Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson: Authors of Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter and What Really Does

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, where I interview leaders and innovators for insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Too many students go through college focused on fulfilling course requirements for their major instead of fulfilling their actual personal and career interests. The result is that they earn empty college degrees and have no plans for how to connect their degree to the life that comes after.

Those provocative conclusions come from a new book called Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter and  What Really Does by authors Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson. Ned spent thirty-five years working in academic affairs at a range of public and private institutions toward curriculum development and student success, and Scott is a senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education where he’s reported on the path from college to career, amongst many other topics, since 1999.

I’m happy to welcome Ned and Scott to the podcast today to explore the problems they’ve identified and find out what students, faculty, and advisors can do about them. Thank you both for joining us today.

Ned Scott Laff

Thanks for having us.

Van

Delighted, and congratulations on the launch of your book.

Scott Carlson

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Van

So, the book describes students as getting lost in college on their way to earning a degree, and one major reasons you cite is that students focus just on their major and they in fact don’t really understand their major. Can one of you break that down or both of you break that down for us?

Scott

Sure. I’ll start and then I’ll let Ned get into it a little bit. The main question that students are asked when they arrive on campus is, what are you going to major in? You know, that’s the key question that comes from parents, comes from people at the school, comes from people who are sort of surrounding students from all sides. Often, the student offers an answer to that question and if the answer is business or finance, everybody’s like, that sounds great! And if people say, philosophy or sociology or fine art, a lot of the parents and others would say, what are you going to do with that?

So, that right there sort of sets the stage for a lot of students as they head into college. And what we describe in Hacking College is how that singular focus on the major winds up confusing the students and not allowing them to take advantage of all the other things that are in the college space, in the college catalog and how they could marry some of these things to their actual interests. So why the major doesn’t matter? We think that the major is a guiding principle that often gets students off the path from where they want to go.

Ned

And the other thing that’s interesting is the type of thinking that students run into on campus. This institutional think doesn’t help them prepare for what it is they need to do when they’re out there once they leave college. Here’s a simple one. I’ve been playing on this because I’ve been having conversations with my daughter. She’s on the clinical faculty at a fair to middling medical school in New Haven, Connecticut and when she was an undergraduate, I can’t tell you how much grief I got from my family because she was a French major.

They would ask, “What is she going to do with a French major?” And I said, “Relax, everything’s under control here.” She was always going to go to medical school. Well, what happened is she took a year off from school and spent a year at Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Haiti, where French obviously is important because it allowed her to pick up Creole and it allowed her to do all this work in this incredible hospital setting and meeting different faculty who would bring students over on international rotations.

But we don’t tell students this. We don’t tell students that if you’re going to be a doctor, find out what it means to do doctoring. Certainly some doctors want to study and push through in biology, but there’s other ways to go to medical school. You can go through anthropology, sociology, or the foreign languages. In many schools right now, you will see that almost half the students entering are bilingual or more and those things are important given the populations that they’re going to be interacting with.

So, this idea of helping students think out what the relationship is between the world that is outside of college to how they want to take advantage of the learning opportunities on a college campus is critical, and we seldom introduce students to this.

Van

Well, that takes us naturally to the question of what is the role of the counselor?  I remember a few years back, there was a Gallup poll that asked adults about where they got the best career advice. Of course, on top of that list were people who were the employers. At the bottom of the list were the school counselors who had the least helpful advice when it came to navigating careers and connecting learning with careers. What’s your response to this? How do you think about the role of advising? What’s the reality behind advising on a campus, both in high school and in college?

Ned

Okay, advising can be one of the most profound experiences in a student’s life, but we would have to redefine what it is right now. The other thing we have to put into consideration is we don’t want to say that it is individual advisors who are at fault here. They are stressed and they are given certain things that they have to come through with. They have to deal with retention issues. They have to deal with whether or not students are succeeding in courses and they want to keep students on track in terms of completing requirements. More often than not, the type of advising that advisors could do, they’re not allowed to because the system isn’t asking them to do these things or preparing them or giving them the types of insights they need to really help students.

So there’s this institutional pressure on the advising system to track rather than to create a pedagogical environment in which students can begin to explore how to translate what we call their hidden intellectualism into a vocational pathway.

Scott

I think we would say that advising is often inward looking… inward into the system, inward into the institution itself. So much of what you hear about students trying to get out into the world of work concerns the fact that what they’re hearing inside the system or inside the colleges doesn’t really match up with what the employers are saying.

