We had our college open house this weekend. My part was at the majors fair, where prospective students come by, and I get to tell them why Professional Writing might be good for them. As a still young and small program, we are trying to recruit students, but we are also trying to recruit the right students. No point in becoming a PWR major unless you have a real interest in writing. That’s enough to scare off many students. Imagine a degree where you spend most of your time writing! Leading to a job where you succeed or fail based upon your writing!! Yes, scary stuff indeed.

Anyway, I was having a conversation with a colleague from another department. We were talking about some of the discomfort that surrounds the majors fair. Of course students and their parents want to know that getting a degree is a form of career insurance. They all like the idea of a major that seems to point straight toward a job (though as I’ve said elsewhere, at least in PWR, our students don’t always show enthusiasm for the truly professionalizing courses once they are actually here). After all  Cortland’s most popular degrees are in Education. That’s job security++, right? Get certified as public school teacher and you’ll find a job, get tenure, etc., etc.

I wonder sometimes though what the statistics are. How many students who enter with this goal actually get the degree and the certification? How many get a job right out of college? How many end up getting the Masters degree NYS says you need to get fully certified (the state gives  you five years to do it)? How many are still teaching in ten years?

I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions. However, one does tend to hear that teaching is a career in which a lot of folks burn out fairly fast. The guy who sold me my car last week has a BA and an MA from Cortland
and is certified to teach High School social studies. Obviously it’s
just one example, but it’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

In any case, this conversation I was having centered on the notion that a degree focused on specific job preparation was perhaps false advertising (we weren’t actually talking about teaching, though I am suggesting here that might be an example). It’s false inasmuch as it implies that graduates go on to careers in that particular field. It’s probably more true in teaching than in some other specific job training areas. I would hate to imply that our graduates go on to jobs in technical writing. They don’t, or at least they haven’t to my knowledge, but then again they’ve never shown much interest in doing so either.

What can you really say? If you pick up the right training at the right time, a degree could lead you to a good job right out of college, but if the degree is too specialized you may find yourself back in school trying to retool. If you take a more liberal arts approach then you have to do something special to stand out. There are so many people out there now with college degrees–folks with narrow specializations and technical certifications, folks with liberal arts degrees from fashionable and competitive private colleges, folks with graduate degrees and so on. And a lot of them are doing customer service or retail management or sales or marketing…some generic post-college job. It didn’t really matter what they majored in.

Who knows, maybe they come to love the job they fall into. Maybe not.

I guess my point is maybe we shouldn’t ask "will this degree get me the job I want?" Maybe the question should be "will this curriculum give me the opportunity to shine? to stand out against a sea of other graduates?" In a way, that’s what my colleague and I came to. We agreed that what students needed to figure out in college was that they had something to say. (And I would add now that they also need to learn how to say it.) And at least from my perspetive, having "something to say" doesn’t simply mean having a point of view or a political position or set of principles, it means having the creative, critical, and rhetorical-compositional chops to get noticed.