APPENDIX A
Helicopter Parenting Is a Good Thing

WHAT SHOULD parents do to prepare their children for a work environment that is more volatile and challenging than ever? That question is on the minds of a lot of people because of the strong possibility that current trends toward job and career instability will continue. It would be great if our kids could inherit a world in which college was affordable, jobs were abundant, and career paths were always onward and upward.

Of course, that world no longer exists. More and more these days, second mortgages are routinely needed to finance college educations, a college degree is no longer an automatic ticket to white-collar work, and many careers are vanishing in the global restructuring of the workforce.

A number of observers argue that the financial return on a college education is not worth the cost, especially for the almost 50 percent who will enter as freshmen and never finish. That conclusion seems too radical. Most parents will not abandon their commitment to a college education for their children. The types of jobs remaining in the United States require a higher level of education. Certainly, college administrators agree with parents and encourage them to stay the course. They are not, though, disinterested parties in the debate.

Higher Education as a Vocational Stepping-Stone

For the past several decades the message from college and university administrators has been that education pays. The higher the degree, the better. As evidence, they point out that lifetime earnings for those with bachelor’s degrees are nearly twice the earnings of those with high school diplomas. Furthermore, people with master’s, doctorates, and professional degrees show a steady progression upward of lifetime earnings. These studies are not just endorsed by colleges and universities; they serve as a first line of defense against complaints that higher education costs are too high and have risen too quickly—faster than either the cost of living or earnings of the general population.

The trends have been consistent for the past six decades as students continue to flock to college in greater numbers. More education is the ready answer to fulfilling one’s career ambitions. The message to high school students is, “If you want to make something of yourself, go to college.” This message piggybacks an already existing mindset—easy to believe and relatively easy to execute as billions of dollars are made available through private and government-backed loan programs. It plays out as a mad frenzy among many of the nation’s colleges and universities to recruit their fair share of students and the tuitions they pay.

As a result, colleges and universities are no longer simply benign institutions performing a public service. Higher education has itself become big business—so much so that the most significant growth sector in higher education is among for-profit colleges that now educate more than 7 percent of the nation’s 19 million students. Phoenix University, the largest among them, has an enrollment of over 455,000 students, a population larger than the entire undergraduate enrollment of the Big Ten. And student recruiting budgets continue to grow in proportion.

Each year more than 78 percent of high school students say they would like to go to college—a number that is consistently high across most racial and ethnic minorities as well. When it comes to faith in higher education, most of us are true believers.

That places parents under the gun. The conversation around Bruce and Dora Miller’s Seattle dinner table was like many others. They discussed the financial adjustments necessary to send both of their children to the private colleges of their choice. Like over 50 percent of the respondents in a national poll, they concluded that the only way they could do it would be to postpone retirement and take on a second mortgage. Even a majority of those who thought they could afford to send their kids to college also reported that they would have to make deep cuts in their discretionary spending.

They are expecting a return on their investment. That’s because businesses for many years accepted the college degree as the credential for entry into their white-collar jobs. On that same survey, more than 75 percent of high school seniors say they want to attend college for vocational reasons. That is, they want to qualify for a good job.

But the rules have changed. The correlation between a college degree and a white-collar job is becoming more tenuous. College degrees are now commonplace: today’s bachelor’s degree is the equivalent of yesterday’s high school diploma. College graduates are still able to find work, but many jobs do not pay enough to allow students to live away from home and service their student debt at the same time. At the height of the Great Recession, more than 40 percent of recent college grads reported still living at home. The phenomenon is so widespread that the term “boomerang children” was invented. Rather than “Go to college and get a job,” the new refrain is, “Now that I have my degree, where is my career?”

