Colleges Combine Career Centers and Development Offices to Push Student Employment
As the job market continues to be difficult for young Americans, many schools have been folding their career centers into their development offices with their well established alumni and parent networks.
Melissa Korn of The Wall Street Journal has the details.
Looking for the career-services office? Check with the fundraising and alumni-relations department.
New college grads face a very tough job market, one in which relationships can matter more than résumés. With that in mind, many schools have been folding their career centers into their development offices, which are rich with data on alumni and parent networks.
For example, Amherst College in Massachusetts made its move a couple of months ago. The change is meant to foster better relationships with graduates and parents who might influence hiring decisions at their companies or who can invite students to shadow them for a few days to learn about an industry.
A limited budget—less than $70,000, excluding staff salaries—restricts how much Ms. Olender’s team can meet with employers. Now, when fundraisers make the rounds, they throw in a pitch for career-services connections, too.
The benefit goes both ways. With newfound knowledge from their career services counterparts, development officers can point to the need for new internship stipends, financial aid assistance that would allow students to take low-paying public service jobs and other specifics when soliciting funds.
Most career-services offices report up through the student-affairs or student-services branch of a school’s administration. But the other segments of that department deal primarily with student health and safety, which take priority. Amherst Career Center Director Ursula Olender’s office pulled off a day-long mixer in April for about 50 students to meet alums who are with J.P. Morgan. Amherst needed just two months of planning thanks to individual relationships that development officers had with some of those employees. On its own, Ms. Olender estimates, the career office would have taken about six months to organize the event.
