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  • Suing the Alma Mater

    By Dean Dad August 5, 2009 9:17 pm

    Several alert readers sent me links to this story, about a new graduate who is suing her alma mater (of all of three months) for its alleged failure to get her a job.

    It's one of those stories that really allows you to see what you want to see. Is the student an unrealistic whiner? Is the school trading on false hope? Is it reasonable to charge high tuition for an unemployable degree? Is it reasonable to hold a single college accountable for a nationwide recession?

    I'll start by acknowledging that I don't know the student, I'm not familiar with the school, and there may be particular facts in this case that would change my interpretation of it if I knew them.

    That said, though, my first response is “oh, honey, no.”

    At the most basic level, colleges are not employment offices. While they often have Career Services offices to help people find jobs, 'help' is the key word. Absent some really serious fraud, there are no guarantees. The article quoted the student accusing the college as follows:

    "They're supposed to say, 'I got this student, her attendance is good, her GPA is all right -- can you interview this person?' They're not doing that," she said.

    Um, no. That's not what they're supposed to say (or do). (The article goes on to mention that the student had a 2.7 GPA, and has landed two interviews but no offers.) They're supposed to coach you on your resume, help with some interview tips, and provide some resources for you to start looking. Beyond that, it's up to you.

    In fact, landing two interviews within three months of graduation with a 2.7 GPA in the midst of the Great Recession isn't bad at all.

    The story brought back memories of my time at Proprietary U. Since PU sold employability, students often brought outsized expectations to their job searches. (To make matters worse, the tech bubble of the late 90's briefly made those expectations actually realistic.) When the bubble burst, even the better students often struggled to find something. They weren't notably better or worse than the class that had graduated the year before; the market had just changed.

    Most students understood that, at some level. But there were some who seemed to think that the Career Services office kept a top secret stash of nifty jobs that they'd dole out to whomever complained the loudest. In my observation, this was not the case.

    There's no central clearinghouse for most jobs. (I'm told there actually is one for doctors, but that isn't relevant here.) Degrees and skills can improve your chances, but chances are not guarantees. If degrees guaranteed jobs, there wouldn't be PhD's trying to cobble together livelihoods from adjunct gigs. (Though I'll admit that all those freeway flying PhD's suing their graduate programs makes for a fun thought experiment.) A program can be academically rigorous, and a Career Services office can try really hard, and the result can still be nothing. It's a big world out there.

    But the idea of suing the school is worse than merely missing the point. If it were just that, I'd expect it to be summarily dismissed and we'd all move on. My concern is that as an employer, if I found something like that attached to an applicant's name, that candidate would be thrown out of consideration post-haste. I don't need the headache of an overentitled, litigious applicant when I've got plenty of other good applicants who would actually be happy to have the job. A lawsuit like that renders you radioactive.

    Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not – again, I don't know if Monroe College overstepped somewhere in this particular case. But as a rational employer, do I really want to take that chance? As a manager, I'm acutely aware that a small fraction of employees consume a vastly disproportionate amount of my time, complaining about everything under the sun. As Robert Sutton noted in The No Asshole Rule, these people drag down entire organizations, even when they're otherwise individually productive. Given a reasonable alternative, I'll take the alternative every single time. This student, whose name I'm not repeating as a courtesy to youth, is branding herself with a scarlet letter. Not a good idea.

    We all catch lousy breaks from time to time. How you handle those breaks says a lot.

    My free advice to the disgruntled graduate: move on. Put this behind you, quickly, and focus on actually getting a job. Unless there's something really egregious here, there's nothing to be gained by blaming one college for a national recession. And you could lose more than legal fees.

Go to comments (8) »
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Comments on Suing the Alma Mater

  • Found employment
  • Posted by Page , functional (fiscal) specialist on August 6, 2009 at 5:30am EDT

  • She has since found employment courtesy of The Ski Channel:

    http://www.theskichannel.com/news/equipment/20090804/The-Ski-Channel-Offers-Job-to-Jobless-Graduate-Suing-Monroe-College

  • Alumna sues college
  • Posted by Mary Donnelly , Asst. Professor at Broome Community College on August 6, 2009 at 8:15am EDT

  • She's 27, an adult student. Usually, they're a little more realistic.

  • Posted by Linda Aragoni at http://www.you-can-teach-writing.com on August 6, 2009 at 9:30am EDT

  • I don't know whether the student learned the value of publicity in college, but she certainly knows how to use the media. I suspect there will be plenty of media-savvy employers willing to cash in on her instant celebrity and pull some publicity for themselves.

    What caught my eye in the news story were the comments from the student's mother, who said she believed a college degree guaranteed a high-paying job.

    There's an old saying that if you take credit for the sunshine, you have to accept blame for the rain. Colleges have promoted themselves as the path to a high paying job. It is hardly surprising that students who don't get them feel they've been suckered.

    It's tempting to dismiss the suit as frivolous (that was my initial reaction), but perhaps it should prompt some further discussion about how colleges market themselves. I suspect we'd find a deep disconnect between what college faculty think is the role of education and that which is implicit in the way the colleges are being marketed to students and their families.