This situation has given rise to another set of conversations in American households. John Patterson’s college degree was made possible by a combination of financial support from his parents and student loans. A year after graduation and still making little more than minimum wage, he asked his parents for an extension of his rent-free living arrangement with them until his financial situation improved. Like so many others, John’s parents were sympathetic. But they wondered in private how much of John’s situation was caused by the economy and how much was John’s fault—his choice of major and his grade point average. They couldn’t tell, so they stayed the course. With unemployment holding at 9.5 percent, many people were having trouble finding any job at all.

But if you think you can relax once the Great Recession ends, think again. Jobs will continue to move beyond national boundaries as the worldwide restructuring of the workforce continues and competition for white-collar jobs becomes even more intense. The message bears repeating. A healthy economy will not change the underlying dynamics of the global marketplace. Globalization has caused competition for all kinds of work—including white-collar jobs—to escalate.

Parents (and students) are left with an unanswered question: What will a college degree do for my son’s or daughter’s career? The answer is the new linkages between careers and higher education—how they work and what you can do to make them work for your child. The time has passed when a parent can blindly rely on the belief that a college degree also confers a middle-class income to its recipient.

Many colleges haven’t changed their mission, however, or their view of linkages between higher education and career opportunity. A director of career services at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities typified how universities are programmed to respond when she commented:

[The] concern was echoed recently by a group of guidance counselors from across the country who visited [my] University. I asked them to tell me the number one concern of parents. Unanimously, they asserted that parents wanted their children to use their education experience to obtain a successful career.

As a parent, I understand this concern. After all, college often costs enough to require a second mortgage. As director of a large career center, however, I know that parents often worry unnecessarily. That is because I’ve seen plenty of philosophy majors who’ve managed to do everything from investment banking to law to starting their own business. Marshall Gregory, professor of English, liberal education and pedagogy at Butler University puts it this way. “In 35 years of teaching, I have never seen a student who really wanted a job fail to get one after graduation…. But I have seen many students fail to get an education because they were fixated on the fiction that one particular major or another held the magical key to financial success for the rest of their lives.” For guidance counselors, there is a real balance between encouraging the educational aspirations of students and assuaging the fears of their parents.¹

In fairness, the comments were not intended to explain how your child can make the transition from philosophy major to business magnate. But the comments are clearly more comforting to administrators than to either parents or students. Parents continue to be told that if the student really wants a good job he or she can get one. In other words, the message is, “When it comes to your child’s career, trust us. It will all work out in the end if the student really wants it to.” The reasoning, of course, is completely circular. If it doesn’t work out, the student didn’t really want it to.

Such blind faith may have been justified when college degrees were not so plentiful and companies were scrambling for a fair share of graduating college seniors. The scenario has changed dramatically, however, especially if a parent has to take out a second mortgage or a student takes on substantial student loans. Parents and students alike would be more comfortable taking on debt to attend institutions whose administrators promise that their university understands the connection between educational attainment and career management and is committed to making that a key component of what each student learns during his or her time there. But according to longstanding tradition, the curriculum is the province of the faculty, which appropriately refuses to allow their educational content to be hijacked so that their college serves as a vocational clearinghouse for students.

As such, a disconnect has developed between the reasons many students go to college and what most colleges are prepared to deliver. Parents and students alike must look elsewhere for vocational direction. Just before his freshman year, John Patterson had a detailed discussion with his parents about what he might choose as a major and what his job prospects would be. Their collective sense was that the next four years would be a time of growing independence from each other and John would gradually assume control for his choices ahead of him. They trusted that the university had enough resources and experience to steer John in the right direction. In retrospect, they wondered if their trust was justified.

Those experiences are surprisingly typical. Consider this: Two sociologists recently tracked 2,300 students through four years of college. After two years, they reviewed what students were learning in the way of critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication—all skill improvement areas appropriate to an undergraduate education regardless of academic major. The answer they got was students were learning “little or nothing.” Of the 60 percent who had full-time jobs after graduation, more than two-thirds were making less than $35,000 and an astonishing 45 percent were earning $15,000 or less.²

Parents Need to Hover More

Perhaps you have heard of “helicopter parenting.” Coined in the early 1990s, it is a pejorative term used to describe those who are overly involved in the lives of their college-age children. Some stories have reached legendary status. For example, one college freshman handed her cell phone to a university administrator so she could explain to the student’s mother why a class was no longer available. Another parent went to see a professor to let him know that the grade his son received was not what he needed to get into graduate school.

