The Hidden Curriculum: How to Build a Career that College Never Taught You

What does it actually mean to go to college? If your honest answer is “get a degree so I can get a job,” Ned Johnson and Scott Carlson want to complicate that, in the best possible way.

In this conversation, the authors of Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn't Matter - and What Really Does, break down why the major is far less important than the experience students build around it, and why so many students graduate with what they call “empty degrees” - credentials that check boxes but don’t connect to anything real.

Ned and Scott introduce the idea of “hidden intellectualism”, the genuine interests students bring with them that the academic system rarely surfaces, and they walk us through the “field of study” framework that help students turn those interests into an integrated, intentional college experience.

We also talk about the hidden job market (it’s bigger than you think), why first-generation students have more cultural capital than they realize, and why the skills in this book aren’t just for 18-year-olds. They’re tools for navigating change at any stage of life.

In this episode:

•       Why “declaring a major” rarely means what students think it does

•       The “permission zone”: how to help students take their own interests seriously

•       The research investigative interview, and how to start one

•       The translation chasm: connecting hidden passion to a visible career path

•       Why cultural capital is the fuel for real social capital

•       The advice they’d give every young person starting their college journey

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We have this notion of the undecided student. The undecided student is the student who hasn't declared a major, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily undecided in that thing they'd really like to do. All it takes is somebody to say, yeah, that makes perfect sense altogether.

SPEAKER_03 0:17

Hi everyone, and welcome to Pathfound, the podcast about the real, messy, unexpected journeys that lead us to the work we love. I'm Monica Argendonia, and every week I talk with someone whose story proves there's no single right way to build a meaningful life. Most college advising boils down to a checklist. Complete your GEs, hit your required courses, graduate on time, done. But what about the actual life you're trying to build? What about the interests you've never been given permission to take seriously? What about the massive invisible job market no one ever walks you through? I'm here today with Ned Laff and Scott Carlson, the authors of Hacking College, why the major doesn't matter and what really does, a book that I think every college administrator, every parent, every student needs to read. And here's why. Advising on college campuses, for the most part, is a checklist. Making sure students complete their Gs, make sure they hit the required courses, make sure they graduate hopefully on time. That's it. That kind of meaningful, intentional advising that actually connects a student's education to the life they want to build rarely happens. And I know this to be true because I'm an advisor on a college campus. So welcome, Ned and Scott. Again, super excited to have you on today. Ned, you spent 35 years in academic affairs before writing this book. And Scott, you came to this as a journalist covering higher education for the Chronicle. So how did the two of you find each other? And how did your different vantage points shape the this book when you ended up writing it?

SPEAKER_01 1:51

You know, that's a great story. It would actually end up being a pretty good movie, too. Scott was starting to write articles about the connection between college and careers. I was testing this model at the last school I was going to be working with before I supposedly was going to hit retirement, which still hasn't hit. And I kept sending him emails. I said, Scott, there's a better way. There's a better way. And I think I wore him down because I think I nagged him for about three years. Scott, is that about correct?

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Yeah, that's about right. Yeah, yeah. Nagged me for a while. And then I think what I saw in what Ned was describing was a little bit of my own college journey. So I went to, you know, as a first generation student essentially, and went to college really through a back door because I didn't have very good grades in high school. And then worked my way through college. You know, it took eight years to graduate, but was sort of constantly leaving to go do internships and so on. So the approach of like mixing the way that the field of study approach sort of mixes the academic learning with a lot of work, with some applied learning within a work environment. That for me, that was like the Minnesota Daily and some of the internships I did as I was going to school. That resonated with me. And the way that he broke down the major, because I was also not a journalism major, also resonated with me. I could see what he was talking about. So as a chronicle journalist, you know, we're often covering higher education from the outside. I've been there for 25 years, you know, so you think I know a lot about higher ed, right? But we rarely have these close relationships with people who work down in the, you know, sort of the salt mines of higher ed, down in the pits of it, to really see what's going on. Most of the time, as journalists, we're talking to the people who are at the top of the organizations and they're sort of declaring this is how it is. And what was really appealing to me about working with Ned was that I was going to work with somebody who has actually worked down in the guts of the organization and sees all of the crap that's down in there.