So, part of what we’re doing with Hacking College is trying to use the advisors as a prompt to push the students outside of the system to go check things out, much of the way that a dissertation advisor would work. As Ned would often say, it’s about challenging you to think about these issues that are at the core of what you’re trying to build in the college system and really sort of disrupting your view of that and trying to get you to see it in this clearer way through that disruption.

Ned

You know, an interesting way to think about it is how a college catalog is structured. They present first the rules and regulations, then they present the colleges, then they present the majors underneath the colleges. But what students rarely do is go to the back of the college catalog and take a look and start reading course descriptions, right? They never do that because they’re not guided in that direction…to find out who your faculty are by field of specialty.

So, for instance, if you put five psychology departments up against each other, the thing that differentiates these departments are the fields of study that the faculty are specializing in themselves. There is no such thing as generic sociology department, a generic psychology department, a generic business administration department. There is a wealth of field of study specialists all across the campus, and when students start looking at these individuals, what they find is they’re all multidisciplinary to one degree or another and that’s the message we have to get across to students.

Van

This tip that you’re giving — to give agency to the students, but to help the students explore by researching and approaching faculty — is actually a hidden tip.  I compare and contrast with my own college experience as a first generation student, which was reading the catalog and checking off what the course requirements were versus my son, who now has the benefit of us coaching him to go talk to the faculty. I think this is like decoding how to really navigate a college system for the purpose of learning and exploration, right?

Ned

Exactly. And the other thing that students have is the ability to go outside of the university and start talking to people. So for example, I want to be in business. That’s nice, right? What does that mean? I want to ski is a business, right? I want to work with motorcycles… that is a business. I want to open up an international flower shop, that’s a business. But they require different types of things and different types of backgrounds. But most importantly, students have the agency, if they are taught how, to create experiential opportunities, not only off campus, where they can learn a whole bunch of information that they can bring back and translate into learning opportunities on campus, but across the university system itself in places that they never even know about.

Scott

Just because you went to college doesn’t mean you know how college works, right? But people who are inside the system understand how the system works. That’s part of what we’re trying to do with Hacking College is to try to sort of pull away ‘this is actually what the college learning was supposed to be about.’ This multidisciplinary connection between these different kinds of courses and different kinds of intellectual offerings, along with how it integrates with experiential learning and the things that are off campus and the on-campus activities and all of that.

So, you know, rather than looking at college as just this hoop that you jump through, we’re trying to say, let’s engage with it in this way that people who are approaching it from a first generation standpoint don’t really understand because they haven’t seen how the whole thing works.

Van

And are there exemplars of institutions or systems that do what you recommend in your book?

Scott

I think I’ll have Ned talk about the University of Illinois in a minute, but there’s a number of institutions that have allowed students to build something more intentionally, in part by taking away some of the structures. So, for example, you would look at College of the Atlantic — which is a very small college in Maine with only 300 students — they have only one major, Human Ecology. That one major is there in part because they don’t have the faculty numbers to support stand-alone departments. So it’s not like you’re going to have a bunch of history students and then a bunch of students in geography and so on.

So the students have only one major to choose from, and have to define that major for themselves. Human ecology in their sense, can mean I want to use these skills as very environmentally-focused or I want to use these skills to try to launch a business with a hydroponic growing of lettuce, for example. I wrote about a student who wanted to do that. Or human ecology can mean I’m really interested in how people interact with the shore of the Bar Harbor area where COA is located. It can mean all of these different things.

What we argue is that the students are — when they come to these different course offerings — they’re going to pull different things out of it. So the student is already going to offer a prism on the learning as it is, right? You’re going to pull the things out of it that are relevant to you. You’re going to shape the learning in a way that’s relevant to you.

Ned

The origin story for this came from a program at the University of Illinois…gosh…this is going way back into the 20th century, called Individual Plans of Study, where students could design their field of study if it was something that could not be done in one of the thirteen colleges at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

It was amazing the types of things that students came up with, but more importantly, it was amazing the types of connections that began to develop. Students would discover faculty. For instance, I’m interested in the commodities exchange, and all of a sudden I find out that here’s somebody in ag economics in the College of Agriculture who’s doing work on the commodities exchange, but then go over to another side of campus altogether and go to the business school and find out here’s somebody also interested in the commodities exchange. So, the people who were connecting the faculty were the students who said ‘I just talked to professor so-and-so’ who’s on a side of campus that they never go to.