Fervent helicopter parents know no boundaries when it comes to advancing the interests of their children. When their behavior crosses certain ethical lines, they are dubbed “Black Hawks.” These are parents who write papers for their children or otherwise endorse getting the desired result at all cost.

A commonly accepted explanation of the rise of helicopter parents is that they are baby-boomer moms and dads determined to micromanage every aspect of their children’s lives. One sociologist quoted in the St. Petersburg Times commented that the fault lies with parents who “saw their youngsters as special and sheltered them. Parents outfitted their cars with Baby-on-Board stickers. They insisted their children wear bicycle helmets, knee pads and elbow guards. They led the PTA and developed best-friend like relationships with their children.”³ These parents reportedly call their children to wake them for class and expect daily progress reports.

The involvement of parents has spilled off the campus and into the workplace. Parents now call employers to negotiate salary offers and attend interviews. Some employers have acquiesced and invited parents to job-fair open houses to give them a firsthand view of their employment process.

College administrators take a dim view of helicopter parents, encouraging them to step back and give their children a chance to learn life’s lessons on their own. They claim, “If they don’t grow up now, they never will.” In fact, the term “helicopter parent” was invented—or at least popularized—by university administrators.

That is grounds for suspicion. No group should be given a free pass in characterizing individuals who make their lives uncomfortable. Rather than examine the overindulgence of a generation of parents, more satisfying answers would be found by examining the overindulgence of higher education itself.

Higher education has, on balance, never felt compelled to take a student’s future career into consideration in the normal operation of its business. Campus administrators responsible for job placement usually do not take part in the decision making of the institutions in which they serve, in spite of the fact that they represent that part of the university most responsive to what students attend college to get. Placement-center personnel desperately need to upgrade their craft but have neither the resources nor the work experience beyond the university to do so. Colleges and universities accepted the revenue from career-driven student demand for higher education without fully accepting the responsibility. When seen in this light, helicopter parents are filling a role that has gained urgency as the world of work has changed.

The behavior of helicopter parents can be explained, in part, by a reversal of fortune from more white-collar jobs than degreed students to one of more students than jobs. The worldwide restructuring of the workforce will continue to aggravate the situation as competition for white-collar work takes on a growing international dimension. Who would have thought a few years ago that IBM would have 50,000 employees (15 percent of its employee population) located in Bangalore, India?

Insulated to a large degree from these concerns, colleges have been slow to move beyond the traditional “trust us” response. A college president recently asked, “Whatever happened to the days when Mom and Dad dropped you off at college—maybe helped you with moving in—and left for home hoping to hear from you once a week (on Sunday) and planning to see you next at Thanksgiving?”

We can now answer that question. Those days disappeared when parents began to realize that higher education was costing more and delivering less on the far end. Parents have stepped in because they are unsure what their child will do after college.

Over time, higher education will have to respond more aggressively to the vocational aspirations of students. But the job your child needs after college does not happen over time—it happens now and in the near future.

Filling a Void

Once the freshman year begins, you will have difficulty getting the attention of your college-age children concerning certain subjects. Career planning tends to be one of them because it doesn’t have the sense of immediacy for freshmen that it will command down the road. Students get busy meeting new friends and basking in the glow of independent living away from Mom and Dad.

But as parents, you know graduation is right around the corner. Don’t wait for their senior year, when the prospect of postgraduate unemployment sends students scrambling to the campus’s career services center for guidance. A major reason they are attending college is to qualify for a job that pays well and has career potential.

