I wasn’t sure where to post this, but I am hoping to get some help for my son, who is currently a sophomore at a prestigious university. The school has lived up to its reputation with respect to his education, he is happy with his classes and his professors, finds the curriculum challenging and I can see that he is learning a lot. But one factor we never even considered during his college search was the efficacy of the career office. Without question, I believe it is one of the worst. My son is trying to get a job or internship for the summer that is relevant to his career goals. There have been exactly TWO campus visits by employers. There was a job fair but the job fair did not feature any major employers, mostly military, food service, cell phone sales. Likewise, the job offerings on the career services website are extremely limited to military, nonprofit foundations, on campus ambassadors to sell products, etc. No banks, no automobile manufacturers, no accounting firms, no oil and gas companies, nada. He has made several appointments with the office and they do not have job listings, their advice is always “use LinkedIn to network with alumni.” He has done that, very few alumni on LinkedIn that he has been able to reach out to.
I have googled and found so many other colleges that have copious resources online for their students. Even tiny schools in the middle of nowhere that work very hard to get jobs for their students and graduates. My niece, a sophomore at MIT, tells me they have several job fairs throughout the year, and employers recruiting on campus almost daily in the fall and early spring. She turned down an offer from Apple will be working for Google this summer. Granted the school my son attends is not MIT, but it is a top tier school that has turned out many notable alumni. Some of their current research is on the cutting edge in medicine and business. Their endowment is huge and their tuition is among the highest in the country so not hurting for resources.
I do not have access to a network of business contacts to provide him, he has contacted everyone he can think of for help and so far he is still coming up empty handed.
So my questions are these - are the schools your kids attend doing any better? What should a student expect from their career services office? And if a student finds himself at a school that does not seem interested in helping him find employment, what should he do? He has networked on LinkedIn, googled and applied to dozen of jobs online (statistics show that less than 1% of these applications result in even a response, he has had two). He has asked his professors, friends parents, etc. for help. He does not want to take classes or do volunteer work over the summer, he has done tons of that already and now needs to get some real world work experience to add to his resume.