine or mill towns performed the same function.
A more recent example can be found in auto repair, of all places. Imagine having the skills, learned either on your own or at school, to be a mechanic. Now you need tools. Many companies cater to these workers: whether you took notice or not, you’ve seen mobile stores that drive around to garages selling professional tools. Mac, Snap-On, and Cornwell are among the largest. The trucks are owned by franchisees, providing the brand a secondary revenue stream in addition to the high-margin hard goods. Back to that young mechanic: once you buy your wrenches and screwdrivers, where can you store them? A chef needs only a knife roll; hundreds of pounds of steel aren’t so portable that you can take it home every night. So you buy a tool box. No problem, right?
Take a look at this beauty: $11,000 (or even a quarter of that) for a tool box for someone starting out is impossible, so out comes the credit, and the mechanic can in effect become a sharecropper. Of course, the tool loan is on top of a car payment, most likely, and maybe a student loan, possibly from a predatory for-profit institution. Our young mechanic is behind the 8-ball in month one of their first job.
Oh, and when I said the mechanic needs wrenches, that’s only half the battle. Modern automobiles are microprocessor farms, as we have painfully learned in the past 18 months or so. The diagnostic tools to service these chips are incredibly complex. Here’s one from Cornwell for $28,000. To be fair, such an advanced unit might be owned by a dealership, but simpler models that mechanics are expected to buy on their own can cost $4,000 and up. Once you buy the computer, get ready to pay for software updates if you don’t want your unit bricked. In short, the physical capital required to be an auto mechanic is significant, and it’s not surprising that there’s a labor shortage there as well as in such trades as auto body, HVAC, all fields of carpentry, and appliance repair, most of which require smaller up-front capitalization.
Intellectual capital is largely taught in school and on the job. The lower the knowledge content of a job, the more likely it is to be automated: think of the kiosks at McDonalds or at the Delta Airlines counter. At the same time, there is a frequent mistake in focusing only on the task knowledge: how do I get that piece of luggage tagged and onto the plane? It turns out that what used to be called “soft’ skills probably matter more: how to work with other people, how to defuse tense situations with disgruntled passengers, how to create work-arounds when the computers act up, how to manage up, down, and laterally in an organization. The push and pull between “how to do the job as nominally specified” and “how to realize the larger context for the task, how to get humans to do what the process needs them to do, and how to grow into the next three jobs” is not getting settled any time soon, and certainly not here. The point is that intellectual capital can be conceived of in both proximate and extended contexts, and different institutions do better and worse jobs, in part depending on how they define their mission.
Adding up to more than a trillion dollars in the US, student loans are obviously a much bigger factor than tool loans. It’s worth considering what is being bought in each transaction, however. Someone recently pointed to the intensity of the focus on student-facing amenities at many colleges and universities then posited that “college has become a 4-year cruise that you spend the rest of your life paying for,” and there’s truth embedded in the cynicism. Dorms are no longer assumed to be dumpy, rec centers are more often than not state of the art (but don’t even think they compare with what the revenue-sport athletes are getting), and class scheduling gets crammed into ever-narrowing windows. Forget Saturday classes, and even Friday classes some places, along with early-morning sections.
What are students getting? The specialization school of majors includes packaging (Michigan State), biopharma regulatory compliance (Northeastern), and costume technology (DePaul). Selective liberal arts colleges lean the other way, eschewing application for principles and trends for evolving taxonomies of theoretical knowledge: as an undergraduate, you can often study economics but not business. Harvard includes neurobiology with anatomy, for example, and evolving social structures means that gay and lesbian studies is also a major. Princeton famously doesn’t have law, medicine, or business schools at the graduate level.
Apart from engineering majors, how prepared are most ”knowledge” college students for their first job? It will not be shocking to hear this former consultant say “it depends”: students with internships combine big-picture conceptual thinking with micro-scale problem solving and often do fine. Other industries that hire heavily from selective schools (banking comes to mind) have carefully designed onboarding processes in place. Realistically, however, a large percentage of extended-Ivy students head for graduate school, eventually if not immediately. Yale has a handy visualization tool and 4 times as many students in the class of ’21 are working as are studying. Note, however, that the #1 employer of Yale students is . . . Yale, suggesting that many students might be polishing credentials for med school in a lab or doing similar work.
Both approaches have their place. A Stanford economics graduate simply won’t have experience with the software tools, the terminology, or the organizational context that a Penn State supply chain or Northern Iowa sales management major will. At the same time, the liberal arts graduate will probably have broader historical and conceptual context, will likely write better, and will have “learned how to learn” and may more readily evolve in dynamic labor markets. Some skills-focused majors do little to prepare graduates for their third job after college, focusing instead on the first: when that Michigan State packaging major gets promoted, how much do they know about the marketing, sales, supply chain, and other functions that intersect with blister packs and shipping cases? In sum, what you know about a job, about an industry, and about larger forces is a second form of career capital.
The third form we will consider here relates to the age-old saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” But social capital is more than connections, important as those are. Short of being the owner’s son or daughter, having good connections is only part of the career path: at some point you have to make decisions, allocate resources, manage people, address unpleasant realities, and otherwise perform in a role. Social capital is difficult if not impossible to quantify, but you know it when you see it. How do you create networks of people you can lean on for advice? For leads on potential hires? For pointers to trustworthy service providers: law, accounting, financing and banking, event planning, or whatever? How can you deliver value to your network such that you can call in a favor now and then? How can you build your professional reputation with some degree of intentionality so that 2 or 5 or 15 years from now, people remember you in a positive light and hire/bankroll/deploy you to your mutual advantage?
How do you learn such things? MIT and Penn’s Wharton School will teach you the factual content of some programs free or at a significant discount, but you are not given the full degree certification or access to the alumni bases. I’ve had former students consider MBA programs not for what they will learn but for who they gain access to. Much of social capital is a matter of signaling: what shoes, shirt, or tie you wear; how you manage a 5-course meal (which fork do I use? What should I not talk about with the managing partner? How much and what kind of alcohol should I drink?); how you manage a handshake in Houston, a business card in Tokyo, or a taxi ride in Bangalore. To oversimplify, social capital addresses the many ways we function in a vocational setting with regard to other people, job content put to the side. Knowing the optimization point for a given allocation problem is obviously important, but so is knowing not to surprise your boss with a loaded statement in a big meeting or with a career advising question at 5:30 pm on a Friday afternoon.
How can we do a better job getting our young people so capitalized? Student loan forgiveness affects millions of people, as we saw, but how can we deliver similar subsidies to vocational students in the trades? Mentoring is a huge piece of any successful career, but how can we encourage its provision, especially in industries with heavy M&A activity and thus personnel churn? At the same time, how can we train young people to distinguish good mentoring from bad advice (or worse)? Can universities do more with the social capital side of the equation, especially taking into account many differences in student sub-populations: women in tech, first-generation college students, international students, liberal arts students migrating into vocations, military and veterans? Each of these groups has particular mentoring needs that should be addressed in ways that might not be helpful to some of the others. Finally, how can powerful social platforms, including everything from YouTube to LinkedIn, be used more effectively in the launch phase of young people’s careers, wherever in the economy they might reside? The potential for career-enhancing Internet platforms and other tools is enormous, but largely unrealized - but that's a topic for another time.
Posts