Your job, in part, will be to make sure your child is career ready. As it stands, far too many students are in a mad scramble late in their senior year to find a job. They will want to interview with companies that visit campus each year in search of talent. They will go online to find everything from résumé templates to companies that hire students with their major and grade point average. Some students will be able to list summer jobs and travel abroad on their résumés as evidence they have taken their undergraduate years seriously. But that may not be enough to convince employers they are among the best of this year’s graduating crop. Most students look just like the many thousands of other graduating seniors with indistinguishable résumés and backgrounds.

Parents can urge their child to choose a major that is in demand in the job market. Engineering, economics, and business are usually preferred over philosophy, English, and women’s studies. Some students know exactly what they want to do and follow a course of action that delivers upon graduation. Others are not so sure. Regardless, there is no reason for any student to ignore that finding a good job that leads to a solid career is a primary motivator for initially going to college.

How pleased would you be if the assessment of recruiters was that your graduating college senior “clearly represents the kind of person we look to hire”? That is the assessment of an elite group every year. You would be surprised to know they are not always the smartest or have the highest GPAs. It makes you wonder, “What do they know that we don’t?”

First, parents should understand that they need to be more, not less, involved when their children are in college. That is, they need to be more like those helicopter parents who understand that the time has passed when college is merely a way station between adolescence and adulthood. College shouldn’t be all work and no play. But career management does demand attention and planning. And parents can help.

Some, like the Pattersons, wanted to be involved but were unsure how to go about it. Most people feel attending interviews or writing term papers is beyond the limits. But every time you think you know where the boundary line is, it moves. Take, for example, the idea of paying cash so your son or daughter can work. Who in their right mind would pay someone to hire your kid? Yet a growing number of parents have warmed to the idea of paying between $6,000 and $9,500 for unpaid internships for their children.

That is the idea behind the for-profit company University of Dreams. Sound hokey? Think again. It advertises itself as the “premier provider of summer internships for college students” and boasts of partnerships with over 3,500 employers. Its website has a special page devoted to parents, where it says, in essence, what placement center directors cannot: it will make providing a link between college and career management a key component of what each student learns during his or her time with the company. In other words, it is stepping into a void that was left by the changing marketplace of jobs.

The company proceeds to embed the vocational aspirations of students into a curriculum that is unencumbered by the traditional concerns of an academic faculty. The pitch to parents includes:

10+ years of experience placing students

10,000+ student participants

99 percent placement rate

Over 5,000 internship opportunities at any one time

Another for-profit company, Fast Track Internships, has stepped into the breach as well. It offers three money-back-guaranteed levels of service: unpaid and paid internships and at least two job interviews. These services are available for $800, $1,000, and $2,000, respectively.

Would a company really hire someone whose parents paid for an internship? Such “jobs” seem little more than “silver spoons” for well-to-do parents trying to buy success for their children rather than have them earn it. In reality, it is an inexpensive way for companies to get a close look at potential employees. When they see an intern they like, the decision to hire is easy. Companies tend to prefer students with work experience—especially internships—and generally do not care how the experience is financed.

Some critics of paid internships argue that they are yet another perk that favors the well-off at the expense of the poor. Others cannot get used to the idea of paying to hire their kid solely for the purpose of gaining experience. Further, the requirement to spend additional monies appears as a cruel hoax for parents with second mortgages and students laboring under the weight of educational loans. But the growing popularity of parent-paid internships underscores the competitiveness of the global white-collar job market, the reluctance of colleges to deliver a vocationally based service, and the need companies have to select the best candidates as economically as possible.