  • people more realistic now, but...
  • Posted by JJR , Librarian at Texas Woman's University on August 6, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

  • I think part of the problem is that Academia likes to tell itself that students can major in anything they like, the mere fact they have a college education will put them ahead of other applicants, etc, and they can do anything they like, after graduation. When access to a college & university education was more restricted to the wealthy, and more focused on the Ivy league, it's true a student could be an English major and a Psychology minor and still expect to get a well paying job after graduation because of family connections and the social networking at such elite schools. But such smiling optimism is much less warranted for the average middle class and working class student attending State U, who needs to be more practical minded, seek out internship opportunities, unique work experiences outside of the classroom, etc. If you have the chops to do math and science, then that is what you need to do, even if it means long hours spent in the lab or studying. If you don't have the math and science skills, you need to work on being creative and garnering a variety of experience(s). Part of why I became a librarian is because I did NOT want to become an itenerant, newly minted humanities PhD trying to cobble together the semblance of an academic career with part time teaching gigs at various 2 year (and if lucky 4 year) institutions as an ajunct instructor, etc. I still toy with the idea of Law school, but I don't really see myself going down that path, I'm just too ambivalent about that line of work, versus the increased student debt load on top of what I already owe from library school. I also am very lucky to have landed my library position, as competition is now getting very tight for these jobs as well. I have my public school teacher credentials I could fall back on in a crisis; it's not something I enjoy but I could go back to doing that if I had to. I agree with this editorial, however; this student is not doing herself any favors with this lawsuit; even if she "wins" (and that's unlikely), it's a pyhrric victory at best. I graduated library school in 2004. I did not land this job until 2007. I worked for a major insurance company in between to make ends meet. It was a stressful, face-paced office job, but it paid the bills and was at least always interesting work. The job search is a long, hard road and it takes grit and determination and the willingness to keep pressing on in the face of an uncertain future; it requires a strange brew of self-confidence and humility. I don't envy today's new graduates; it's tough out there. I'm not proud to say so, but part of why I first went to grad school (before Library school) in the early 1990s is because I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life and I was partly trying to escape dealing with the "Real World" for just a bit longer. All I knew then was that I admired my German lit professors and wanted to follow in their footsteps. It was ultimately not to be, but I'm happy with my reasonable compromise as a working Academic librarian.

  • You need more than just a degree...
  • Posted by SLJ on August 6, 2009 at 10:15am EDT

  • A bachelor's degree no longer guarantees a high paying job. It sounds like she couldn't find her ideal job right away and, instead of taking something for the meantime, decided to sue. Maybe she didn't have the experience necessary (with the degree) to get the job that she wanted.

    I have found that you not only have to get the education but you have to work your way through jobs that aren't always perfect in order to get the experience that will get you the job you want. I'm sure that she could have gotten a lead, supervisory, or management job somewhere (retail, fast food, etc.) that would have given her experience on her resume that she could have brought to the bank!

    Sometimes you just have to do things that you may not want to in order to get to where you want to be someday.

  • So sue me
  • Posted by GLG , English at CCSU on August 6, 2009 at 12:30pm EDT

  • To help curb just this sort of "I'm here to get a job" mentality, I always present to the parents of incoming students, during my summer registration talks, a 1914 quotation by Oxford don John Alexander Smith that I had to translate into Latin for the final exam in Fr. Felton's Latin Prose Composition class during my sophomore year at Xavier University. I don't remember how I translated it (although I'm sure it wasn't very good, much less Ciceronian, Latin, but it has stuck with me all these years:

    … you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will … form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

    So, sue me!

    Cross-posted at http://connecticuthalfwit.blogspot.com

  • OK, but what about truth in advertising?
  • Posted by Michael on August 6, 2009 at 4:15pm EDT

  • Dear Dean Dad,

    While I agree with you that the student is doing herself no favors personally, and there is no guarantee of employment from a college degree, you also pointed out in one sentence that a lot of schools "sell" employability. If I sell diet supplements that I claim will make you thinner, and they don't, might consumers want to take this up with the FDA? My point is that there is a large (and arguably unethical) disconnect in higher ed between the high-minded supposed public good of higher learning and the way many colleges (and not just proprietary ones) advertise and sell themselves. Everyday I take the NYC subway amidst working class young adults who stare at posters of smiling, fulfilled professionals whose lives have supposedly been transformed by such and such college branded above. The typical slogan is "start your future," "where your future begins," etc. There is nothing conditional about what they are selling. I think there should be. Just as food products need to list their ingredients on their labels and cigarettes need warnings from the surgeon general, why shouldn't colleges be forced to print a) their graduation rates; and b) their job placement rates by major/field on their advertsiements? Why shouldn't these statistics be monitored? Because education can be great, but debt and false promises can be VERY hazardous to your health. And finally, this is also making me wonder why us high minded intellectuals and academics who work in higher education don't bring more attention to this issue? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

    Best,

    Michael

  • "guarantee"
  • Posted by charisse , PHD student media psychology at USC on August 9, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

  • although i think that her moves are questionable, i argue that she has the right to the lawsuit. i think that its foolish for schools to "guarantee" employment and i think that monroe should change the wording on their entrance documents. furthermore, this should serve as a lesson to educational institutions; you are offering an education, you are offering to provide information that will assist in their job search, but guarantees are inherently sketchy.

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