Vocation Isn't A Dirty Word
by Jamienne Studley, J.D.

On Broadway Avenue Q is packed with youngsters who laugh ruefully at songs like “What Can You Do With a BA in English?” and “I Wish I Could Go Back to College.” As the characters, engaging puppet/human college graduates, search for jobs that will pay the rent, the notion that what they are really searching for is “purpose” hits them like a thunderbolt.

That reaction was a vivid reminder to me, a recent college president and long-time advocate of liberal education, that we need to be clearer about the relationship among learning, work, and purpose. Our students want to know how to connect their values and goals, their intellectual passions and capacities, the myriad of learning experiences in which they engage during college, and the work of their lives.

Too often students are introduced to the world of work and the process of career planning the same way they learn about sex—on the playground from their peers. The results are often similarly distorted, incomplete, and even risky. As with sex, learning how to connect one's education and life's work is best done thoughtfully and with responsible adult involvement. It's high time for us, as educators, to think about what that would look like in undergraduate education.

College mission statements testify to the integral connection between liberal education and preparation for work, leadership, and service. Lately, academia seems to be consciously embracing the importance of integrating all aspects of the undergraduate educational experience, including academic, co-curricular, residential, volunteer, spiritual, and athletic life. But even with this comprehensive vision, the dimension of work, past, present and future, is typically left out of the integrative model. Some institutions and educators treat students' fascination with their future pursuits as irrelevant, a distraction, the province of a few specialized staff. Skilled career services staff offer self-assessment, counseling, and other resources to help students plan outward for career choices and job searches, and faculty are typically happy to let them do it. The problem is that these career development processes are not woven into students' central educational endeavors where they could provide powerful material and expand motivation for learning.

The goal is to broaden students' vision instead of narrowing it. The rising enrollment in undergraduate business degree programs is driven in large part by students' expectation that jobs in business will be more readily available to business majors than to others. But the best teachers, including in the business department, tell students that it is most important to pursue subjects to which they bring intensity, curiosity, discipline, and a desire to learn, and that students of every subject find rewarding work when they have done their best and developed essential capacities.

Those of us in midlife know that finding our vocation(s) and meaning in our work, and linking them to our values, knowledge, and capacities, is a lifelong challenge. Understanding that, we should give our students a strong foundation for conducting that process of exploration, reflection, adaptation, and learning—and we should seize the chance to do it as they make the critical early choices of their college years.#

Jamienne S. Studley is the former President of Skidmore College.