Value Creation in the Ivory Tower

You don’t have to pay for internships, but you can take action during the college years. Now is not the time for parents to withdraw and let students learn life’s lessons on their own. Here are three steps that can help you create your own linkage:

1. Get additional information that can be used to help you understand the lay of the land.

2. Make college experiences count—develop a plan of attack.

3. Help your children translate the plan into actionable items during the course of their time at college.

Additional Information

Is the choice of college major important? It is, but in a way that is different from how you might expect. Let’s face it: employers who come to campus looking for accountants or engineers are not likely to interview philosophy majors. And every parent’s nightmare is that his or her son or daughter will choose a major that is totally disconnected from what campus recruiters want to see. However, parental reasoning on the subject is flawed on two accounts. First, those graduating with highly sought-after degrees are no less subject to the vagaries of the job market than others. Though it may appear easier for some majors to find employment immediately after college, their jobs get downsized and outsourced at rates similar to others—and, in the case of some majors, even faster. Graduating engineers, for example, are often dismayed at how quickly their skills become obsolete and how willing employers are to move engineering jobs elsewhere. Likewise, MBAs from prestigious universities are not spared when a company downsizes. Being highly sought after immediately following graduation can give a graduate a false sense of security, making the fall back to reality after a downsizing more painful.

Parents are quick to point out that facing the prospect of losing a job is better than having no job at all. If your children are among the fortunate few who know exactly what career they want and the college major that matches, they should go for it. But do not be dismayed if your kids do not fit that pattern.

Second, the choice of college major isn’t nearly as important as you might think. There are plenty of entry-level jobs for those who qualify. The qualifications for those positions depend more on the characteristics and skills an applicant brings to the table than on a college major. For example, of the top fifty companies conducting on-campus interviews, only 35 percent report college major as being most important. A whopping 65 percent look first at other characteristics that are not specific to a particular major, and a very significant 45 percent are interested first and foremost in soft skills such as leadership, decision making, writing, and presentation skills. Further, only 5 percent mentioned grade point average. While you should encourage your children to study hard and choose a “good” major, their refusal need not have disastrous career consequences.

That’s because the type of degree doesn’t matter as much as the value an applicant learns to create. Each year employers have to make a “guesstimate” as to which students will create the value they demand—that is, which of them has the greatest potential and therefore represents the best investment opportunity. You will be surprised to know that these are often liberal arts majors. What they often lack, however, is a specific understanding of how to convert their academic preparation into value for companies recruiting on campus.

Make Experiences Count

Jobs most often go to those who are able to match up what the student has accomplished during his or her time in college with what employers value. If seen in this respect, a freshman has four years to demonstrate his or her relevance to the job market. If you allow your child to treat college as a way station, the time will pass without significant vocational progress. That can be avoided by developing a plan of attack.

Meanwhile, parents should remember that choosing a major can be an emotional experience. It usually means that a chord of intellectual curiosity has been struck and a student wants to pursue a specific subject he or she is interested in. It is unnecessarily discouraging when that choice is challenged by parents and friends with no other thought in mind except whether a job awaits at the end. Good jobs are available for college graduates with majors unattractive to their parents. The student just has to demonstrate the ability to create value.

A Plan of Attack

Think about the issue of employment after college as a job search even if your child is unsure about what he or she wants to do. Do not allow indecision about career choice to stand in the way of developing a relevant skill set. Your child has four years to develop the profile he or she needs to be perceived as a strong candidate for many entry-level positions regardless of major.

Where do you get the information that tells you what companies want? The same place you would if you were looking for a job. You read position descriptions. Before your son or daughter goes off to school for the freshman year, call or visit your placement center with your child and ask to see examples of typical position descriptions companies use when they recruit on campus. If your child is unsure what he or she wants to major in, ask for position descriptions for jobs that do not require a specific major.

You will find many characteristics in common whether a major is specified or not. Almost all employers would like to see evidence of leadership, computer, writing, analytical, and communication skills. You might also discover a preference for students who have had internships and good grade point averages. Share this information with your child and ask, “What do you need to do over the next four years to demonstrate you have developed those skills over and above others against whom you will compete?” This same question needs to be asked at the beginning and end of every year in school as a measure of progress.

