Every year, some students have their dreams derailed after they fail gateway courses or are unable to secure admission into selective undergraduate or graduate programs. We—as faculty, staff, and administrators—sometimes assume the barrier is students’ ability and ask if they are college-ready. Tia Brown McNair and her colleagues remind us to flip the question and ask if the systems we created are student-ready. What if collectively, we are the problem?
Students routinely share examples of the barriers they encounter within our systems, illustrating the need for student-ready colleges. For example, in Talking About Leaving Revisited, aspiring STEM majors describe how their motivation diminished after they faced large lectures, competitive grading practices, unwelcoming comments, and limited student support. Those who persisted noted they valued engaging pedagogy, collaborative academic environments, early career guidance, mentoring, transfer student advising, and undergraduate research opportunities.
Readers of this blog are uniquely qualified to respond to the barriers students face. We understand that students discern and claim their callings in communal contexts and their external environments play a powerful role in what becomes possible. As members of various departments, divisions, and committees, we can draw upon our expertise in vocation and advocate within these spaces to transform the existing structures within our institutions and create lasting change. Even as we can continue to encourage our students to embrace multiple callings and ongoing, adaptable discernment in the face of failure, we must combine these individual efforts with broader institutional transformation. If we expect students to shoulder the burden of unforeseen vocational changes, we only maintain the status quo and perpetuate injustice.
Listening to and Re-Imagining our Institutional Calling
When we respond to these challenges and work strategically to redesign our institutions, we embody and honor what David Cunningham refers to as our college or university’s calling. The design and decision-making of our institutions, Cunningham argues, should reflect and embody the same dynamic vocational discernment that we facilitate with our students. He challenges us to articulate our institution’s vocation by listening to the people we serve and collaborating across divisions to engage students to live out this calling. Such integration avoids fragmentation, redundancies, and additive programs that often only result in burnout, superficial change, or fleeting fads. By demonstrating institutional agency and intentional reflection, we align our actions with our purpose and actualize our most cherished commitments. To achieve this positive change, we can mobilize our own departments or governing committees to listen to three key voices: students, faculty and staff, and our community.
Students
We can start by reviewing our institutional data to gain a deeper understanding of student experience and learning, including gateway course completion rates, first-destination career outcomes, and high-impact student engagement data. This analysis can reveal differences that might exist between student groups, given that nationally, non-dominant students are more likely to struggle in their job search after graduation and less likely to network, participate in internships, or secure admission into medical school. Students can also share the barriers they have encountered in surveys, exit interviews, focus groups, or advising conversations.
Faculty and Staff
Once we understand these barriers, we can begin to re-imagine how to address them. Professors might redesign courses or integrative innovation pedagogies that could improve student learning. They might also adjust prerequisites or create new courses that pace student learning more effectively and enhance course completion rates.
Faculty and academic success staff could offer course-embedded support to reduce stereotype threats, performance anxiety, imposter phenomena, and the stigma often associated with tutoring. To access tutoring services, students must disclose that they are struggling and understand their confusion well enough to know what to ask, which can be both embarrassing and challenging. In recitation hours or supplemental instruction, instructors or peer mentors remove the ambiguity and establish an agenda during weekly study groups, which can better embody the communal aspect of our institutional vocations. Students are called not only to learn themselves but also to help their neighbors and classmates thrive, and this structure normalizes learning as incremental, requiring effort from everyone. In addition to learning content, these study groups can also discuss learning strategies and the practical value or relevance of the material they are studying, which increases student motivation. Instructors can also use exam wrappers that invite students to evaluate their study strategies before or after a test. This habit also engages students collectively in metacognition.
Our Community
Re-imagining our responses to these barriers cannot be isolated to our campus community. Students encounter them long before they arrive at our institutions. For example, students who transfer to four-year institutions from community colleges often lack access to pre-professional or graduate school advising. Partnerships between two and four-year institutions ensure pre-professional students receive the career and academic planning they need to compete for selective admission.
Although we often ask students to complete an interest inventory when they enter our institutions, they often become aware of their interests only when they have exposure to or access to specific resources or activities. For example, school-aged students are more likely to know about and express interest in careers or majors in STEM if they have access to books, after-school activities, and summer camps in these areas—all of which can be costly. We can spark their imaginations and broaden access by partnering with local school districts to host free STEM events, class speakers, or formal mentoring. Once they arrive at college, students can continue to explore their options through experiential learning, which we should more fully embed across our curriculum through alumni panels, service-learning, class speakers, employer excursions, informational interviews, or job shadowing.
Invitation to Engage Institutional Vocation
As we listen to institutional data and diverse voices from our campus, we can formulate goals for transforming our systems to better serve our students. As we do so, Cunningham challenges us to avoid creating new programs or asking students to think about their calling in isolation. Instead, we must focus on “elements that more organically align” with our institutional values and engage a “more communitarian or corporate approach” to vocation.
High-impact experiential learning often serves as a means to do so, yet barriers remain entrenched even in these practices. Some institutions expect students to find mentoring opportunities, internships, premier programs (e.g., Fulbright), or applied learning on their own, yet first-generation students may not know how to do so. To alleviate these challenges, institutions can design major maps, which help academic advisors engage students in both educational and vocational planning. Advisors can also make scholarship information available, so that students know the costs associated with study away, internships, or research. Micro-internships or course-embedded applied learning can also support students with time constraints like student athletes or working students.
We should conduct a similar audit of campus leadership opportunities. Student government positions often serve as premier career capital for students who aspire to pursue graduate or professional school. Do our institutions permit individuals to self-fund their campaigns? If so, where does this leave low-income students? Educating student government leaders on the unintended consequences of their structures could prompt changes to their constitutions so that all students could access equal funding. As Cunningham reminds us, we role model vocational leadership during these kinds of processes.
Campus communities can both summon and silence students’ calling. The vocation of our institutions requires us to consider and address barriers that impede vocational engagement or vocational outcomes. We cannot simply help students choose alternative majors or careers. We may need to redesign our pedagogy, academic support, community partnerships, and high-impact experiential practices. Through ongoing collaboration and listening, we can ensure that all students have access to our institutional vocation.
Billie Streufert serves as an academic advisor at Dordt University, a faculty member in NACADA’s eTutorial program, and the associate editor of NCDA’s Career Convergence Web Magazine. She’s fueled by (besides coffee) the belief that the world is a better place when everyone has access to meaningful work and study. She enjoys collaborating with her colleagues to foster vocational exploration and engagement. As a first-generation graduate from a working-class family in rural Iowa, she aspires to give back to others like those who supported her. For other posts by Billie, click here.