So, what we began to see through individual plans of study is that for every student who came into the program, there would be twenty to twenty five who could develop the same kind of multidisciplinary program underneath the rubric of a major. It was just in how they designed the courses. When you look at a college catalog, for example, a college catalog does not lay out a curriculum. It lays out a menu, and that’s not a curriculum. It’ll say something like, here’s sociology. You need to have stats. You need to have intro. You need to have research methods. Choose one out of column A and choose one out of column B. There could be 40 courses. You’re going to have to have a capstone course and then you have whatever you want to pick out of sociology.

Well, how does that connect with anything else? So when we flip the game and say to the student ‘talk to us about what you’re interested in and what you want to do’ all of a sudden, sociology can be a pre-med program; sociology could be a business program; sociology could be a marketing program; sociology could be labor and industrial relations. It ripples out.

What students find is ‘my faculty are not like the faculty I have in high school. They’re out there. Yes, they’re connected on campus, but they’re also connected nationally. Some are connected internationally. They’re doing research that crosses all these boundaries.’

So when they change the conversation and they begin to see the learning opportunities on campus, the whole nature of the college changes without the structure of the college changing at all. It’s just how students take advantage of the opportunities that are right there. The whole campus then becomes part of this learning environment.

Van

Let me ask one follow on question for you, Ned, and then a different follow on question for Scott. So, this type of personalized learning that is basically centered on the student and what their interests are….does the size of the institution make it more possible or less?  And for Scott, what can the institution do to be an enabler of this? Do you build in cooperative learning or a different type of career advising? Maybe both of you can help me probe those questions.

Scott

Okay. Let me try to get at both of them and I’ll pass it to Ned after that. One thing that could come out of the hacking college model that is often talked about is more course sharing that goes across institutions. How can some of these small colleges that have limited faculty and limited educational opportunities band together and offer their courses across the different institutions so that students at a small college in Ohio can take courses from a college in Kentucky.

Now there are these various services out there that are trying to make this happen. I believe the CIC has one. Of course, there’s RISE that comes out of Jeffrey Docking and Adrian College and all of that stuff and there are some other organizations out there that are trying to make this a reality. But I think that’s one of the things that — especially in this time of contraction — is going to have to happen in the higher education space. We have to become better at sharing our resources across the institutions, and that includes academic resources.

In terms of the institution enabling this or providing the opportunities to take this on, one of the big things we find is that it’s really sort of about leadership supporting this kind of framing of the college experience and then setting in place the opportunities for students to learn this in a more formal way. For instance, the “hacking college” principles could be integrated into orientation courses or first year experience courses or first year composition courses — those kinds of things — where students have a structured environment where they’re able to walk through the steps of the program, which include discernment about deciding what you really want to pursue in college and then going out in the world, discovering it and then translating it back into the college experience.

Van

So, basically the student is experiencing those set of questions or doing exercises along the way embedded into all of their coursework. It’s not just the role of the career guidance center that you periodically visit at the end of your career at the college.

Ned

Exactly. Part of the process is that there is nothing that a student can think about that isn’t being done out there. I was using this example the other day, because C2E2, which is Chicago’s Comic Con, just ended this past weekend. I was there last year because one of my daughters is a graphic novelist so she was pushing her book there. For anyone who’s listening who is a Trekkie, I’m at C2E2, and this Gorn – which is a creature out of the original Star Trek — walked past me. So immediately I went up to that individual and I said, “This is the coolest cosplay.  Where did you do this?” And that individual pointed me to somebody.

So now the whole business side, the whole creative art side, all of what this world is about starts to open up. Here’s this world of cosplay. Now, a student could come back with information from an experience like that and then work with people to translate that information into a variety of different learning opportunities that exist on campus. Some of those learning opportunities might exist in regular courses, some of those learning opportunities might exist in the option for students to develop independent studies courses with faculty, some of those options may exist by taking advantage of all the other things that are on a campus, whether it’s a large campus or a small campus.

Campuses have things like art departments, they have government affairs, they have HR, they have people who work on investment and endowment. All of these things are available, except for the most part, students are never introduced to the breadth of what exists, not only on their college campus, but in the surrounding area that they’re living in. That surrounding area is also part of the learning environment.

