The Most Critical Skill to Learn in College? Navigation

As I was buying a subway pass on a recent visit to New York City, I overheard two relatively recent college graduates trying to figure out how to get someplace in Brooklyn.

“They should have taught us how to read a subway map in college,” one said to the other.

“Instead, they taught us stuff we’ll never use,” the other responded.

I ran off to catch a train, so I have no idea where they graduated from nor if they ever figured out how to get to their destination.

But the brief exchange serves as a metaphor for a problem I’ve seen all too often over the last year while working on a book about how recent college graduates launch into the workplace: students are not using their time in school to learn to navigate what comes afterwards.

In an economy where jobs are increasingly threatened by automation, the future belongs to those students who possess “agency”—who act with purpose and determination to drive themselves across a career map without clearly marked roads.

If students are simply good at taking tests, jumping through hoops, and following the rules, chances are pretty good that they’ll struggle in their start after college. The problem is that students are failing to build in college the resilient muscles that they will need as adults to manage risk and succeed in unpredictable lives.

 In college, “there are things you’re taught, and then there are things you learn,” Rick Settersten, a professor of human development and family sciences at Oregon State University told me. “A lot of what college comes down to is not what happens in the classroom. It’s about navigating life and building relationships.”

The most successful students I met in my reporting—those who found the right fit in majors and courses and snagged good internships—often found the opportunities through informal networks of peers. But many students are sleepwalking through college. They don’t take school seriously, they avoid rigorous majors and courses, and focus more on the social scene than academics.

“A lot of what college comes down to is not what happens in the classroom. It’s about navigating life and building relationships.”

In 2011, a book by two sociologists called Academically Adrift described just how little students learn in college. A few years later, the authors tracked down nearly a thousand of the students they surveyed in college for a follow-up book about what happened to them after commencement.

What they found was as distressing as their first book, but not much of a surprise. Poor academic performers in college were more likely than other recent graduates to be unemployed, stuck in unskilled jobs, or to have been fired or laid off from their jobs after graduation. Where students went to college didn’t matter two years out, the two authors found, as much as what they did while they were on campus.

“The most important choice students can make is whether they are on the party-social pathway through college or are investing sufficient attention and focus on academic pursuits,” Richard Arum, one of the authors, told me.

For the first two decades of our lives someone else directs our learning—parents, teachers, professors. But once young adults enter the workforce they need to self-direct their own learning for the rest of their lives. Learning to navigate their educational journey in college will better help prepare them for life after school.

Jeffrey Selingo is author of two books on higher education. His forthcoming book, There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow, is scheduled for release by HarperCollins in April 2016 and is available for pre-order now.