Next, revisit the discussion regarding Rule #2 under “Five Steps to Your Value-Infused Résumé.” It will help both of you to think of how you will eventually make connections between your child’s experiences (during and before college) and the value employers look for employees to create. The five steps were initially intended to help the reader develop a focused résumé. When employers come across a résumé focused on the value they want created, it piques their interest. The same is true for entry-level positions. Students who have tailored their experiences in college to directly address the requirements of employers will stand a better chance of quality employment.

As a reminder, those five steps are repeated here with appropriate modifications:

1. Identify key words in the position descriptions that indicate what employers consider to be of value. This does not preclude you or your child from opting out. If your child does not want to gain the kinds of experiences asked for, that’s not the right job for him or her. But make that decision intentional rather than accidental.

2. Direct your child in listing experiences as he or she makes the four-year journey through college. Your child probably will not use all the experiences for each position of interest. But he or she will be in a good position to pick and choose which ones fit best with what a given employer seeks.

3. Infuse those experiences with value through a process of qualification and quantification. That is, the emphasis should be on accomplishments and not just activity.

4. Select the best statements when the time comes. This should be done throughout the college years as your child applies for various opportunities. It’s good practice and will enhance the chances of successfully competing for jobs and internships throughout college.

5. Format your experiences. That is, put a résumé together right now based on jobs your child might eventually apply for or be interested in. This could be a difficult exercise, but it will help all concerned see the gaps and provide focus on bridging them.

This may well be a difficult discussion to have with your children. That should not deter you from providing them with a firsthand understanding of the process. If you run up against an adolescent wall, try to discuss piecemeal the more specific issues listed in the next section.

You should remember that developing a relevant skill set does not mean urging your children to ignore activities unrelated to a future job search. College is also a great time to study the arts and literature, and other topics of aesthetic interest. Just make sure that some of what they do every year helps to build a personal profile that will make sense to employers.

Focus on Action

Planning for the future may be too vague a concept to interest your children. You may need a more concrete translation of what the plan means. Worry less about major and GPA (though do not ignore them altogether) and concentrate on action steps once they reach campus. Here is a list of possible options written as though they are directions provided from parent to child. This may help you find the right words.

Survive. Making the adjustment to college is not easy, and over 25 percent of all students leave before the freshman year has ended. The various reasons include too much party time, loneliness, poor academic preparation, the wrong courses, money, and generally being overwhelmed. Recognize when you are in danger of not surviving and get help. Before the freshman year starts, let’s find out from university representatives why students drop out and what resources are available on campus to help.

Think small. You want to create the kind of value in your extracurricular activities that employers will find attractive. Pick a small activity or club that piques your interests or holds relevance to a potential career option and join early. Why? Because in a small club you will have a greater opportunity to demonstrate the results employers can relate to as factors in succeeding in their own jobs. In a small club, your contribution becomes magnified and the leadership responsibility you can hold early on is significantly greater than in a large organization. At this stage of your development, employers will place emphasis on how well you did something and not so much on what you did.

Thinking small not only applies to extracurricular activities but also to classes. Small classes give you an opportunity to get to know professors better and thereby gain experiences that create value. The best way to determine which professors you should target is to read their CVs to find out their research interests, books and papers they have written, and their previous experience in their field of expertise. When you find a professor whose interests marry with yours, attempt to develop a relationship by taking one of his or her small classes, attending his or her office hours, and signing up for independent study with that professor. Getting to know one or two professors well has added advantages. They may become potential networking contacts, and/or they may give you an opportunity to undertake research and analytical experiences that are valued by today’s employers.

Learn to communicate more effectively. The Job Outlook report, published annually by the National Association of Companies and Employers (NACE), consistently reports that the ability to speak and write clearly is the number-one skill employers are looking for in entry-level applicants. Yet it is the number-one skill that is most often absent.