Van

So I would imagine most students interact with their faculty and their advisors. How difficult a task is it to engage these individuals in this new approach that you’re recommending?

Ned

You know, I would have to say it depends. I have worked on a breadth of college campuses and when I started this, somebody said to me, “Well, yeah, you’re at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Look at all the stuff you can do. I’m not at that school.” And so what I did was I just started picking up positions at different types of institutions — small liberal arts colleges, colleges that dealt with first generation students, colleges that would appear to be geographically in a place where this couldn’t work.

What I discovered when I was going through this process was, you find the individuals on campus who are willing and open to the idea. Once it starts to work, you let those people sell their colleagues. It doesn’t actually ask faculty, for instance, to change anything more than something like this: instead of saying I’m just an English professor, share that I really work on looking at mystery stories.  All of a sudden different types of possibilities open up, right? There’s this whole world out there of mystery novels, which we don’t think about. Well, how do you get into that world? And there’s ways to start doing it.

At the same time, you need to begin to help people in career services realize that this thing we call the hidden job market is massive. There’s nothing you can think of that isn’t going on and it’s easy to talk to people in this because people love to talk about what it is they want to do or what they are doing. They’re excited when somebody wants to share in that same thing and that opens up the opportunity to create experiential opportunities in arenas that colleges never look at.

Van

So, Scott, I would imagine that especially after the pandemic where so many things went online, you can engage with your courses fully online. You can engage with your faculty and advisors fully online. I’ve been wondering what is the role of place when so much can occur online? Like, how do you think about the institutions themselves that have campuses? How should they be using the role of place?

Scott

That’s a super interesting question. It’s something that Ned and I have been talking about a lot recently. We made a visit to a campus during the reporting. We made visits to many campuses, on one campus in particular, we wanted to talk to faculty and students and we just found that the campus was really empty. I mean, there were students there, but the faculty in particular….you went into the bays of faculty offices and it was all closed doors.

I really do feel like the college campus is one of the last marker of physical place in America and how we like to be in physical place. I mean, think about how the college campus interacts with the college town, which in many ways is sort of the idealization of the American town. It’s kind of idyllic, right? I think that’s all because of our inward yearning for place.

How this works into hacking college is that much of the direction that happens for students while they’re in college is often serendipitous. They just happen to run across somebody and they say ‘you know, I’m really into that’ and the other person says let me introduce you to this person over here who takes care of that.’ When is that gonna happen in the online experience?

Some of those things can be orchestrated and there are organizations that are conscious of the notion that people are isolated in their basements doing their online courses. How do you help these people connect and engage with the college campus and engage with their other students? Certainly, if the organization is cognizant of that, they can set up structures maybe to deal with that. But I really do feel like most of what we do as human beings is interacting in these sort of random ways and the college campus really should be a laboratory for that to happen.

Van

Hmm, that’s a good point. A role in orchestrating or facilitating serendipity. Right.

Ned

Yes.

Scott

Well, and I would add to that too, that much of what we talk about in Hacking College is about how do you exploit the structures that are right around the college that are accessible to you? If you look at a small college city or a relatively decent sized college town, you’re still gonna find a range of hidden jobs within that environment, right? And so how do you get the students to go out into that space, into that environment and start to pull the covers back and start to discover, there’s this small firm here that deals with how amphibians are handling water pollution, and that’s the thing that I’ve always wanted to study. Or the student can discover that and come back to the college and inform the college about what’s around them. I feel like in a lot of cases, the colleges don’t really have a solid handle on what opportunities really are available in the community around them.

Van

They’re not viewing it as the type of asset that you’re proposing it to be.

Scott

It’s too difficult, I think, for them to try to reach out to those organizations at scale. They are able to reach out to the local hospital, which has thousands of employment opportunities, or the local big corporate employer, which has thousands of employment opportunities, but these little firms that have maybe two or three opportunities in them or maybe have one internship every summer or something like that…I mean, it’s too difficult for the organizations on campus to sort of go out and proactively encounter these things. To some extent, you can use the students going out on their discoveries to help bring some of that information back to the campus.

Van

What other concepts would you like to share from your book that we haven’t discussed yet?

Scott

I think one that we both can go into a little bit is the role of social capital. And everyone talks about social capital, right? It’s who you know. This is Julia Freeland Fisher’s stuff and everybody talking about how can we get students connected to people at corporate offices who can start to mentor students and give them the experiential opportunity they need. That’s all great.