SPEAKER_03 3:47

All right. So you write this book. It's called Hacking College, Why the Major Doesn't Matter, What Really Does, and you talk about empty degrees. And for someone who's worked hard to declare a major that they think is meaningful, that might be really hard to hear. So what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

The thing for me is it's not the major that's meaningful. I mean, you're in anthropology, right? Great. I was in quote unquote English. What does it actually mean to be in anthropology or be in English? There's whole bunches of different ways you could go. I want to get into business. Okay. Tough question. Tell me something that isn't business. Everything is business. If everything is business, then how do you know that the business degree is actually going to prepare you for what you want to do in this world of business, which is thick and broad and doesn't involve tech. It may not involve finance. It may not involve whole bunches of things. It'd be all over the place. And when you look at a major, right, in most majors, they'll have maybe three required courses, a senior seminar, pick a course out of column A, pick a course out of column B, and then pick five more courses. What does that mean? And then there's the Gen Ed. And for most part, if the course you're taking from Gen Ed doesn't fit with the major, it's just like take something that I don't have to put a lot of time into. Then there's what do you do with the electives? Well, what we're doing now is selling things like badges to get students marketable or pick a major that has a title that might look like it can get you a job. That's empty. And that's what's happening to so many students in the college environment right now.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

I think the part of this too is yeah, what does an English major mean? Right. Like so I was an English major, right? Ned's an English major. And in a lot of cases, English is just sort of a study of sociology, politics, you know, families, history, all of that stuff through stories. You can use English in all sorts of ways if you marry it to other things. You know, what's a psychology degree, right? And unless it takes on hues from other things. So the major can matter in certain instances when, you know, you need a license at the end of the college journey, and and that's tied to the major, but in a lot of cases, it's really up for interpretation.

SPEAKER_03 6:10

Right. I I mean I get I teach in environmental science and policy, and my students ask me, but you're an anthropologist. And I'm like, Yeah, and the environment is all about people, and anthropology studies people. It it totally made sense to me. So yeah, I think you're right. So you introduced the concepts of hidden intellectualism. And I I like this idea that genuine intellectual passion that the system never surfaces. And then you talk about the hidden job market. So all these hidden things, why is so much of what matters in college invisible? And what does it take to make it visible?

SPEAKER_01 6:46

That's a great question. The reason why it isn't visible is because students are never introduced to this. And the same thing with the hidden job market. There things are taking place right in front of them when they don't see it. So, for example, think about orientation on your campus. How many times are students introduced to faculty as field of study specialists? On most university websites, you won't even find that information at the under on the undergraduate pages. You got to go up to the graduate pages where faculty outline their field of study because in grad school you want to study with somebody who's in the area you're interested in. And when we think about the hidden job market, it's everything. It's who sells who sells the city of Chicago for to television and film companies. It's out there, it's real. You go to Comic Con, which is a $500 billion trade show, and most people go there, they're entertained, but they never go behind the curtains to see all the things that make Comic-Con work. What video gaming is really about, what the fantasy world is really about. It's not just creating the product, but you can be a finance major, and what you're doing is financing the development of video gaming. And we don't put those connections together because they never come to a career center. So it's in front of us, but we don't notice it. We don't think about it that way.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

I think, you know, the other reason why we it's sort of hidden is because if you're looking at it from the perspective of, you know, the administrator who runs universities or the people who run universities, right? We've got people like you, Monica, that are very interested in talking to students and really unearthing what motivates them and what makes them tick and how that might connect to things in the academic program, but then also in the job world afterwards, right? But a lot of people, I think, who work for colleges and universities, I mean, I think they do care about education, but they also sort of see the students as, well, these are the numbers coming in, and we've got to slot these people into various places in the, you know, in the university. And it's just easiest to say, okay, you want to go into nursing, here you go. You want to go into this business pathway program, here you go. You know, it's just they're given the scale questions in higher education, often the interests of the individual get lost in that. And I think that's a big reason why some of this stuff is hidden is because it's just not talked about because the the tracking is easier.

SPEAKER_03 9:24

So how do we improve that? I mean, career centers aren't adept at this. And you know, yeah, there might be a handful of faculty who are going out of their way and doing some of this stuff, but how do we make it visible?