Perfecting your communication skills is of utmost importance. Any value created is value obscured if it cannot be communicated. Students should hone their writing skills by taking elective writing classes and getting published. You may wonder, “How in the world can someone in college get published unless that person is the next coming of Hemingway?” Actually, it is much easier than you think. Numerous college journals, department publications, and countless other organizations regularly publish articles, memos, newsletters, and reports, and they actively seek student submissions.

Public-speaking classes, which almost all colleges offer, are a great way to polish verbal-communication skills. Additionally, students should seek opportunities to present speeches at symposiums and research seminars. Almost all academic departments offer these opportunities to interested students, and being able to highlight these on a résumé is a great way to underscore a commitment to value creation.

Get connected. Conventional wisdom has it that the only way to network one’s way to a job is through a well-established set of networking relationships. Weak networking ties work just as well and probably better. Research by sociologist Mark Granovetter found that almost 60 percent of people who find jobs through networking actually do so through weak ties. They have the added advantage of being easier to establish and maintain as compared with strong ones. In addition, the person you connect with is as important as the strength of the tie. Connect with people who know many others who are connected to the kinds of opportunities you want (these people are called connectors). Weak ties with one or two very well-connected people (think small) works better than plowing inordinate amounts of time trying to cultivate strong ties with ten people.

Oftentimes the best networks (and the ones students most readily neglect) are parents—the parents of their roommates, parents of friends, and many other adults including professors. These people have more experience and are often willing to help out a college student in need.

Land that intern job. Paid internships work for some people but not for others. The fewer resources you have, the more you should think small. Where a student works doesn’t matter as much as the value he or she creates while working there. That is what employers will focus on. The important thing is not so much what you do but the value you create while doing it! Participation is not enough. Focus on actually accomplishing something.

Start Sooner Rather Than Later

The time to start teaching your children the power of value creation is sooner than you might think. Our work with the KIPP Academy in New York City is a case in point. KIPP is a national network of over fifty-seven college-preparatory public schools in underresourced communities serving more than 14,000 students. Started in 1994, by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, in Houston, Texas, after they completed their commitments to Teach For America, KIPP has a student population that is of over 90 percent African-American and Hispanic-Latino descent. Yet 80 percent of KIPP alumni go to college. A value-creation method was designed to help KIPPsters graduating from college to connect to the job market. The program was needed because KIPP students were just like others who, upon graduation from college, were beginning to ask, “Now that I have my degree, where is my career?” They needed to distinguish themselves in a crowded job market. Again, understand that work experiences for KIPP students happen once they leave KIPP and move on to high school and college.

KIPP New York is a middle school in the Bronx that uses work experiences as a primary means for helping students understand the world of work. The KIPP-to-College counseling staff asked us to put together a program for use in determining the kinds of experiences students would need to be competitive upon graduation from college. Essentially, KIPP students leave middle school after the eighth grade but remain tethered to KIPP through job placement and counseling support through college. The objective was to supplement the job-placement activity and provide a broader understanding of jobs and the organizations in which they worked. This was accomplished by requiring each student to fill out a questionnaire during the course of each job. We asked them questions about:

What the organization does

How it services its customers

The value created by the organization

How the value they create is measured

What the various jobs are within the organization

Who some of the most important workers are

What the most significant thing is that the student can do to contribute to the value the organization creates

By the time a student is ready to enroll in college, he or she has been exposed to the larger picture of how organizations work, why companies look for specific kinds of talent, and what experiences students need to be competitive in the job market. The program lays the groundwork for understanding value creation.

NOTES

1. See Sheila Curran, “Choosing a Major or Concentration,” June 6, 2008, http://curranoncareers.com/choosing-a-major-or-concentration/.

2. Amanda M. Fairbanks, “College’s Value Added,” New York Times, January 7, 2011.

3. Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler, “Mommy, Tell My Professor He’s Not Nice,” St. Petersburg Times, June 19, 2009.