What we’re  talking about with Hacking College is that social capital is built off of cultural capital. It’s built off of this notion that I have this thing that I’m into — anime, manga, or baking, or I’m really interested in how amphibians are dealing with pollution, or I really want to solve breast cancer in the Middle East — these kinds of quests, which are actual quests that students have. When they go out on these interviews to discover, well, what are the opportunities out there, is this a real job, are there real opportunities that I can uncover through my college experience, they discover people who also have interests in anime and manga and amphibians and all of that stuff, right? And that’s where the social capital comes from. They encounter these people in an interview. Hi, I’m really into Neon Genesis Evangelion and Cowboy Bebop. I am really wanting to watch Samurai Champloo….

Van

I could actually track you because I have a son that watches all of those!

Scott

That’s part of his cultural capital, right? I’m really into this stuff. And then the person across the table says, I’m really into it too. have you watched this? Have you seen this? What do you like about it? And then there’s sort of this relationship that starts to build there. So, when the student gets to the end of the process and says, hey, I really need an internship or I could really use a job shadowing opportunity or do know other people I can talk to? It’s more likely that that person is going to say, hey, yeah, come work with me or I know somebody that you can talk to or hey, there’s these opportunities that are hidden deep within inside our organization. I can help open doors for you. It comes from that cultural capital. It comes from that sense of identification with the other student.

Ned

And it works on a real simple thing that we all know, but we never take advantage of: everybody loves to talk about what it is they do. And so one of the problems that we have is that we sit down and say, here are the major industries that are out there, so let’s prepare people for the major industries that are out there. But the hidden job market is so much vaster than what the industries are, and these hidden job markets are in these areas where there’s small colleges.  What’s going on around the colleges and what could be created when you start to develop partnerships? And all of a sudden students get involved in these things.

At one school, I convinced the mayor’s office that they ought to have college students sitting in some of the mayor’s meetings about what to do with the city. Well, all of a sudden, these students start getting involved with everything that is in the city, things they would have never thought about, right? That could open up all sorts of possibilities. Now, this doesn’t mean that a student’s gonna graduate and work in that town. What it means is that a student is gonna graduate with hardcore experience about working on projects that are relevant to city growth and development.

Then they begin to see things like, wait a second, how I present something is important. Now I understand why these communication courses take on meaning for me. Wait a second, understanding somebody’s narrative and being able to make sense of it and how I can connect with it…now I understand the skills I should be getting out of literature courses or history courses. And now I begin to see that I don’t necessarily have to be in a business major. I could literally be in a humanities major and then pull different learning opportunities from different parts of campus together into an integrative area that says, I want to get involved in community development.

So I cut my chops at the college I’m at and in the town I’m at, and now I have a skill set, background, project completions, all this stuff that’s on my resume, and now I can go talk to somebody else in some other city.

Van

You know, what’s so interesting as you both speak is that back when I was with the California Community Colleges, the career education faculty would say, “My goodness, my time is not just teaching. I have to go engage with the partners and connect them to the students.” And it’s a lot more work than if you’re just coming into the classroom and doing a lecture. In a way, you’re both challenging the faculty, but also all the other staff on a campus to think about how to engage the broader community and connect them to that real world, connect them onto the campus and then connecting students back out. It’s not just the Career Center doing it or that career education faculty, it’s everybody’s role and job.

Ned

It’s everybody, it’s the entire campus. And the key is you ask students a simple question. Well, who’s doing that in the city? Okay, well, you go to your favorite friend, Google. All of a sudden you find out who that individual is, right? You call up.

Van

Right.

Ned

Hi, my name’s Scott Carlson and I’m a student at Augustana, well I don’t even use the word student. I’m Scott Carlson, I’m from Augustana College and I’m doing research on this. Could I get thirty minutes of your time? All of a sudden, boom, they are in the door. And if they’re prepped with the right questions, then two things happen. Rather than, a harried individual in Career Services trying to set this up, the students start making the connection and then the offices can take advantage of the work that the students have done.

So now, the students are not only building social and cultural capital for themselves, they’re building social and cultural capital for the college.

Van

It’s amazing. I don’t know how many times students have reached out and just said, hello, I’m so-and-so. Can I  intern with you? And I go, okay, sure. Right? It’s the initiative that you like and it’s no cost to the college, which is wonderful.