SPEAKER_00 9:36

We talk about it in two different ways. One is to offer scaling on the front end of some sort. So, you know, you're looking at orientation programs, first-year experience programs, comp courses, and so on. And we'll let Ned get into this a little bit, but to try to change the narrative about how you go to school with a broad number of students, right? Okay, let's take the focus off the major. It's all the things we just talked about in the beginning of this podcast, right? And you sort of start to reorient their idea about it. And then you have people within the organization that then reinforce that idea through conversations with students that happen through the next four years. Ned, do you want to talk about some of the processes around that?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yes. And this is an important thing. We're not talking about necessarily changing structures, we're talking about changing the conversations that take place within those structures. My daughter's coming to visit, so I'm going to play off this one. She's on clinical faculty at a Ferdinand Middle and Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut. Here's an interesting question. What is the best way to prepare for medical school? The answer to that question is it depends. Anthropology would be a profound way to prepare for medical school. Foreign languages would be a profound way to prepare for medical school. Sociology could be a profound way to prepare for medical schools, but we don't tell students this. We don't introduce them to this. And most importantly, we don't send them on what Scott and I call the research investigative interview to help them begin to get into the granularity of the world they're going to get involved in. So when I'm working with pre-med students, one of the things I will tell them to do is I want you to go to a waiting room in a hospital. I don't want you to do anything but listen hard, write down everything in detail that you hear. It's sort of like an ethnographic study, right? And what they come back with inevitably is, oh my God, I must have heard 20 or 30 different languages being spoken. Next step. This is the question that breaks down the barrier of what it means to do X. What does it mean when you hear those languages? And through conversation, right, the way we would want to have this give and take in a classroom, 20 or 30 languages represent 20 to 30 different cultural problems in the delivery of healthcare. Interesting question. How is an invertebrate biology course going to help you with that problem if you want to be a doctor? And these are the kinds of conversations that could take place in an orientation course to college, a first-year seminar course. I even taught a first-year composition course. And I had to match two different things. The first thing they had to come out with mastering the learning outcomes of the composition course, but the other thing they did was they went through the hacking college process. And what I found in it was that when they were looking at their life as text and then going through the different rhetorical forms, they ended up writing better essays and mastering the tools better because they were writing about something they cared about themselves.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

So you brought up this research investigative inquiry. And it's a great process and you outline it in the book. But if I'm a 19-year-old and I'm, you know, sophomore, I have no idea what I want to do. What does this process look like for me?

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Well, the first thing is you made an assumption. I don't know what I want to do. My experience has been they have a sense of what they want to do, but in many instances, they're not allowed to think about it because they don't see how it fits in the traditional structure or it sounds crazy, right? So my other daughter, I knew she was always going to go into law. And she is in law. She just had to do it through modern dance and choreography. And she did put all the pieces together through modern dance and choreography. But what happens when you start the hacking college process is you put students in a permission zone. Those things that you care about, those things that you would really shut the noise out if you had the opportunity to pursue it. And somebody said to you, I can guarantee you a living, what would that be? And they start talking about that thing that really drives them, what would make them go down the rabbit hole now during this investigative interview, that that will change because that's what research is about. You start talking to people, you start pulling in more information, you start clarifying your sense of ideas and self. And all of a sudden, you begin to formulate where it is you want to go because you're not only clarifying your hidden intellectualism, you're clarifying your ability to see what's out there in the world and in the world that you want to get involved in. We have this notion of the undecided student. The undecided student is a student who hasn't declared a major, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily undecided in that thing they'd really like to do. All it takes is somebody to say, yeah, that makes perfect sense altogether. I had a student who came in who wanted to be a cook, but wanted to cook healthy foods. Okay. I said, let's look this up food and health. And up comes a culinary medicine program that's, I think it's at Tulane University. Who would think, right? It's there, it's alive, it's well, but it's not outlined in a college catalog that says undergraduate program in culinary medicine pre-med. And so once we open the door to the students to see this, we also open the door for them to do something else. Identify faculty by their field of study specialties. So when they walk in the door to talk to somebody, they're not coming in to say, you know, I think I'm interested in the major. They're coming in to say, I think I'm interested in you and what you're doing and how that matches what I'm doing. And that always changes the nature of the conversations.

SPEAKER_03 16:02

You know, I have a lot of first generation students coming to my office. I was also first generation. And I remember my dad, no matter what I did, he was super supportive. But no matter what I did was how much money are you going to be able to make? Are you going to be able to get a job? By the way, my bachelor's degree is in film production. I think for a lot of these students who come in, they're actually terrified of kind of what you're talking about as a non-traditional path and having to go back to tell their families this and who are worried that they won't have anything concrete to show for their education. What do you say, or how do how can we encourage them to do this?

