Students seek real-world experience

CAREER-MINDED: Vance Morgan, center, professor of philosophy and director of Providence College’s Development of Western Civilization program, speaks with PC students Tessa Rutledge and Walter Manning. / COURTESY PROVIDENCE COLLEGE/ KEVIN TRIMMER
CAREER-MINDED: Vance Morgan, center, professor of philosophy and director of Providence College’s Development of Western Civilization program, speaks with PC students Tessa Rutledge and Walter Manning. / COURTESY PROVIDENCE COLLEGE/ KEVIN TRIMMER

Supplementing a liberal arts education with “real-world experience” is the carrot career-center directors and admissions staff at Rhode Island’s colleges and universities increasingly dangle when marketing their schools to incoming freshmen.
“It’s the No. 1 thing students ask about from day one when they’re talking to me,” said Andrew Simmons, Brown University’s director of the Center for Careers and Life After Brown.
Educators at Brown, Providence College, Roger Williams University and Rhode Island College agree that the tight job market and high cost of education are forcing prospective students and their parents to “ask the hard questions” at open houses prior to choosing a school – namely, how does a liberal arts education help a student land a job?
The answer, they say, is that providing internships, more research projects with faculty and networking with alumni take students further than a liberal arts degree does by itself.
Rhode Island College liberal arts graduate Valeria Canar, 24, of Uxbridge, Mass., now works as a chemist for Perkin Elmer Life Science of Boston. She says the research project she participated in as a student jointly with University of Rhode Island students, practicing the most-efficient ways to produce polypeptides, or amino acids, gave her hands-on experience.
That, supplemented with “thinking on her feet” while presenting research data, contributed to the way she communicates with her supervisor at work today, she said.
“In the real world, sometimes you just need to do your own research and work independently,” Canar said.
A 2013 study by the Washington, D.C.-based Association of American Colleges and Universities, “It Takes More Than a Major,” found that 75 percent of employers surveyed believe applied knowledge in real-world settings as well as the liberal arts skills of critical thinking, complex problem-solving, and written and oral communication should be emphasized. “All students should be involved in independent research and/or collaborative projects either through internships or community-action projects,” said Debra Humphreys, vice president for policy and public engagement at AACU, in an email.
RIC recently made it a priority to increase the number of internships available to its students, said Linda Kent Davis, director of the RIC Career Development Center. The college posted 537 internships this past academic year, 52 percent more than the 353 in the previous year, she said.
She also cited a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which connects schools to campus recruiting and career services professionals. The survey found that 63.2 percent of 16,000 graduating seniors from the Class of 2013 reported having taken part in an internship, co-op, or both – the highest participation rate since NACE began tracking it in 2007.
Increasing internships at RIC “is linked to the college’s strategic plan,” Davis said, and helps show why a liberal arts education is “not a frivolous choice.”
“We know, and NACE has all the data, that people who have previous internships are more likely to get hired and more likely to get hired at higher rates of pay,” she said. The liberal arts, or humanities, have always been focused on training students to be analytical thinkers and clear communicators steeped in a broad cultural foundation in arts and sciences. And colleges are still hitting on those broad skills as career enhancers.
Providence College this month is opening its new Ruane Center for the Humanities, a $20 million, 63,000-square-foot building that will cater to the largest freshman class ever: 1,045 students, said Raul Fonts, dean of admissions.
To add to the investment, the school has refreshed and revitalized its liberal arts core curriculum, he said. The new building “is part of the overall mission of the college that we continue to talk about – the uniqueness of [that] core curriculum: the two-year program in the development of Western Civilization,” he said. Educators acknowledge that getting a job after four years of pricy higher education, which can total tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars before a student is through, is as necessary as the skills a liberal arts program imparts.
Andrew A. Workman, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Roger Williams University, points to the university’s Community Partnership Center and internships that give students experience collaborating with businesses or community groups. A recent project involved helping plan to rehabilitate the Wally School, an old elementary-school building in Bristol.
The other way the university is trying to allay parents’ concerns about the value of their $29,000-a-year investment in tuition and room and board at RWU is to encourage students to take a minor that supplements their liberal arts major, he said. A dance major may then end up working for an arts-management nonprofit, he said.
According to Simmons, Brown’s research opportunities with faculty and projects with the Swearer Center for Public Service, which connects students and employers beyond the standard recruiting methods, contribute to students getting hired once they graduate.
When students tout that liberal arts education, Simmons noted, “the trick is to be able to go out to employers and say, ‘Here’s what I’ve done, and even though I have absolutely no experience in this field, I have the capabilities to get the job done.’ ”
At Bryant University, known for its business school, and RISD, known for its fine-arts programs, liberal arts informs the educational experience. For instance, at Bryant, all liberal arts majors have a business minor and all business majors have a liberal arts minor, said David Lux, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“Both sides will say their minors are extremely important when launching a career,” he said.
In fact, Bryant graduates who do find a job within a year out of school earn about $52,000 a year.
“Starting salaries are higher for liberal arts majors than the business majors,” he said. “It has to do with the students in fields like actuarial math, statistics and science. It surprises people. So, there’s a kind of myth around the difficulty of a liberal arts education.”
At the Rhode Island School of Design, liberal arts studies are required as part of a bachelor of fine-arts degree, said Daniel Cavicchi, interim dean of the liberal arts division. Student projects often focus on what the school calls “critical making” – the combination of critical thinking and artistic creation, he said.
Providence College cites a 93 percent success rate in students either getting jobs or entering graduate school within six months of graduation. However, that number is based on a 37 percent response rate from graduates of the class of 2012 polled by the institution, said Fonts. Statistically, researchers have confidence in that number because 95 percent of the responses fall within a margin of error of 4.8 percent, he said.
“We do cite [the statistic] because that’s what we have to go on,” said Patti Goff, director of Career Services, “but we’re trying to improve it.”
Bryant and Brown, in contrast, claim job and graduate-school-placement percentages of about 98 for the class of 2012, based on response rates of 70 and 80 percent, respectively. These universities are much more aggressive, school officials said, in following up surveys by reaching out to students directly and on the Web. •

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