Ned

Yes! But it also builds connection between the college and the community. So it builds better town-gown relationships with small colleges in say like in Iowa or in the middle of Illinois. But it also builds interesting and powerful relationships if you’re in a city. There’s all sorts of different types of things that can begin to develop.

We drove a lot of our initiatives from things that students came back with. The students share that information, that information goes into the memory palace of the offices, and then those people in the offices can start building out those things with other students.

Scott

And I would add to that just quickly, Van, one of the knee-jerk responses we get to what we describe in Hacking College is that students aren’t able to do that. Like, students aren’t able to call people up and open up their own opportunities, you know? We sort of push back on that. I mean, yes, it’s an intimidating process, but I was a student at one time — and it took me a while to remember this moment — but at some point I had to make my first journalism call, which was to call somebody up and say, “Why did you screw up this thing?  I’m going to write about it in tomorrow’s paper.”

I mean, that’s a difficult call to make, but eventually you learn how to make that call and learn how to have those conversations. We feel that learning this networking process — a number of people are pushing for this anyway — should be pushed down to high school, in fact. I think American Student Assistance talks about that and Julia Freeland Fisher talks about that. Her book is oriented around K-12 to some extent. But we think that students have to learn this process. This is something that will separate the successful from the middling to non-successful later in life. You have to learn how to build your own networks.

Van

In closing, let’s give you a lightning round opportunity to share your thoughts on the future of learning. What makes you optimistic?

Ned

You know what? I’m actually gonna put Scott on the spot. The experience that Scott had with a couple of students at Central Michigan, for me personally…it was just a joyous moment to watch on a variety of different levels. The biggest level is this isn’t about Ned Laff and it isn’t about me proselytizing about something I believe in. It’s more about a process.

And to watch Scott, who is not an academic, work this process with some students — and I don’t want to spoil the moment —  but you have to explain what happened with the students after you explain what you did with the students. Come on, Scott, I’m putting you on the spot here.

Scott

Ned is referring to a conversation that I had at with a student at Central Michigan who was in a philosophy and religion course and didn’t really know what she wanted to do with it. She was getting a lot of pressure from her father about how to manage  that. And I said, “Well, what is it you really want to get into? What is that hidden intellectualism? What’s that vocational purpose? What’s the wicked problem you’re trying to solve.”  These are questions we ask at the beginning.  And she said, well, I’m just really into death.

She was embarrassed at first to say this, but she was like, “I’m into death. I think near death experience is really interesting. I’m interested in how people cope with death. I think I’m interested in what happens to people at end of lives, you know?” And I said, “That’s interesting. Have you heard of Steven Jenkinson?” He is this Canadian philosopher who worked in palliative care for a long time. So there’s palliative care. There’s the neuroscience of near death experience. There’s researchers who use psychedelics to help terminally ill cancer patients face their death. There’s musicians who play for the dying to help them cope with the pain of death. Death is a hidden job world.

When she saw this, this euphoric smile sort of came across her face, like, wow, it’s real. And we’ve seen that. I’ve seen that over and over again when we visited campuses. The story that we share at the beginning of Hacking College is about four students who talked to me and Ned about these different things that they’re interested in. When we started talking about how they could actually get to those things, they’re like, “Wait a minute, how do we get there?”

So to ignite the student’s interest, to drive their persistence in college…I think that’s one of the optimistic things that we could do right now. There are tremendous opportunities. There’s lots of technology that allow us to break down walls and spread this information far and wide. Are colleges willing to break down their own walls? Is the society willing to support college now that it seems like something that’s so expensive and maybe doesn’t lead to anything and it’s getting trashed by public officials all over the place? It still is the thing that it always was.

As we describe in Hacking College, confusion about the path from college to career existed in the 1980s. The empty college degree existed back then. Somehow people figured it out afterward. It had to do with the value of the college experience in the marketplace. We need to find that value again and really engage with the college experience in order to make it valuable.

Van

Well, thank you so much, Scott and Ned for joining us today and inspiring us with really practical advice on just how to rethink the college experience and connecting the college experience to careers and life. Your book, Hacking College, Why the Major Doesn’t Matter and What Really Does, tell me, where can listeners find it?

Scott

Everywhere. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it from the Hopkins Press, wherever fine books are sold.

Van Ton-Quinlivan

Well, congratulations on getting your book out. And thank you very much for joining us today.

Ned

Thanks so much for having us.

Van

I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in America.