SPEAKER_01 16:36

That's a cool question because there's two different ways of looking at this, right? There's what the student wants to do, and then how they explain it to their families. And those aren't necessarily the same things. I was working with a student, all she was interested in was skydiving. And everyone would say, What are you going to do with that? Some of the people said, Well, you know, you could join the military and be a paratrooper. But when she started doing her research, she found this whole world called the International Federation of Sky diving, right? They're the ones who put on all these different kinds of advance. They're a regular organization. She actually hooked into some internships with some of this, right? And she got into the communication side of the operation. So when she was talking to her parents, she was telling them when going into corporate communication. She just didn't say what corporation it was. Now, this works, this actually works fairly well with first generation students. The key is the translation chasm. This is what Shay in chapter three faced the translation chasm on how I can take this interest. You know, spoken word help me. Well, what are you going to do with spoken word? Well, right now, through her path, she's now associate director of a program working with first generation students at Northwestern University. And she uses spoken word to help get things going with the students she's working on. So the ability to understand this not only nonlinear, but when you understand how to make the translation between your interests and how it fits in other areas, that's where it starts to get exciting, right? So when Carla, when she finally learned the translation, that you're talking about how to use social media. And then she found out, wait, but if I could, then she hears, can use social media bilingually, and all of a sudden she finds out that would make me, quote, marketable as hell, and I'm going to be a Spanish major, right? It is, well, the question of what are you going to do with Spanish disappears because now she's using all the blank spaces to put all the pieces together and hooking herself into experiential opportunities, which give her this incredible background. And each student in the book is an archetype. There's hundreds of students, just like each one in the book.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

I mean, we would say too, to the parents, the kind of conversation that institutions have to have with parents around, you know, expectations and how an individual student, your kid, leans into what makes them individual, marketable, adaptive in the world. I mean, that's this is a big part of why we're talking about how to make students adaptive to the world is how having them lean into what they really like. Because if they're leaning into what they like, they can understand, they can sort of, they're going to be seeing the whole world anyway, as opposed to something that they think is sort of marketable and they don't really understand and they don't have any sort of relationship to it. That's, you know, that's not necessarily a good outcome. And, you know, to prove, to point to instance, recent instances where, you know, these supposed degrees haven't worked out as well. I mean, you just point to like computer science as an example of that. You know, what's happened to computer science in recent years with AI, or what's happening to with to some forms of, you know, jobs like business jobs or marketing jobs that lead directly into data entry. I mean, data entry is going to be taken up by AI very quickly. I think that's one of the reasons why students are having a hard time finding work after graduation in these last couple of years. So, you know, that leaning into yourself is going to be important precisely for that reason of for being adaptive, you know, having being able to see that world broadly.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

And this also raises the question of should we be changing the conversations we have with parents during those orientations? You know, when they separate the students from the parents and the parents go into these separate workshops. We need to start explaining to parents here's this massive world of the hidden job market. Here are all the possibilities that your students are going to be introduced to. And here's how we can help them prepare to put together an integrated undergraduate experience that includes experiential opportunities and help them lean in, as Scott says, to their interests in a way that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

I mean, we have done this talk in front of parents, high-end parents, like layman Manhattan with school, which is right across the street from the stock market. We've done it for, you know, run-of-the-mill parents. Their kids are going to sort of normal schools. Once they hear this sort of breakdown of the major and how important it is or what the major actually represents, they start to understand it just like the students do. So I think there needs to be some sort of retraining out there for both student and parent around this. I think that's right about that.

SPEAKER_03 21:46

Yeah, and I would argue that it probably should even start high school, junior and senior high school.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

That is exactly what we're hearing right now. We have people who are coming up to us and asking, can we put Hacking College into The high schools, and my response would be absolutely. And if we started at a junior year, especially with first generation students, and you begin to talk to them about the mechanics, right? Here's how you could use dual enrollment and then community college, and then up to the and here's how you identify the four-year institution you want to go to. Now they become agents of their own education. They can put together a cost-effective education that makes sense, and they can address the ROI factor at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

And it's the clarification that takes the long time. And that's one of the things where I think K-12 has really been falling short recently. You know, because the so much in K-12 has been oriented around assessment testing over the past 20 years or so, that is, I think, reducing the opportunities for students to explore, just to explore. And that doesn't give you a hint of like, oh, I'm actually interested in fishing, or I'm interested in motorcycles, or I'm interested in, you know, this aspect. The other thing I think that's like working against students in terms of that discernment process is just how maybe it's a double-edged sword, but just how virtual everything is, how much of life for you know a lot of tweens, teens, you know, late stage, early adults is experienced online. And that's just a virtual, vicarious world that is not, doesn't actually give you the interaction with the thing that might give you a sense of whether you actually would want to do it or not.

SPEAKER_03 23:31

Yeah. And even, you know, starting in junior and senior year, just clarifying where they'd even go to college. I mean, you know, because so many are pursuing the prestige or, you know, choosing these colleges, universities for the wrong reasons. And it could just open up so many more possibilities and right.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 23:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

And better possibilities.

SPEAKER_03 23:55

Right. So you talk a lot about social and cultural capital, especially for first gen students or working class students, students of color. So what do you mean by that? How do students pursue that?

SPEAKER_01 24:09

You know, you're raising something that's critically important. So I was a single parent raising kids when I was working on my doctorate at the University of Illinois in Urbana, right? I'm living on a graduate student salary, right? Income-wise, it's like, wow, getting by. But in terms of social and cultural capital for my kids, I might as well have been making $100 million a year with all the connections they were making and the understandings that they were coming into and their friends whose parents were college faculty. What we are arguing is that part of the research investigative interview is how students learn and talk to people out there. And in talking to people out there, they start to build their networks of understanding, their networks of building up a cultural awareness of all the opportunities that there that's actually out there, and the social capital of learning how to be attentive and creating their own networks. Now, a lot of times students will tell me, well, why would anybody talk to me? Right. And I should say as an aside, we never send anybody to an HR office. We're always sending them to somebody who's in charge of something, somebody who's doing something. And the reason why people talk to them is because most of them are frustrated parents whose kids never listen to them. And nobody ever asks their advice on if I wanted to be you, if I wanted to do what you're doing, how would you tell me to do this? And they come back, they always come back with a wealth of information. They always come back finding out it was really easy to do. And all it takes, right, is a little bit of preparation. I mean, in some instances, in one of the offices I set up, the peers were trained when they were talking with one of the students, right? So these are students too. They'd actually dial the phone and put the phone in the student's hand and say, make the appointment. And what they found out was they were never talking to the person. They were just talking to the person who handled the scheduling. And once they were in the door, we knew when the appointment was coming up, the peers were taught how to coach these students through the kinds of conversations they need to have. And what it does is it builds a sense of confidence in students because all of a sudden they're in the office and they're talking to. Well, I'll give you an example. I am the associate director of family and preventative medicine at the University of South Carolina Medical School, but I'm in this clinic where I'm dealing with all these families and parents. And these students are talking to this person. And this person is saying, this listening to them and validating them. And then all of a sudden, when they get to the point of experiential opportunities, there's always that notion of patient navigator. And once you get that first step, it can build to the next and the next. And then you begin to see yourself, you begin to believe in yourself. I can do this.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

You know, to your question of cultural capital, I think one of the important things is that we see cultural capital as the key to social capital. That social capital doesn't just happen because you're introducing a young person to someone who's out there in the world doing, you know, a job of some sort, right? And that's often the formulation that colleges and universities use just simply because they don't, there's no other way that they've thought about doing it. But, you know, they go to their alumni network or they go to sort of their corporate partners, partners that hire the most students from their institution, and then look for, you know, potential mentors within that pool. And, you know, students may connect to the people who that they find through those networks, but we're sort of arguing that social connection actually, social networking actually happens with cultural capital as a fuel because the students are using that thing in them, the thing that they care about, to connect to somebody who cares about the same thing or shares a sort of similar background or shares a sort of similar perspective on the world. What uh Nitsan Pellman and some of the people that we've talked to about this stuff would call homophily, right? So that's actually how social capital happens. And the students can use various forms of cultural capital that they either bring from their background, you know, cultural capital that you have as someone who's grown up on the south side of Chicago or on a ranch in Wyoming is unique and different. And it's something that you can connect to the other people that work in that world or live in that world. And if you want to enter that world, you might need to gather some of that cultural capital. So that you can get from college or you get it from experience within that environment. So this is an important piece of how the students will begin to enter these various work worlds that they're in through the culture and through the social.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

And this also clarifies something else. We are not telling students to follow their passion for us, right? They're following this hidden intellectualism, this drive inside them. Passion is just the emotive expression of it. And so when interest meets interest, all of a sudden you have two people who are really jazzed about what they're doing, talking to each other. And that creates some really powerful connections for students. And it's a validating experience for students.

SPEAKER_03 29:34

You know, and they're so afraid to talk to strangers, right? So I instead of a research project for one of my classes, you know, they have enough of those to do. I give them a career project and they have to go out and do five informational interviews with people who have jobs that they think they would want. And so now it's under the guise of an assignment and they can say, hey, this is a school project. So it kind of makes it a little easier for them then to make these calls or send out those emails. Because they really are, you know, I I connected a student with somebody in a field she was interested in. I gave her the phone number. He said, Oh, give her my number. And she kind of froze and said, Well, I can't call. Isn't there an email? So they really have this fear. And I think, you know, that idea of connecting to people who may have similar backgrounds or, you know, that cultural capital component, I think, is really interesting and really important and something to remember.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Connecting to people is just a muscle, you know, as somebody that has had to do that in my entire career and had to learn essentially how to call up people I don't know at all and then ask them uncomfortable questions as a journalist, right?

SPEAKER_02 30:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

So yeah, it's it's just a muscle that you you learn how to develop. And, you know, to the whole question of this being an assignment, hacking college, you know, the field of study process that we talk about, we think it should be in a curriculum. It should be in the university as an assignment. These are things that you're going to do. I mean, that's one effective way to get the students to walk through it, you know.

SPEAKER_03 31:07

But you also, that's a nice segue into this question, is that you point out, you know, you want institutions to be more agile, but they are resistant to change, slow to change. So, where have you seen real traction? I mean, what does a school look like that's actually doing this?

SPEAKER_01 31:26

You know, I can't say where is a school that's actually doing this. I can say that as Scott likes to say, this is a guerrilla warfare. There are people like us on every campus that are doing this. They're just doing it below the level of visibility, and that's where it starts to take off. Here's the other thing that's important. Once a group of students, five, ten students, meet somebody who's helping them do this, the next thing that happens is they bring five or ten of their friends in and it starts to grow. This is very much a bottom-up process because once students get engaged, right, they start spreading the word to other students. You got to see what I'm doing. How did you find out? I went, I was over at this office over here. Now keep in mind, depending on the campus, this could be set up in a residence hall, in a living learning center. It could be set up in a place where students hang out. I mean, I used to go to the cafeteria and just hang out and talk to students, and all of a sudden they're off doing these things. And so the it's not as if you have you don't have to structurally change. This is not structurally changing the institution, it's changing the working culture of the conversations that run the relationship between students and other individuals within the campus. So, one place it's a great arena, for instance, to have your students do these career interviews is on the corporate side of the campus, which we never introduce students to. There are people handling the investment in the endowment, there are people in government affairs, there are people in supply chain management, there are people all over the place that students never know about because who wants to know about the corporate side of a campus? But yet, those people, you can make appointments, you could go in, and part of that is and you can rehearse this with them. And then when you come out, you could come out with an experiential learning opportunity with them, but at the very least, you're coming out with having experienced how to do that, and the more you do it, the better you, the more comfortable you get, and then the better you are at it.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

There are institutions out there that are trying this at scale. So Champlain College, Roanoke College, Central Michigan is doing stuff with it. There's institutions here in Minnesota are starting to pick it up.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

University of Rhode Island is playing with the idea of changing their whole orientation to college course around this.

SPEAKER_00 34:08

It has caught fire with a number of institutions that are looking at how to set it up and scale it up. And each institution has to do it their own way. It's not something that can be done as a blanket process.

SPEAKER_01 34:19

And Scott mentioned something important here. We're not outlining this is the rigorous model. What we're outlining is a process. And that process can be shaped by an institution to fit that institution's needs. There's no right way or wrong way to do this. It is looking at the process itself, looking at the social and cultural capital of the campus, looking at what's around the campus, and then figuring out how to make it work within the confines of the environment anyone's working in.

SPEAKER_03 34:53

You're writing at a moment when higher education is under all this pressure from politicians, from families worried about their return on investment, from students drowning in debt, from AI. Does this approach help make the case for the value of a degree, or does it complicate it?

SPEAKER_00 35:13

I mean, I think it makes the case for the value of the degree. I mean, it depends on, you know, we need to have a national conversation about what is the value of a college degree. So is the value of a college degree just a job at the end of it, which is where the conversation is sort of going right now, or is the value of a college degree lie in its its basis as an education structure for an individual and how an individual sort of gets to what they want to become. And I think what we're trying to do with hacking college and field of study is attend to both of those, that it's not job or passion, if that's how you want to put it. You can find the way to weave these two things together. And I think in terms of what it can do for colleges, I mean, we've spoken about some things already where the colleges could capitalize on this. How do you use this as a recruitment tool to say to students, look, you can come here and do anything. Look at all the different things you can do with the major here, not just like go into some job-oriented major, but craft it in a way that's appropriate for you. Look at how it can save liberal arts programs that might be seen as useless by students and parents. If you re-organize the conversation around what is the value of an anthropology degree or an English degree, then it's very likely you're going to have more students going into the programs to major in them. And that can help to prop up that department. I mean, there's all sorts of ways that this could change the conversation if people took it seriously.

SPEAKER_03 36:40

So Pathfound, this podcast, is about career pivots and life reinvention. And your book is really about helping, you know, 18-year-olds or college students to not have to reinvent themselves at 35.

SPEAKER_01 36:54

I don't know about that. Okay. No, no, no, no, no. This is this is an ongoing process. Okay. What it does do, right? This is important. It gives students the tool to reinvent themselves when they're 35. And when you think about it, right, it is I'm not moving in the direction I want to do. What do I have to do? Okay, now you've got to rethink the paradigm you built for yourself, right? So this goes back into rethink, start doing the same kind of investigation that not feeling steady in what you're doing. We could call that the anomaly that challenges you to restructure who you are and what you're doing, right? But the important thing, I want to add this in there, it's not about just career development. It's about how you learn to negotiate the day-to-day life that you're going to be living. And this, I'm going to throw in some of my classical illusions, right? This is what Thucydides called politics. How do we negotiate the day-to-day interactions between us and the world that we live in? And so this is embedded in the process. So it isn't just like I'm going to go out and get into computer science. I'm coming at this in a way so that I know how to think about the implications, the consequences. I'm learning how to think about myself operating in this world. And this world is a world of wicked problems. How we define these problems has a lot to do with how we begin to solve these problems. And so the first wicked problem, I want to put together an undergraduate education that is marketable, it is vocational, it is non-vocational, and that it challenges me to think about my interactions in the day-to-day environment I'm going to go into. And this is constantly, it's a constant ongoing process.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

And I think too, you know, how we talk about our relationship with vocation as a passion. And, you know, so Cal Newport would say, well, passions change. You shouldn't like pursue your passion, right? But it's interesting how we have that kind of language to describe our relationship with work, which is very much how we would describe a relationship with a partner or a spouse, right? And in relationships with people, you know, we have these kinds of, there's these analogies with the work. You know, we can have a marriage of convenience to our job, right? Which just sort of pays us and sets us up, but we're not really in love with it and so on. But we can also have a relationship with a job that is more like a passion relationship. And so what if your passions do change? What if you don't want to be with that job anymore? Like what if you want to get a divorce, right? And so where and where do you find your new partner in work, right? And how do you assess in yourself, you know, what that is going to mean, what that's going to look like? Or how do you stay with your current work partner, for example? And how do you change what's in yourself, or how do you see different things in the work to sort of craft yourself and change yourself to stay with that profession? So, you know, it's that's the analogy, right? But I think it has a lot of validity when you're thinking about like how does your life change and how does field of study sort of help you think about your life changing environment.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

So, in a sense, the skills of doing this are skills that you're going to use throughout your life because the I'm fond of saying the only thing that's constant is change. And the one thing we resist is change. And so the whole process of field of study, right, is it is constantly being able to look at, understand, and negotiate the change that happens in your life day to day.

SPEAKER_03 40:44

I like that. So then it's it's not too late. I mean, somebody who's 35, you know, can use this field of study framework and and use it to kind of change their path. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Yes. If they're going to school or if they're just sort of thinking about, what do I do? I'm, you know, I've worked in this job for 10 years and it's not really doing it for me anymore. So then you go on this process. What is my hidden intellectualism? What's my vocational purpose? Or how has that changed since I started on this path 10 years ago? Right. Yeah. And then how do I find people in the hidden job market? How do I have conversations with them? That research investigative inquiry. How do I open up opportunities by saying, hey, here's my background and here's what I bring to the table. What do I, how could I enter, how could I be like you? What do I what else do I need? You know, that's the same conversations you have at 35, 45, maybe 55.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

I'm not going up to my age.

SPEAKER_00 41:36

What's that? At some point you get cut off, but yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 41:39

But the other thing is, what do you get out of college? You have learned how to learn. You have learned to take knowledge and think with it, to think about and think through the situations you are in. So it's not necessarily the content, it's the exercise of being able to do this. And so it's a fluid process you just carry with you as you develop.

SPEAKER_03 42:02

What is, you know, you you have a lot to say, but what is the most important piece of advice you'd give to a young person right now starting their college journey?

SPEAKER_00 42:13

Get quiet time because you need quiet time away from the phone, your friends, the TV, the video game to be able to think, you know, and I'm talking about extended quiet time and frequent quiet time, to be able to sit and think. What do I actually believe? What do I actually want? What am I actually striving for? What's important to me? What's really important to me? What am I thinking about right now? We spend some time talking to Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson, who are these authors of this book called The Disengaged Teen, which looks at how it's basically like, in a lot of ways, it's like hacking college part one because it focuses on teenagers in middle school and high school and what is their, what do their lives look like and how are they engaged with school or not engaged with school. And a good majority of the students in the book are these disengaged teens who are very similar to the invisible students in our book. The students who are just kind of like running through college and they don't really care, right? And then you have the students that they identify that are not disengaged, they're more like achiever type students, right? Who they're sort of the sort of the grade grubbers and they want to get all A's and they're there, and that it's just sort of very goal-oriented, right? And they're doing well in school, unlike the invisible students or disengaged teens, or even the resistor students, right, who don't want to be there. These students, the achiever students, they're doing okay, but they're still not engaged because they're just sort of jumping through the hoops, just like the other students, right? The students who are actually engaged, who are downloading all of these skills, who are picking up all this content, who are actually learning things and learning things about themselves along the way, are these engaged students. And what separates the engaged students from the disengaged students, but even the achiever type students, is that the engaged students have a lot of time on their own and quiet time. To ponder their thoughts. And so it's super this is super important, especially at a time when every the attention economy is trying to get your eyeballs 24-7. You should get away from that and really sort of spend time and quiet time outdoors, hiking, you know, in the dark, just sort of thinking to yourself, what do I actually believe? Those are some of the most important questions you're going to answer in your life.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

For me, one of my favorite phrases for students is it doesn't matter how crazy you think. You can't think crazier than me, but whatever you're thinking about, there is somebody out there doing this who would love to talk with you. And in doing that process, you will begin to find out that those things that you care about, those things that really drive you, they're real. It's not crazy. And there are people you can talk to, people you can engage with who will help you work out all the pieces and so you can get on the path. And this is just the starting path to take you to your first steps.

SPEAKER_03 45:03

I love both those pieces of advice. That's fantastic. So your book is readily available, but if anybody's interested in following your work or, you know, I'm I'm sure you're gonna keep writing about this topic. I know you're speaking in various places. Where can people follow you?

SPEAKER_00 45:20

I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So you just find Scott Carlson from the Chronicle of Higher Education on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_03 45:25

I'm on LinkedIn too. Okay. Thank you both for being here today and for writing this book. I'm gonna buy everybody copies and give it to them for Christmas.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

Thank you so much for having us on.

SPEAKER_01 45:36

Yes, thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_03 45:38

Thank you so much for listening to Pathfound. If anything we talked about today connected with you or gave you a new perspective, we'd love it if you subscribed, left a review, or shared the episode with someone you care about. You can also find us on Instagram at Pathfound Podcast. To explore more stories, resources, and ways to get involved, visit Keystoneetwork.org. This podcast is just one part of the journey. A Keystone Network for helping young people and anyone figuring it out as they go build meaningful futures one step at a time. A huge thank you to my podcast editor, David Strutt. You can find him on LinkedIn for helping bring these stories to life, and to Elizabeth Minor at Silvermine Creative for the beautiful artwork and web design. And if you're on your own path, navigating the unknown, making a pivot, or simply figuring it out as you go, just know you're not alone. The route may not be linear, but there's always a way forward. I'm Monica Argandonia, and I'll see you next time on Path Found.